Queer Students Talk Back to Schools From an Out-of-School Time Setting

• In Event: Adolescents’ Intellectual and Emotional Communion: Exploring Shared Vulnerability and Connection in Literacy Learning

Abstract

On a Saturday Zoom call in the spring of 2021, I shared with my students in Write It Out, a writing program for queer teenagers in the region surrounding a Rust Belt city, two articles written by and for educators. These articles—“Strategies for Supporting LGBTQ Students,” by Larry Ferlazzo (2021) and “Covering LGBT Issues in the Classroom” by Beth Hawkins (2018)—offered instruction for in-service teachers about what LGBTQ+ students in their classes needed. I offered the students three writing prompts in response to these pieces: they could create a narrative that filled in the blanks of one of the articles, create their own instruction manual for teachers in how to support LGBTQ+ students, or write a counterargument or deeper argument for one of the points made in the articles. Each of the students in the class meeting that day chose the second prompt. Kaia wrote:

Rainbows can disappear in moments,
the words you speak cannot.
Lights can burn sometimes
and the shadows can be home.
If corrected, apologize to the rainbow
but don’t let the neighbors know for show.
If the rainbow speaks a question
answer.
Don’t offend your unknown.
Let the rainbows know their present and their past and darling,
rainbows need to know how to stay well
just like the puddles do.
Thank you.

Lys noted, immediately and with pleasure, that the poem is “catty.” For them, Kaia’s use of “the rainbows” and its snarky resonance carried the day. I noted, then as now, the profundity of “light can burn sometimes / and the shadows can be home,” a process that Kaufman & Seidel (2012) illuminates in his response to Moises Kaufman’s description of seeing queer theater for the first time as a young person—perhaps we as queer people keep to “the shadows” because exposure is painful, “burns.” However, Kaia chooses exposure in this small group of queer people, sharing emotions that resonate for the others even though her schooling experience is distinctly different. Quinn, too, found power in her classmate’s poetry, and was able to answer with a work that showed her own vulnerability and frustration with the lack of support for queer youth in school spaces.
Ehret (2018) notes the potency of visceral connections in the moment in teaching writing. Using narrative inquiry and practitioner research, this paper explores the ways that three queer students, living and writing at a time when LGBTQ+ rights and particularly rights for transgender students are on a dangerous precipice, find visceral connections to each other. Participants Kaia, Lys, and Quinn—ages 15-17—not only used their writing to express anger at injustices they’d seen and experienced in educational spaces, but also bore critical witness (Dutro, 2019) to each other’s visceral expressions of anger and hurt. They found visceral recognition in poems in which their classmates bared their vulnerabilities and connected profoundly through these acts of composing and sharing.

Author

• Gemma Cooper-Novack, Independent Scholar