It's Not Straightforward: Challenges and Opportunities Within a Queer, First-Year English/Language Arts Teacher's Curricular Enactments

• In Event: Complicating Asset-Oriented Literacy Pedagogies in the Classroom and Community: Negotiating Funds of Knowledge/Identity Entanglements

Abstract

Purpose
This study spotlights the induction experiences of a queer secondary English/Language Arts (E/LA) teacher by examining some of the “dilemmas in discourse” (Wohlwend, 2009) within his first year of teaching. Specifically, through his stories/storying, this study highlights the entanglements of LGBTQ+ issues regarding precarious employment conditions, professional responsibilities, risks, an adherence to “rigid” district curricula, and held implications for his literacy instructional practices.

Theoretical Framework
Under the theoretical tent-poles of queer theory (Butler, 1990), discourses (Gee, 2014), and systems of first-year teaching (Strom et al., 2018), this work engages in disrupting inequitable power-relations of gendered discourses. Through examining liminality and performativity within the vastly heteronormative spaces of school, we may comprehend ways queer teachers navigate these contexts. Simultaneously, E/LA teachers’ positions are some of the most highly contested (Zancanella et al., 2016). For novice E/LA teachers who identify as queer, this creates opportunities and challenges, which often sediment subjectivities.

Modes of Inquiry & Data Sources
Drawn from a larger, two-year ethnographic study, that employed a feminist, critical narratological stance (Larsson & Sjöblom, 2010), this study focuses on Anthony, a White, cisgender, gay/queer-identifying male 11th grade E/LA teacher, teaching in an “affluent,” “White,” and “highly-conservative” suburban high school. Utilizing a critical enthymemic coding process (i.e., Janks, 2014; Knight & Sweeney, 2007) to analyze multiple data sources (e.g., classroom observations, student-learning artifacts, PST coursework, three semi-structured interviews), Anthony’s stories illuminate (un)conscious and systemic forces that were integral to shaping his conceptions of classroom literacy practices.

Preliminary Results
Anthony’s narratives illustrate the overlapping and conflicting discourses of teaching E/LA, and how his experiences as a queer-identifying novice teacher were emmeshed in the tensions and curricular decision making. Importantly, his student teaching proffered a rupture in “one-size fits all'' curricular mentality to undertaking more differentiated instruction, as well as centering discussions of race, particularly White environments (Wetzel et al., 2020). Small (in)formal classroom moments, especially around students’ identities, led to larger epiphanies in his classroom literacy practices. Nevertheless, within his first year, these became sources of tension, as he wrestled with centering literature-based conversations of power, privilege, and personal responsibility, which fell-flat or were silenced. Particularly, exploring topics related to gender and/or sexual orientation were sometimes introduced, but often muted. Partially, this struggle was attributed to the highly regimented E/LA curricular map, but was also layered with issues of precarity, as Anthony’s status of novice queer teacher, in a state with no employment protections.
Scholarly Significance
The first year of teaching is often filled with many tribulations associated with organizational infrastructure, content-related concerns, personal matters, and socio-political issues, often leading to emotional tension (Darby, 2008). However, little empirical data showcases queer teachers’ induction stories, more specifically E/LA teachers, and their narratives are tethered to educational and literacy ideologies. More so, in Indiana, where queer bodies are highly politicized and contested (Terkel, 2016), these entanglements may trace onto issues of turnover/retention, and the literacy practices of youth, which are tangential to equitable educational outcomes.

Author

• Summer Davis, Western Michigan University