Using Literacy to Explore Heteronormativity With Second Graders

• In Event: What's the T? Queer Realities and Queer Possibilities in K–12 and Teacher Education

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation highlights how I, as a second-grade teacher, transformed my pedagogy using literacy to engage my students in LGBT-related issues. I highlight the discourses that emerged during literature discussions of children’s books with themes of non-heterosexuality and/or non-normative expressions of gender.

Perspectives or theoretical framework
Queer theory provides a helpful lens for this kind of work to be enacted in my classroom.
Queer theory positions identities (including queer identities) as multiple and shifting (Jagose, 1996). Understanding the ways heteronormativity is structured and maintained—even in a primary classroom—is of importance to this study. Butler (1990) characterizes the “heterosexual matrix” as the invisible rules that govern and reify dichotomous and narrow understandings of male and female, and that rely on the understanding that desire is only, or most acceptable, when experienced between men and women who express their genders in the most powerful and desirable ways (Connell, 1987). By locating and recognizing gender/sexual subjectivities that are cast to the margins by heteronormativity (i.e., non-heterosexuality and non-normative expressions of gender), I employ queer theory to engage in a disruption on discourses considered normal.

Methods
The data was from a fifteen week after-school literacy club with six second-graders, taught by me, that occurred in early 2015. The children (three boys/three girls) were students in my second-grade classroom during the 2014-2015 school year. They attended a large, K-8 school in a diverse urban neighborhood. Over fifty languages are spoken by the students in the school, over 90% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and most of the students are first- or second-generation Americans and are classified as English Learners. The six children in this study mirror the demographics of the school.

Data sources
Data was in the form of audio recordings of the read alouds/literature discussions. The audio recordings were transcribed, coded, and critically analyzed after the completion of the project, using Rymes’ (2009) concept of “language in use” to explore how outside social factors, the context of the discourse of my classroom, and how an individual’s words are all interpreted in interactions.

Results
During my initial analysis, I noticed the complexity and conflicting nature of the discourses that emerged. The two most salient and broadest categories of discourse were coded as rejections (of non-normative expressions of gender/sexual identity) and disruptions (of heteronormativity). Further analysis highlighted that the ways the children in the study engaged with issues relevant to non-heterosexuality and/or non-normative gender expressions were nuanced and attend to the variety of ways the children’s discourses reified, challenged, and disrupted the heterosexual matrix.

Scholarly Significance
There is a gap in understanding the ways in which LGBT-related issues surface in primary classrooms. Though scholars have highlighted the ways that young children reify heteronormativity in primary classrooms (Blaise, 2005 & 2009), there are few empirical studies highlighting primary-grades teachers’ attempts at grappling with issues related to homophobia and heteronormativity. This project can assist other teachers and teacher-educators as they explore such issues in their own contexts.

Author

• Paul Hartman, Illinois State University