Queering Straight Teachers

Much of the focus of anti-homophobic/anti-heterosexist educational theory, curriculum, and pedagogy has examined the impact of homophobia and heterosexism on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) students and teachers. Such a focus has provided numerous theoretical and pedagogical insights, and has informed important changes in educational policy. Queering Straight Teachers: Discourse and Identity in Education remains deeply committed to the social justice project of improving the lives of GLBT students and teachers. However, in contrast with much of the previous scholarship, Queering Straight Teachers shifts the focus from an analysis of the GLBT «Other» to a critical examination of what it might mean, in theory and in practice, to queer straight teachers, and the implications this has for challenging institutionalized heteronormativity in education. This book will be useful in courses on educational foundations, curriculum studies, multicultural education, queer theory, gay and lesbian studies, and critical theory.

"How do gay and lesbian teachers grapple with their professional and sexual identities at work, given that these identities are constructed as mutually exclusive, even indeed as mutually opposed? Using rich interview and ethnographic materials from Texas and California, School's Out explores how teachers struggle to create a classroom persona that balances who they are and what's expected of them in a climate of pervasive homophobia. Catherine Connell takes readers into the private and professional lives of gay and lesbian educators, along the way developing the innovative concept of racialized homophobia, which thwarts challenges to sexual injustices in schools. She also uses her own experiences as one point of intersection with the ideas in this volume. Connell's exploration of the tension between the rhetoric of gay pride and the professional ethic of discretion insightfully connects and considers other complicating factors, from local law and politics to race and gender privilege. With a sense of ethnographic verve and an engaging authorial presence, School's Out is essential reading for specialists and students of queer studies, gender studies, and educational politics."--Provided by publisher.

Jen Gilbert: Foreword - Acknowledgments - sj Miller and Nelson M. Rodriguez: Introduction: The Critical Praxis of Queer Memoirs in Education - Part 1: Queer Paranoia: To Risk or Not to Risk - Adam J. Greteman: Contingent Labor, Contingently Queer - Summer Pennell: Queer Paranoia: Worrying About and Through a Queer Dissertation Study - Ryan Burns and Janet D. Johnson: Reconciling the Personal and Professional: Coming Out From the Classroom Closet - Part 2: Queered Tensions: Beyond the Academy - Sara Staley and Bethy Leonardi: Remaining Stubbornly Faithful: What Queering Academia Does to Queer Teacher-Scholars - Michael Borgstrom: Inside. Out. Queer Time in Midcareer - Kristen A. Renn: How I Met Foucault: An Intellectual Career in, Around, and Near Queer Theory - Part 3: Queering Academic Spaces: Renarrating Lives - Nelson M. Rodriguez: From Doctoral Student to Dr. Sweetie Darling: My Queer(ing) Journey in Academia - Jenny Kassen and Alicia Lapointe: Working With and Within: Weaving Queer Spaces With Cycles of Resistance - Stephanie Anne Shelton: Adopting a Queer Pedagogy as a Teaching Assistant - Michael Wenk: Sanctioning Unsanctioned Texts: The True Story of a Gay Writer - Part 4: Misrecognition: From Invisibility Into Visibility- sj Miller: (Un)becoming Trans*: Every Breath You Take and Every ... - Kerrita K. Mayfield: Queering the Inquiry Body: Critical Science Teaching From the Margins - Darrell Cleveland Hucks: Intersectional Warrior: Battling the Onslaught of Layered Microaggressions in the Academy - Erich N. Pitcher: Undone and (Mis)Recognized: Disorienting Experiences of a Queer, Trans* Educator - Part 5: The Political Is Personal - Catherine A. Lugg: Slam Dunk on Tenure? Not So Fast ... - Kamden K. Strunk, Douglas R. Bristol, and William C. Takewell: Queering South Mississippi: Simple and Seemingly Impossible Work - Scotty M. Secrist: Smear the Queer: A Critical Memoir - Thabo Msibi: "I heard it from a good source": Queer Desire and Homophobia in a South African Higher Education Institution - Part 6: Queered All the Way Through - David Lee Carlson: A Profound Moment of Passing - Dana M. Stachowiak: Being Queer in Academia?Queering Academia - William F. Pinar: The Constant in My Life - Contributors

This book advances a broad constellation of critical concepts situated within the field of queer studies and education. Collectively, the concepts take up a cross-section of scholarship that speaks to various political, epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical concerns. Given the ongoing global centrality of sociocultural and political developments related to the topic of LGBTQ in the twenty-first century, the concepts in this volume and the issues raised by each contributor will have wide international appeal among researchers, scholars, educators, students, and activists working at the intersection of queer studies and education.

Theoretical studies in curriculum have begun to move into cultural studies--one vibrant and increasingly visible sector of which is queer theory. Queer Theory in Education brings together the most prominent and promising scholars in the field of education--primarily but not exclusively in curriculum--in the first volume on queer theory in education. In his perceptive introduction, the editor outlines queer theory as it is emerging in the field of education, its significance for all scholars and teachers, and its relation to queer theory in literacy theory and more generally, in the humanities.

Queering Elementary Education is not about teaching kids to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight. ItOs not part of a sinister stratagem in the Ogay agenda.O Instead, these provocative and thoughtful essays advocate the creation of classrooms that challenge categorical thinking, promote interpersonal intelligence, and foster critical consciousness. Queer elementary classrooms are those where parents and educators care enough about their children to trust the human capacity for understanding and their educative abilities to foster insight into the human condition. Those who teach queerly refuse to participate in the great sexual sorting machine called schooling where diminutive GI Joes and Barbies become star quarterbacks and prom queens, while the Linuses and Tinky Winkies become wallflowers or human doormats. Queeering education means bracketing our simplest classroom activities in which we routinely equate sexual identities with sexual acts, privilege the heterosexual condition, and presume sexual destinies. Queer teachers are those who develop curriculum and pedagogy that afford every child dignity rooted in self-worth and esteem for others. In short, queering education happens when we look at schooling upside down and view childhood from the inside out. This groundbreaking volume demands we explore taken-for-granted assumptions about diversity, identities, childhood, and prejudice.

This volume assembles a range of writers from diverse backgrounds and geographies to examine five broadly-defined areas in elementary education: foundational issues; social and sexual development; curriculum; the family; and gay/lesbian educators and their allies.

What do we mean when we talk about 'queer teachers'? The authors here grapple with what it means to be sexually or gender diverse and to work as a school teacher within four national contexts: Australia, Ireland, the UK and the USA. This new volume offers academics, educators and students a provocative exploration of this pivotal topic.