“I Don’t Want Anyone to Feel Troubled After Today’s Class”: Queer Confessions From a Straight Teacher Educator/Researcher

• In Event: Disrupting “Safe Spaces” With Queer Bodies: Exploring Perceptions of Safety and Vulnerability as Teachers and Researchers

Abstract

It was the end of an intense class with my pre-service teachers in which we had focused on anti-homophobia education in secondary schools, so I reminded my students how to contact me if they needed any further support or dialogue. My last words as I left the room were, “I don’t want anyone to feel troubled after today’s class.” Did I really mean that? If I did mean it, why had I bothered to teach about this at all? Had my class been a “safe space’? Was that even possible or desirable?

Objectives: Vasquez, Tate, and Harste (2013) provoke pre- and in-service teachers to think critically about “perspectives that might appear to be potentially hurtful to others” (p. 73) In this presentation, I will “trouble” (Kumashiro, 2004) my attempt to teach anti-homophobia and gender diversity from a simultaneously caring and critical stance. I have three objectives for this presentation:
• To share parts of an autoethnographic narrative of my experience as a “straight” or heterosexual teacher educator exploring gender and sexuality diversity with pre-service teachers in the Canadian prairies.
• To interrogate and “queer” Discourses of “safety” emergent in my narrative and explore how this may have affected my (in)ability to teach from a critical stance.
• To invite further questions and conversation about what this may mean for my own and potentially others’ journeys to become anti-oppressive educators.

Perspectives or Theoretical Frameworks: I adopt a critical literacy perspective, in which I believe examining my own “assumptions, values, and beliefs is part and parcel of understanding the position(s) from which we speak, the position(s) from which we teach, and the Discourses (ways of being, doing, acting, talking, and thinking) that shape these positionings” (Vasquez, Tate, & Harste, p. 23). I frame this study through an anti-oppressive lens (Kumashiro, 2002, 2004), but wonder how the “ethics of care” (Noddings, 1992, 2002) fit within notions of anti-homophobia/anti-heterosexist/pro-gender diversity teacher education (Airton, 2009; Ferfolja & Robinson, 2004). In particular, I draw upon Goldstein, Russell, and Daley’s (2007) conceptual framework of “safe,” “positive,” and “queer” moments in schooling.

Methods and/or Modes of Inquiry: I engage in autoethnography (Ellis, 2004, 2007, 2009), which I intentionally present as an act of “emancipatory educational storysharing” (Barone, 2000). I use critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2011; Janks, 1993, 2010; Mills, 2004) to interrogate my narrative.

Data Sources: The narrative is the primary data source, but I experiment with multimodal ways of telling so I can draw upon poetry, visual art, and comics for the presentation.

Conclusions and Significance: While I intend for this presentation to provoke more questions than offer “conclusions,” the process of sharing and then “queering” (Goldstein, Russell, & Daley, 2007) moments from my own teaching may prompt others to explore Kumashiro’s (2004) call to “re-think the possibilities for change within the particular social, historical, political, and pedagogical context” (pp. 122 -123) in which we live and teach.

Author

• Jennifer Watt, University of Manitoba