Reading Between the Lines: LGBTQ+ Secondary Preservice Teachers’ Navigations and Apertures of Teacher-Self

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 4:15 pm - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Becoming Teachers: Identity, Narrative, and Pedagogical Journeys

Abstract

This phenomenological study contributes to growing scholarship highlighting LGBTQ+ preservice teacher (PST) experiences within the United States, including those who identify as gender-creative/expansive, non-binary, and/or trans, whose experiences are vastly underrepresented in induction literature. Through field experience journals (FEJ), these seven self-identified LGBTQ+ secondary PSTs engage in questioning and introspection regarding their teacherhood; yet, unlike their heteronormative and/or cisgender peers, the journals demonstrate how such moments are often intertwined with queer joy and frustration, interrogation, and accompliceship in crystalizing their professional dispositions. Importantly, this research captures the unique but seldom documented space of PSTs negotiating queerness and personhood within an often vastly performative and perfunctory heteronormative assignment of FEJs, and ends with an innovation for teacher educators.

Authors

• Summer Davis, Western Michigan University

• Bradley Reinbolt, University of Cincinnati