Preparing Teachers to Reculture Schools for Gender Inclusivity and Transgender Equity

• In Event: Seeking Social Justice: Teacher Leadership for Equity, Inclusion, and Advocacy

Abstract

The American ideal of public education as the great equalizer remains unrealized in our public schools. This is especially true for transgender students whose gender identity differs from their assigned sex at birth. According to the 2015 US Transgender Survey “fifty-four percent (54%) of those who were out or perceived as transgender in K–12 were verbally harassed, nearly one-quarter (24%) were physically attacked, and 13% were sexually assaulted in K–12 because of being transgender” (James, et.al, 2016, p. 9). As a result, transgender students commonly experience social exclusion, emotional distress, and disrupted learning (Kosciw, et. al., 2016). These injustices persist despite Title IX, a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, and legal rulings in eight states that protect transgender students. To improve the educational experiences available to transgender students we must go beyond legal rulings and reculture schools to create gender inclusive school norms.

Traditional school culture is zealously cisnormative, resulting in rigorous enforcement of traditional gender norms that situate “boy” and “girl” as absolute and mutually exclusive categories. Cisnormative school culture perpetuates a deficit perspective of transgender people, casting them as deviant. Equity for transgender students requires a shift away from cisnormative culture and deficit thinking toward more inclusive cultures that recognize and value the contributions that transgender students make to educational spaces. Cultural shift is constituted through and by changes in beliefs and practices. Teachers, as informal leaders, and in collaboration with their colleagues, are uniquely positioned to change a school community’s regime of competence (Wenger, 1998) and shift school culture to become more gender inclusive. As such, peer-to-peer influence may be more effective for changing cisnormative school culture than policy mandates or legal rulings.

This study situates teachers as informal leaders in the effort to transform school culture to become more gender inclusive and facilitate transgender equity. Cultural shift is dependent upon teachers’ capacity to influence one another and change their school community’s “regime of competence” to include more gender inclusive practices. How then, can we build teachers’ capacity to engage this work? What knowledge and skills do teachers need to transform cisnormative school culture? To answer these questions, I interviewed more than 30 elementary-level teachers who knowingly taught transgender students. Collectively, they provide insights into the knowledge and skills required to act as leaders and shift school culture as well as the obstacles that hinder cultural transformation. These findings are then used to conceptualize the kind of learning opportunities teachers need to engage fully as leaders dedicated to reculturing schools for gender inclusivity and transgender equity. The findings from this study can be used in the development of pre-service programs and on-going learning for teachers dedicated to leading for social justice and equity.

Author

• Melinda M. Mangin, Rutgers University