LGBTQ Latinx Students: Crossing Linguistic Borders and Gendered Binaries Through Stories of (In)Equity and Transformation

• In Event: 21.048 - Current Perspectives on Queering Elementary Education, Research, and Practice

Abstract

Objectives: This paper provides insights into what is possible when bilingual teachers provide support to LGBTQ Latinx students in their elementary school classrooms. This presentation will center stories that emerge from queer, bilingual classrooms along the US/Mexico borderlands. These are sites of rich digital, linguistic, and cultural production yet they are often imagined and depicted as poor, uneducated, homophobic and impoverished communities.
Theoretical framework: This paper draws from intersectional theory (Crenshaw, 1989), to argue that we do not simply need schools to become more inclusive of LGBTQ students, but that instead we need to critically analyze all historical oppressions and social formations based on language, race, class, gender, and sexuality that shape the current (in)equities in our schools, our students, and their families. An intersectional lens challenges researchers and teachers to think deeply about how the identities of our students and their families are complex and layered. Having this lens acknowledges the multiplicative nature of these descriptors and the variety of differences within and across groups, including families and social groups. Intersectionality places emphasis on how identities, oppressions, and power emerge from the interstices—the in-between spaces of occupying multiple subject positions at once. Intersectionality underscores those interstices, the in-between spaces, which are sites of identity and subject formation.
Methods and Data Sources: This study is set in Southern Arizona, a bilingual, multicultural community in predominantly Mexican-American classrooms and teacher education program. In this study, I used a multiple case study approach (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) combined with literacy research methodology (Moje & Lewis, 2007) to document conversations that occurred between me and Lupita and Jovana, two novice elementary school teachers. The case studies of Lupita and Jovana included formal and informal conversations as well as their written reflections of their own classroom observations and multimodal digital stories.
Results: While the majority of classrooms place the burden on queer children, queer families, and queer teachers, the teachers in this study embodied intersectional advocacy to help all teachers, school leaders, and peers collaborate collectively on transforming schools to be more inclusive and safer for all students. The findings revealed a strong need to expand the ways we use language to disrupt notions of gendered binaries and linguistic borders especially in bilingual classrooms where Spanish is used regularly. These case studies also revealed that advocating for students using an intersectional lens is not easy work.
Scholarly Significance: Creating more inclusive teacher education programs is important because this work holds the possibility of creating allies who decrease the burden felt by queer people–students, teachers, families–in schools. Literacy research and classroom teaching practices without attention to intersectionality is inherently heteronormative, homophobic, and transphobic. Teaching children to read the world and the word, means teaching children to read gender. Teacher education programs, language arts teachers, and literacy research scholars can push the field forward by dismantling gendered binaries in our classrooms and in our language.








Author

• Carol Brochin, The University of Arizona