Teaching Social Justice Using the Queer Literacy Framework

• In Event: Social Justice Comes to Secondary English Teacher Preparation: Historicizing, Understanding, Implementing, and Assessing Standard VI

Abstract

Objectives
Drawing from the queer literacy framework (QLF) (Author B, 2015), guided by ten principles and commitments about how to teach, affirm, and recognize, trans* and gender creative youth (T*GCY), this study demonstrates how curriculum and pedagogy mediate safe, inclusive, and affirming classrooms. It offers literacy educators—pre- and inservice Pre-K-12 teachers—strategies to meet their needs across economic, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Such models not only demonstrate how to instantiate social justice into teacher disposition work but how to rework social and classroom norms where differential bodies are legitimated, how to shift classrooms for reading (a)gender, and how to support students to experience value in their (a)gender self-determination.

Perspective(s)
Thirty years of research about bridging LGBT issues (Quinn & Meiners, 2011) to school curriculum has been well-documented, yet education remains without a large-scale study for preparing pre-service teachers to address lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, intersex, agender/asexual, gender creative, and questioning youth (Author, 2015). As language and understanding around T*GCY identities have become part of the social fabric of society, youth have more access to support their processes of becoming, using these opportunities for both personal and social recognition.

Methods
With social positioning as the presumed or “normative” condition, those whose gender identities fall outside of the binary tend to be misrecognized, misunderstood, experience a double-consciousness (DuBois, 1903) and suffer from a recognition gap. Misrecognition subverts the possibility to be made credible, legible or be understood. When one is misrecognized, it is altogether difficult to hold a positive self-image, knowing what images others may hold. At school, T*GCY experience macro and microaggressions, and are forced to placate others by representing themselves in incomplete or false ways. Recognizing these dangerous realities, recognition underscores a new theory for trans*ness and a trans* pedagogy as methodology and seeks to inspire a sustainable curriculum of recognition for T*GCY.

Data
Data emerged empirically from within research studies and teachers’ classrooms who took up the QLF (see Tables 1 and 2). Teacher researchers’ intentions were to recognize the presence of T*GCY, and generate lessons that encouraged a safe, affirming, and inclusive classroom within myriad sociocultural and linguistic contexts. They designed curriculum, applied pedagogical knowledge, and generated assessments that accounted for intersectional identities for all students across social, economic, cultural, and linguistic contexts.

Results
Students, when affirmed, have the power for self-recognition and to be spatially agentive. Concomitant, it cuts across borders of spacetime. Through an integration of a conscious curriculum, not only can T*GCY be recognized, but peers can mirror back their lived realities. As teacher education and professional development remains open to evolving nuances of (a)gender, a stabilized futurity of students who embody (a)gender justice has potential to generate social shifts.

Significance
When schools privilege heterosexist, cisgender, Eurocentric, and gendernormative beliefs, students must focus on survival rather than on fulfillment. When school is not safe, T*GCY suffer. However, these teachers invited T*GCY to see their social value mirrored, to thereby experience (a)gender self-determination and justice, and to start living lives they were meant to have.

Author

• SJ Miller, University of Colorado - Boulder