Combating Metro-Normativity? Sense-Making About Social Justice Leadership for Queer Inclusivity in Three Rural Communities

• In Event: Distributed Leadership for Social Justice in Diverse Localities: The Politics and Pedagogy of Place

Abstract

In this qualitative comparative case study of three rural school districts, I use a distributed leadership model to explore how educators—including superintendents, principals, and teachers—make sense of social justice for queer youth in the context of the rural community. The types of data analyzed for this study include interviews, observations, philosophy statements, and school policies. School leaders are responsible for student learning, monitoring teaching, building professional community, acquiring and allocating resources, and establishing a safe and effective learning environment (Halverson & Kelley, 2017). Leadership is distributed among educators (Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2004), and those who are oriented toward social justice “make issues of race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and other historically and currently marginalizing conditions in the United States central to their advocacy, leadership practice, and vision” (Theoharis, 2007, p. 223). Scholars have demonstrated how LGBTQ+ identities are often positioned as inherently urban (Gray, 2009), which has negative implications for queer youth who live outside cities and queer youth of color everywhere (Brockenbrough, 2016; Manalansan, 2014; Moussawi, 2019). The notion that cities are always already queer-friendly while other places are not is known as metronormativity (Halberstam, 2005), and a metronormative education can implicitly and explicitly teach queer youth to expect and accept violence outside of cities (Johnson, Gilley, & Gray, 2016). To overcome metronormativity, social justice leaders must engage in resistance, a common theme in the literature which demonstrates how leaders might, themselves, oppose social justice or persevere through external opposition to their social justice work (Bishop & McClellan, 2016; Payne & Smith, 2018; Theoharis, 2007). But few studies explore how rural school leaders preemptively modulate their social justice practice to appease potentially antagonistic members of the school community. When the final data are analyzed, I expect to find that student-, family-, school-, district-, region-, and state-level factors inform the ways in which educators’ espoused values about queer youth are enacted. Additionally, I expect that participants will justify and explain their practices through comparisons to other rural, suburban, and urban schools, and the degree to which educators perceive their own rural community to be welcoming of queer identities will subsequently influence their practices in support of queer youth. This study has implications for school leaders who are responsible for facilitating educational environments that are conducive to the learning and thriving of all students.

Author

• Cory Roseth, University of Wisconsin - Madison