Adopting a Queer Pedagogy as a Teaching Assistant: A Queer Autoethnography

• In Event: 16.027 - Educators Queering Academia: Critical Memoirs

Abstract

Objective
The presentation examines the effort and implications of enacting a queer pedagogy as a Teaching Assistant at a university, institutionally, departmentally, and through student resistances and support.

Perspective
This presentation’s is informed by literature on enacting queer pedagogies and the ways that queerness is both accomplished as a teaching practice and discouraged by academic institutions, specifically at the post-secondary level. Though more colleges and universities offer queer resources, courses, and programs than ever before, the fluid nature of queerness is in constant opposition to the academic institutions’ often rigid structures; in short, “the struggle for its [queer academia’s] very existence could ultimately be the cause of its self-destruction” because existing in higher education requires both “construct[ing] and maintain[ing] identity within academia” and navigating “categories that are ‘exclusionary’” (Stewart, 2007, p. 92).

Method and Data Source
The presentation utilizes autoethnographic writing and observation. Autoethnography and queer topics complement to open “definitional boundaries” and to make “the politics of knowledge and experience central to what autoethnography is and does” (Jones & Adams, 2010, p. 199). The two work to “refuse received notions” of scholarship (p. 197) and to challenge norms as they relate to personal and to cultural understandings that involve gender and sexuality. Through autoethnography, I work to find the means of exploring how my own experiences might contribute to broader conversations about the ways that schools often silence queer discourse, and the possibilities of breaking those silences through queer pedagogy (Britzman, 1998). As a result of the method, the data are thick descriptive narratives examining the presenter’s personal experience in relation to adopting a queer pedagogy as a TA and literature that helps to frame those personal experiences in a larger context.

Results & Significance
The presenter realized that though there was substantial institutional resistance to queer pedagogy, there were valuable resources that could make enacting queer teaching practices both feasible and powerful. TAs serve thousands of students and hundreds of faculty and assume a substantial portion of post-secondary teaching ranks. Pedagogy research rarely credits TAs as having pedagogical positions, and queer research usually excludes TAs. This presentation offers a specific discussion of the value of a queer pedagogy and of how queer education might be with empowered TAs. Queer pedagogy “refuses normal practices” and imagines teaching “unhinged from the dominant conceptual order” (Britzman, 1998, p. 227). Who better to do the unhinging than TAs—a group already navigating competing identities as student, researcher, teacher, while on the fringe of academic professionalism?

Author

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, The University of Alabama