"Everyone Needs a Class Like This": High School Students' Perspectives on a Gay and Lesbian Literature Class

• In Event: 50 Shades of Gay: Past, Present, and Future of Research on the Spectrum of Sexuality and Education

Abstract

This presentation offers insights on how high school students experienced and made sense of their learning in a trimester-long high school Gay and Lesbian Literature course. The author shows how a queer-themed literature curriculum is relevant for both LGBTQ-identifying and straight-identifying students, provides opportunities for engaged, meaningful, and cross-disciplinary learning, and contributes to a better school climate.
The study considers students’ reflections on the class from a queer and social justice perspective (e.g., DePalma & Atkinson, 2008, 2009; Kumashiro, 2002) to examine how queering curriculum and pedagogy opens spaces in literature classrooms for moving from approaches of LGBT-inclusion and anti-homophobia education towards counter-hetero-/cisnormative work.
The paper draws on a larger ethnographic case study of the Gay and Lesbian Literature course, which is offered at a public regional high school in western New England. The focus of the paper is on students’ perspectives on the curriculum and their learning in this class. It presents an analysis of the themes that emerged from the interviews and questionnaires that the students completed as part of the study.
The analysis of the teacher’s and students’ open-ended responses in questionnaires and interviews followed a modified grounded theory approach as part of a recursive research process to generate overarching themes through multiple phases of coding and interpretation (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011) which was enhanced by a postmodern turn to analysis through extensive writing and a thinking with the literature (St. Pierre, 2011).
Students responded enthusiastically to the class, which raised the question of what contributed to such responses. The analysis of students’ responses revealed that what mattered most was the learning that occurred in the spaces that students’ engagement with the various course texts opened up. The following themes emerged: the open, safe, and respectful classroom environment was critical to students’ engagement with the curriculum; students felt they moved from discomfort to confidence related to LGBTQ issues as they moved from ignorance to knowledge; students were eager to learn about LGBTQ history; students felt they gained a fuller understanding of the complexities around sexualities, sex and gender; students developed critical consciousness about LGBTQ issues; students felt empowered to become supportive advocates for LGBTQ people, and students recognized the positive impact the course had on their school’s climate.
Little is known about how students experience a queerly informed curriculum. Although general findings about the positive impact of LGBTQ-inclusive curricula are promising (e.g., Kosciw et al., 2014), there is a dearth of research on students’ perspectives related to such curricula. In addition, the study shows how a queer-themed literature course not only challenges pervasive homophobia, heterosexism, heteronormativity, and cissexism, but also creates a counternarrative to prevalent views which consider such work as impossible within public school classrooms. This curriculum is an example of how queer praxis can be enacted in a high school classroom by allowing the stories, experiences, cultures, histories, and politics of LGBTQ people to become the focus of inquiry.

Author

• Kirsten Helmer, University of Massachusetts - Amherst