What happens when I normalize queerness in the English classroom,
through queering the curriculum as well as disrupting anti-queer speech in everyday interactions?
How do students react to this process?
through queering the curriculum as well as disrupting anti-queer speech in everyday interactions?
How do students react to this process?
There are several intersecting reasons that have motivated me to focus on this issue in my teaching practice and inquiry. These ideas revolve around the concept of identity, as it applies to myself and to my students. First, I consider myself to be a teacher focused on social justice, using my classroom as a space to engage students with culturally relevant materials that affirm their immediate experiences and encourage them to develop empathy for other identities that may not match their own. This means that English curriculum is not fixed, but rather is a tool with which students are granted access to the world at large, and it must be employed responsibly to help students understand themselves as well as others.
The next facet that connects to these guiding questions is my identity as a queer person. Although I have not explicitly come out to all of my students, my outward appearance is a signal of my queerness, which students seem to be aware of. My queerness shapes my understanding of my students and myself and has influenced the ways I’ve engaged with queering the classroom. My role as a direct participant in this process of inquiry as well as one who guides the process of learning in my classroom is inextricably linked to the results of this inquiry. I have also become interested in the process of identity development in adolescents as it connects to their learning as well as their growth as individuals. A student’s learning and social environment can directly enhance or inhibit their healthy identity development in many facets of the self. As I learned about these processes, I began to wonder if my students were provided space to take appropriate learning risks in order to build a working knowledge of both their present and possible selves as it relates to their gender and sexual identities. |
Key Terms
|
Finally, I was pushed toward this question by the conversations that I participated in or overheard in the first months I spent in my classroom at River Wards Health Tech. My ninth grade students seemed ever ready to bring up gender and sexuality in everyday interactions. Many of them lack a sophisticated vocabulary with which to speak about these aspects of identity, but despite this they were willing to ask questions about both broad ideas and specific situations, which sometimes related to my own identity. This led me to believe that students would benefit from safe academic spaces in which they could explore these questions through scaffolded and modeled risk taking and honest inquiry. These academic spaces could be a physical classroom space that is welcoming and encourages inquiry, as well as lessons and curricular materials that engage students and encourage them to think beyond their current situations.
At the same time, students in my class were prone to using anti-queer speech (especially the words “faggot” and “gay”) as insults to police each other’s behavior and performance of gender. It seemed to me that many of my students had strictly binary expectations of gender and sexuality that I saw as dangerous. These students are not hateful people, but simply reacting to coming of age in an environment structured by homophobia and heteronormativity. It seems that their overall cultural contexts, as well as previous educational experiences, never provided for space to explore queer identities.
By combining all of these elements I predicted that creating space in my classroom to normalize queer identities, through both queering the English curriculum and confronting anti-queer speech in everyday interactions, students might develop neutral or positive opinions of queer identities along with fuller understanding.
At the same time, students in my class were prone to using anti-queer speech (especially the words “faggot” and “gay”) as insults to police each other’s behavior and performance of gender. It seemed to me that many of my students had strictly binary expectations of gender and sexuality that I saw as dangerous. These students are not hateful people, but simply reacting to coming of age in an environment structured by homophobia and heteronormativity. It seems that their overall cultural contexts, as well as previous educational experiences, never provided for space to explore queer identities.
By combining all of these elements I predicted that creating space in my classroom to normalize queer identities, through both queering the English curriculum and confronting anti-queer speech in everyday interactions, students might develop neutral or positive opinions of queer identities along with fuller understanding.
Is it wrong to not like someone because they are gay?
Hector, January 31, 2017