Queering Conceptions of Diversity: Centering LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer) Issues Within a Social Justice Education Curriculum

• In Event: “We Recruit”: Sexuality and Gender, “Queer Positive” Curriculum, and Teacher Knowledge and Identity

Abstract

Overview. The University of Oregon Teacher Education program recently underwent a comprehensive revision of its curriculum, degree programs, and faculty. These changes were precipitated by grassroots protests organized by students and local community activists. The central objection of the protestors was that the teacher education program at that time paid little or no attention to issue of cultural difference and social justice.
As the institution responded and changes were instituted, however, the memory of that advocacy settled into categories of thought with which people were most familiar. Specific demands were forgotten and a general recollection that “more attention to diversity” replaced it. For a variety of reasons the needs of immigrant ESOL students became the primary image of “diversity” in the minds of many outside the department. The needs of LGBTQ students families was at risk of fading from institutional memory.
This paper traces the struggle to keep the needs of LGBTQ students, teachers, and families within the definition of “diversity” around which the new program was being built.
Theoretical Framework. At its broadest level this paper is framed by feminist post-structuralist and queer post-structuralist theory (Butler 1990; Foucault 1990; Butler 1993).
Considerable scholarship has been produced over the last decade that applies these post-structuralist lenses to the analysis of K-12 curriculum and schooling processes (Rasmussen 2004) and specifically to the production of heteronormativity in school (Thorne 2004; Pascoe 2007). There is also a growing literature that applies these theories to the education of pre-service and inservice teachers, usually examining the response of students to critiques of heteronormativity (Petrovic and Rosiek 2003; Petrovic and Rosiek 2007). This paper uses the aforementioned theories to address institutional level of queer-positive educational transformation efforts in teacher education programs.
Analysis. These feminist poststructuralist and queer post-structuralist theories provide the means of tracking the discursive illegibility of LGBTQ student issues to key institutional stake holders that made it difficult to maintain an institutional focus this dimension of educational justice. Other “diversity” issues primarily related to race and ethnicity were more familiar, their politics more normalized, and administrators had a vocabulary that permitted them to feel competent when publicly addressing these topics.
Findings and implications. The paper will report that the University of Oregon Education Studies department has been able to keep a significant focus on LGBTQ students, teachers, and families within its curriculum focused on promoting social justice in schools.
It is the description and analysis of the constant struggle against the institutional erasure of LGBTQ concerns from the curriculum—the occasions where that erasure happened and the means with which the Department has resisted it—that will constitute the most salient findings of this study. The stories themselves will illuminate the mechanics of this process and highlight strategies for preserving and advancing visibility. In this way we intend for the paper to contribute to the growing body of both theoretical and practical knowledge about substantively including history, lives, and well-being of LGBTQ persons and communities at the heart of public school curriculum.

Authors

• Alison L. Schmitke, University of Oregon

• Jerry L. Rosiek, University of Oregon