Advancing a Gender-Expansive Framework for Educators

• In Event: 31.028 - New Directions in Curriculum Inquiry: Pushing Against/From/With the Margins

Abstract

Teacher preparation programs and the curriculum offered therein are in a unique position to influence future teachers’ supportiveness toward students of all genders, to empower and support transgender pre-service teachers, and to lead education toward transgender transformation. At the present time, however, teacher education does not commonly use any theoretical framework that adequately describes or interrogates cisgender privilege or transgender oppression. Within teacher education courses, transgender topics tend to get grouped into lessons regarding sexual orientation (Airton, 2009), in large part due to the pervasiveness of the acronym LGBTQ, which is ubiquitous in the work of educational scholars to date. However, the needs of transgender individuals differ significantly from the needs of cisgender LGBQ individuals. For example, gay and lesbian students are not likely to change their pronoun or their first name, or request access to various sex-segregated spaces such as bathrooms or locker rooms. Considering that transgender topics are routinely ignored or erased in teacher education courses (Jennings, 2007), pre-service teachers often move into the field unprepared to support their transgender students (Meyer, 2008; Payne & Smith, 2014) and unprepared to teach their students in a manner that advances gender diversity and works against transgender oppression. The present political climate makes preparing teachers with a gender-expansive mindset an even more pressing need.

In this paper, I am forwarding a Gender-Expansive Theoretical Framework which integrates important contributions from queer, feminist and transgender theory (Alcoff, 1993; Beauchamp, 2013; Beemyn & Eliason, 1996; Bilodeau, 2007; Britzman, 1995; Catalano & Shlasko, 2013; Cohen, 1997; Ford 2007; Serano, 2016; Spade, 2015) with critical curriculum theories (Apple, 1990; Giroux, 2001; hooks, 1994; Kumashiro, 2002; Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2015).When educators are immersed in an epistemology of gender that is binary and restrictive, we are less able to imagine, explore, and express our multifaceted selves. This Gender-Expansive Framework can be understood as working alongside existing theoretical paradigms within the field of education that explain systemic oppressions such as racism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism, and recognizes that curriculum can be a powerful tool in understanding gender and advancing transgender justice.

The principles of this framework are as follows:

Principle 1: Gender has individual, institutional, and cultural levels

Principle 2: Genderism is endemic to society and intersects with other systems of oppression

Principle 3: Transgender people’s experiential knowledge is essential to overcoming the epistemology of ignorance

Principle 4: Visibility and invisibility—within language, discourse, and curriculum— is central to understanding trans.

This framework will be critical in improving pre-service and in-service teachers’ ability to respond to the challenges trans people face and incorporate a gender-expansive perspective into their practice. Teacher educators must feel comfortable and confident in transgender topics and must be able to model this approach with their students; incorporating this framework into the curriculum will help them achieve that goal. Instead of relying on an essentialist view of gender as either/or, educators must create tools and strategies that help us interrogate our own gender and practice epistemic resistance.

Author

• Eli Kean, Michigan State University