Supporting Pre-Service LGBTQIA2S+ Teachers in Precarious Times

• In Event: Beyond Survival toward Thriving: Emerging Research on Fostering Holistic Teacher Wellbeing

Abstract

Purpose:

LGBTQIA2S+ pre-service teachers have always faced fear of unfair firing, potential retaliation for being out at work, and potential community backlash for the identities they hold. Under the United States’ current administration, multiple Executive Orders (EOs) have restricted DEI initiatives, criminalized support for transgender students, rescinded LGBTQIA2S+ protections, and threatened funding to institutions supporting equity or LGBTQIA2S+ inclusion. LGBTQIA2S+ (queer) pre-service teachers face many decisions and unknowns, including how “out” to be on job applications and in interviews; navigating “outness” with colleagues, students, and families; balancing passion for curricular inclusion with community norms while first establishing a career; and finding support inside and outside of the institutions in which they will work. This paper discusses a self-study of a faculty team helping queer pre-service educators to establish a registered student organization at a large, public, regional comprehensive institution in the Midwest. This student organization is aimed at networking queer students with currently practicing queer professionals in education and education-related careers.

Conceptual Framework:

This study draws on affect theory (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010), posthuman cartography (Rousell, 2021), and a re-vision of self-study literature that troubles the “theory/practice split” (or binary) that self-study seeks to address (Craig & Curtis, 2020). It conceptualizes self-study not only as a study of a pre-existing, isolated and individual “self” and its doings, but as a “mapping” of a dispersed, posthuman subjectivity (Braidotti, 2013). As such, this self-study maps teacher practical knowledge as both the pragmatic skills fostered and the affects and logics cultivated in community with other queer educators.

Methods and Data Sources:

Data include reflections on being asked to join the initial committee to help establish this student organization; on researching, reaching out to, and meeting with community organizations and other faculty who could help support the organization; and on meeting with the initial student leadership team, helping them to recruit new members, to establish new annual events (e.g. an LGBTQIA2S+ education professionals’ networking brunch), and to network with community-based LGBTQIA2S+ organizations. Data also include reflections on the student organization’s initial meetings, first major events, and the connections--and contradictions--that emerged from these.

Findings and Significance:

In uncertain and destabilizing times when LGBTQIA2S+ people face an adversarial political landscape, queer communities have always relied on each other for mutual aid and support. This is no less true for LGBTQIA2S+ educators and professionals in education-related careers. Imagining, co-creating, and cultivating alternative affective landscapes and logics—landscapes of care and logics of carefulness and attunement—become maps of alternate futures. My reflections make a partial map, but a map that is co-constituted with others’ maps of possible queer educators’ futures. These futures are not utopian; however, such cultivation is of utmost importance during fascistic times in which affective capture via spectacle and logics of preemption of alternative futures (Massumi, 2025) prevail.

Authors

• MaryJohn R. Pachuta-Rysak, Grand Valley State University

• Sarah Chase, Grand Valley State University

• Kelly Lormand, Grand Valley State University