Students and Teachers Queering the Common Core in a Large Public High School

• In Event: Visceral Literacies, Embodied Inquiries: The “Affective Turn” in Critical Research for Social Justice

Abstract

Recounting his experience as a queer teen in Arkansas, Kyle Dean Massey writes, “I was made to believe I was odd and weird and different to the point where it was debilitating. I was always thinking, ‘If I walk this way, or talk this way, or dress this way…will people think I’m gay?’” (Savage and Miller, 2011, p. 175). Heteronormativity in schools and society can have severe consequences for queer teens, leading to lower academic achievement, negative self-esteem, drug and alcohol abuse, institutionalization, or suicide. Many queer students do not feel safe in performing identities that seem comfortable or natural to them in their schools. In this paper, I draw on a study with high school youth and teachers to examine how school curriculum, and more specifically, reading and writing activities, effectively foreclose the exploration and performance of queer subjectivities.

Now that Common Core standards have been adopted, educators and policymakers are shifting their attention to implementation. A top-down approach to creating and implementing curriculum based on national standards risks reproducing inequality and oppression. Drawing on Butler's conception of performativity (1990), the proposed paper explores how power is inscribed on bodies via the discourse of national standards, with a particular emphasis on composition benchmarks. Butler’s concept of performativity (1990) describes how a subject is materialized through performance. As standards are implemented in schools across the United States, I examine the ways in which standards afford or limit opportunities for queer students to embody their sexuality through writing assignments in school.


Set in a large, suburban high school that has a reputation for inclusivity, this study focuses on a collaborative team of students and teachers critique writing assignments as a venue for exploring subjectivity and consider ways to queer the implementation of composition benchmarks in schools.

My data includes observations and interviews, as well as data generated and analyzed by students. The study is informed by youth participatory action research (YPAR), which emanates from an epistemological stance that “expertise and knowledge are widely distributed” (Fine, 2007, p. 215). In this study, queer students share their own perspectives on reading and writing assignments in English language arts classes, as well as conduct research among their marginalized peers in terms of assignments that allow for the safe exploration of issues of power and identity. I describe how students utilize ethnographic methods such as interviews and observations as a means to gather data. I also describe how participants employ critical discourse analysis (CDA) to generate and interpret data.

My study proceeds from the idea that schools are sites of injustice and that queer students possess marginalized but meaningful perspectives about oppression in regard to sexuality and that queer students should be part of bottom-up implementation of curriculum, which incorporates the local knowledge of teachers in a school setting as well as the unique perspectives of queer students. Queer youth possess knowledge, determination, and skills to lead adults in creating safe space in schools, even as these same queer students are victimized, harassed, and isolated.

Author

• Michael J. Wenk, University of Colorado - Boulder