Navigating Gender and Sexuality in the Classroom

Narrative Insights from Students and Educators

Heather Killelea McEntarfer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317597742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

Gender identity and sexuality play crucial roles in the educational experiences of students, parents, and teachers. Teacher education must more directly address the ways that schools reflect and reproduce oppressive gender norms, working to combat homophobia, transphobia, heteronormativity, and gendered expectations in schools. This volume examines teacher candidates' experiences with gender and sexuality in the classroom, offering insight and strategies to better prepare teachers and teacher educators to support LGBTQ youth and families.

This volume addresses the need for broader, more in-depth qualitative data describing teacher candidates' responses to diversity in the classroom (including gender, sexuality, race, class and religion). By using pedagogical tools such as narrative writing and positioning theory, teacher candidates explore these issues to better understand their own students' narratives in deeply embodied ways. This book calls for schools to be places where oppression, in all its complexity, is explored and challenged rather than replicated.

1
Why This Course? Why This Book?

This book describes the results of a study focused on a master’s-level teacher education course that I taught during the fall semester of 2011. The course focused on gender, gender identity, and sexuality in K-12 education, though we also explored intersections with race, class, religion, and other elements of identity. My goals were to help teacher candidates to see and understand the injustices perpetuated in schools related to gender identity and sexuality and to help them understand how they could respond as teachers. Over the semester, my 10 students blew me away with their insights, their willingness to share personal stories and struggles, and their dedication to creating classroom spaces that were open to and supportive of a wide range of gendered ways of being.

There was plenty for all of us to learn. This book will describe how students spoke and wrote about specific issues, including heteronormativity, religion and sexuality, and transgender identity. It will also describe the effects of one pedagogical approach: the use of narrative writing as a way to help students delve more deeply, more personally, and in a more embodied way into issues related to gender identity and sexuality. And it will describe my journey as well: what it was like to plan, teach, reflect on, and study the course.

I hope that teacher educators will find insights that will prove helpful as they plan similar courses or as they integrate gender identity and sexuality into other teacher education coursework. Meanwhile, I hope that teacher candidates will find stories here that prove useful in their own journeys within this profession. They will read about Mike’s growing recognition of his own homophobia and heteronormativity; about Lynda’s experience writing fiction from the perspective of a transgender teenager; about Jill’s struggles as a student teacher in a deeply homophobic school, and about her recognition of her own anti-religious prejudices; and about Ruth’s work to understand the influence of identity categories and oppression within her own family. Within these stories, I hope that teacher candidates might find reflections of their own experiences in ways that will help them understand and learn from those experiences.

Before going any further, I should define a few terms. Gender identity refers to the gender with which a person identifies—in other words, our innate sense of being a girl or woman, a man or boy, or of identifying in a way that extends beyond those binaries. As noted in the Preface, cisgender people have a gender identity that matches the identity they were assigned at birth. Trans-gender people, on the other hand, do not identify with the gender identity that they were assigned at birth. I use the word transgender as an umbrella term to describe a range of types of experiences. Some experiences fall within the gender binary—for example, a child who was labeled a girl at birth might identify as a boy. By contrast, many people’s gender identity does not fit within the gender binary: an adolescent might not feel quite like either a boy or a girl, or they might feel more like a boy some days and a girl other days. This person might choose an identity such as agender or genderqueer, or eschew labels altogether (Beemyn & Rankin, 2011). (Throughout this book, I will often use “they” as a singular pronoun, as I appreciate the way that the word helps us break down binary expectations within our own language.)

While gender identity refers to our own perceptions of ourselves as gendered beings in the world, sexual orientation is a separate concept that refers to sexual and romantic attraction. People might identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, or in a range of other ways. Sexual orientation is often confused or conflated with gender identity, but in fact the concepts, while related, are distinct. I identify as a cisgender lesbian. A male-to-female (MTF) transgender woman who is attracted to women might also identify as a lesbian. Another transgender woman might be attracted to men and identify as straight—or she might feel that bisexual, pansexual, or another identity label (or none at all) better describes her sexual orientation. Identity labels shift quickly, and my goal is less to define the range of labels that a person might choose than to explain how I am using the more overarching terms gender identity and sexual orientation.

Why is Work Around Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Needed in Teacher Education?

Addressing gender identity and sexuality is essential in teacher education for several reasons. First, LGBTQ¹ identities remain virtually absent in curricula at both the K-12 level and within teacher education (Gorski, Davis, & Reiter, 2013; Kosciw, Greytak, Palmer, & Boesen, 2014). Second, despite this official absence, schools are remarkably gendered spaces—spaces that teach young people both subtle and hostile lessons about how they ought to act and who they ought to be. Teachers need to develop a critical awareness of these dynamics and learn how to respond, so that they can help their students do the same.

Absence of LGBTQ Identities in K–12 Curriculum

While LGBTQ issues are increasingly visible in arenas ranging from politics to popular media, the “often-absolute invisibility and silencing of lesbian and gay issues” (Robinson & Ferfolja, 2001, p. 128) remains solidly in place in many schools’ curricula—despite research demonstrating that LGBTQ youth in schools with inclusive curricula hear fewer homophobic and transphobic comments and feel more accepted by classmates (Kosciw et al., 2014). In the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network’s (GLSEN) most recent study, only about a third of LGBTQ youth reported that “LGBTQ people, history, or events” had been included in their school curricula, and half of these students reported that such inclusion had been negative rather than affirming (ibid., p. 56). Rands (2009) points out that transgender issues are even more invisible. My own teacher candidates confirm these trends. Each semester, I ask students in my Adolescent Literature courses whether they ever read a book in a secondary English class featuring an LGBTQ character. Not one student has ever said yes.

My students know some of the reasons why. At my university, most genuinely want to teach these books. They wonder, though, whether they will “get away” with doing so. What will parents say? Principals? It is true that teachers continue to face political pressure concerning such work; the title of Loutzenheiser’s (2001) essay, “If I talk about that, they will burn my house down,” is in many contexts still frighteningly relevant (see also Murray, 2014). Yet it is also true that, in a changing political climate, issues related to gender identity and sexuality occupy an increasingly central space in our public discourse. As I will describe below, teachers are addressing these issues now—and the degree to which my students will feel able to do so seems likely to change over the course of their years in the classroom. Teachers should be prepared to help bring about that change and also to respond as it happens.

Doing so will require specific sorts of knowledge. Teachers will need to reflect on how to respond to critics, how to articulate their work’s importance. They will need deep knowledge of sexual and gender diversity: of the range of ways in which people identify and how those identities intersect with race, class, ability, religion. And they will need to go beyond “learning about the ‘other’” (Kumashiro, 2002) to understand how gender and sexuality function in our society: how heteronormativity and cisnormativity shape our actions and assumptions, and how we can intervene in those processes. Especially given the absence of LGBTQ identities from the official curricula they themselves will have studied, they will need disciplinary-specific knowledge. How does the way we teach biology change if we take into account the full range of gender and sexual diversity? How can we teach history in a way that adds, yes, people and events into curricula (Boston marriages, Harvey Milk), but that also challenges dominant narratives such as the one suggesting a binary system of gender, constant across time and culture?

The current research does offer descriptions of teachers addressing gender and sexuality in classrooms (Athanases, 1996; Clark & Blackburn, 2009; Puchner & Klein, 2011; Zack, Mannheim, & Alfano, 2010). This research demonstrates both the possibility and the power of this work. It also reveals issues that teacher education should address. For example, how can teachers make their expectations for discussions about gender identity and sexuality clear, without positioning their students as all straight and all homophobic (Clark & Blackburn, 2009)? What should the goal of this work be in regards to students who do hold homophobic positions—particularly positions grounded in religion (Athanases, 1996; Zach, Mannheim, & Alfano, 2010)? These are important questions for teacher candidates to examine before they address these issues in classrooms.

Bullying, Harassment, Homophobia, and Transphobia

Teacher candidates also need to understand how hostile school environments can be for LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming youth, and they need to know how to help change those environments. Every other year since 1999, GLSEN has released a National Climate Study focused on the experiences of LGBT students in school. As it has in the past, GLSEN’s most recent survey (Kosciw et al., 2014) reported disturbing findings. Among students who identify as LGBT:

• 71.4% frequently heard the word “gay” used negatively at school, while 64.5% reported hearing other homophobic remarks at school (such as “fag” and “dyke”) “frequently or often.” One-third heard derogatory comments about transgender people (e.g., “tranny”) “frequently or often” (p. xvi-xvii).
• 55.5% “reported feeling unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation… [and] 38.7% felt unsafe because of how they expressed their gender” (p. 12).
• 74.1% had been verbally harassed, 36.2% physically harassed, and 16.5% physically assaulted at school because of their sexual orientation (p. xvii).
• 55.2% had been verbally harassed, 22.7% physically harassed, and 11.4% physically assaulted at school because of their gender expression (p. xvii).
• “Transgender, genderqueer, and other non-cisgender youth faced the most hostile climates” (p. 12). In addition to harassment and bullying, 42.2% of transgender students “had been prevented from using their preferred name,” while 59.2% “had been required to use a bathroom or locker room of their legal sex” (p. 5).

Not surprisingly, such hostile environments negatively affected LGBT students’ school work: students with higher reports of victimization were three times as likely to have missed school than were students with lower reports of victimization. Students who reported more severe bullying and harassment also had, on average, lower grade point averages and were less likely to plan to pursue post-secondary education (p. 6).

Such findings have been replicated and expanded upon in numerous studies that highlight the bullying and discrimination faced by LGBTQ youth at school in the US and Canada (Taylor & Peter, 2011; Pascoe, 2007), as well as higher rates of suicide ideation and attempts (Walls, Freedenthal, & Wisneski, 2008). Research also highlights the additional isolation sometimes experienced by LGBTQ youth of color (e.g., Pritchard, 2013) and those who live in rural communities (e.g., Gray, 2009). LGBTQ youth of color, for instance, often describe feeling doubly isolated—from primarily White LGBTQ communities and also from ethnic or racial communities where heterosexuality is sometimes privileged (McCready, 2004).

The hostility described above does not affect only LGBTQ students. Homophobic and transphobic attitudes position LGBTQ parents and their children as unwelcome in schools, and they place barriers between children’s home and school lives. Some LGBTQ teachers fear backlash from students and parents if they come out; if they don’t come out, they feel isolated, unable to discuss their “real” selves and lives with students and colleagues (Pasciak, 2011). And a national survey of youth in Canada found that 58% of straight students “found it upsetting to hear homophobic comments” (Taylor & Peter, 2011, p. 10).

One particularly compelling aspect of GLSEN’s annual studies is the portrait they paint of the power teachers and schools have to change these conditions—and the rarity with which they do so. In findings that have been consistent over the past decade, participants in GLSEN’s studies reported that “when school staff were present, the use of biased and derogatory language by students remained largely unchallenged” (Kosciw et al., 2014, p. 17; see also McGuire, Anderson, Toomey, & Russell, 2010). In fact, teachers and other school personnel are sometimes the instigators of such language themselves (ibid.). And Meyer (2008) found that even teachers who were personally motivated to respond to bullying and harassment felt constrained by a range of factors, including inconsistent support from administration and colleagues, fear of parent backlash, and lack of formal training on how to respond. Yet LGBT students in schools with inclusive curricula and teachers they could identify as supportive heard fewer homophobic remarks, were harassed less often, felt safer and more connected to their schools, and reported higher GPAs (p. 8). And findings from the last two reports indicate that change is beginning to occur. The 2011 report showed an increase in school support for LGBT youth, an increase that was replicated in the 2013 report—along with substantial declines in biased remarks and harassment reported by LGBT youth. These findings suggest a positive trend: when teachers and schools have the resources and knowledge to support LGBTQ youth, they can make a difference. As such, the findings speak to the importance of addressing gender identity and sexuality in teacher education.

Heteronormativity and Cisnormativity

Yet teachers need to learn how to do more than address outright hostility. I often tell my students about the time I led a poetry workshop on a male student’s poem. During a writing workshop, the writer cannot speak; classmates discuss the piece as they would normally read it, without the writer there to explain. I assumed that the poem addressed a close male friend who had died. At the time, I had known I was a lesbian for over 15 years; I’d been out for over five, and was preparing to enter graduate school to study gender and sexuality in education. But it did not occur to me that this poem may have been about anyone other than a friend until I learned, months later, that the writer was gay.

The poem may well have been about a friend. I do not know. I do know that my own heteronormativity blinded me to possible readings of both the poem and my student. Teacher candidates need chances to examine such assumptions in their own lives—for they have real consequences. A student in my class may have sat silenced—by class protocol, and by what else?—while...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Why This Course? Why This Book?
• 2 The Course: Transforming Belief Into Action
• 3 “I Thought of Myself as Neutral in Some Ways, and Then Them as Other Things”: Recognizing and Challenging Heteronormativity
• 4 “It’s Hard to Wrap Your Mind Around”: Teacher Candidates’ Discourse Concerning Gender Identity
• 5 “Perhaps I Am Not as Open-minded as I Thought”: Religion and Sexuality
• 6 “Knowing the Unknowingness at the Core of What We Know”: Queered Teaching
• 7 “Was I Supposed to Just Continue With My Lesson?” Working Within and Around Constraints in Schools and Developing Teacher Agency
• 8 Conclusions
• Appendix A: Transcription Key
• Appendix B: Methods
• Index