Nonbinary Beginning Teachers: Gender, Power, and Professionalism in Teacher Education

• In Event: Supporting Transgender Workers in Pre-K–12 Schools: Lessons From Research and Practice

Abstract

Objectives and data sources: Supported by a growing body of research, Canadian and US PK-12 schools are increasingly taking proactive measures to support transgender and gender nonconforming students (Blair & Deckman, 2020; Meyer et al., 2016; Meyer & Keenan, 2018; Sinclair-Palm & Gilbert, 2018). Schools also have trans and gender non-conforming teachers; however, little research investigates barriers to their entry into the profession or addresses this group's experiences in teacher preparation programs. This article begins to fill this gap by showing how six non-binary beginning teachers navigated gender expectations, worked to appear professional and negotiated racial and gendered power dynamics in their initial teacher education and preservice teaching.
Theoretical framework and methods: This paper draws on individual in-depth interviews (Seidman, 2013) with six non-binary beginning teachers from various locations across the United States and Canada who participated in a more broadly framed study about the experiences of non-binary educators. I recruited participants for this study through social media pages and a listserv for trans educators and conducted interviews between July and December 2018 in person, by phone, or by video call depending on participants’ location or preference and coded transcripts inductively. In this paper, I explore the experiences of these six beginning teachers in light of Sara Ahmed’s (2014) concept of the “willful subject,” which refers to figures or persons who come to be attributed by others as being willful because they deviate from a norm or expectation.
Conclusions: Through this conceptual framework, I identify the ways in which these beginning teachers were called on by others to take on more normative versions of gender in the course of their teacher education. I show how others attempted to manage these beginning teachers’ gender nonconformity explicitly – for instance, by instructing them not to discuss queerness or transness in class – and implicitly –for example, by implying that being a non-binary teacher is risky, impossible, or not worth the struggle. I also show that, despite the pressure they experienced to conform to normative gender expectations, the participants in this study worked to craft professional identities that incorporated their non-binary genders. Further, they often strived to make their schools and classrooms more hospitable to gender diversity. I argue that if the profession is to genuinely welcome gender diversity, it must do more than protect trans and gender nonconforming teachers from discrimination and harassment: it must also recognize and work to deconstruct its gender normativity.
Significance: As transgender issues have garnered growing public attention in the last decade, trans people may have more access to visibility and recognition but they also remain vulnerable in many ways. It is essential that schools and teacher education programs support their trans students and work to interrogate gender normativity in their programs. This work contributes to the literature on gender normativity in education (Miller, Mayo, & Lugg, 2018; Keenan, 2017; Blount, 2000) and aims to begin a conversation about creating environments in schools and teacher education programs that welcome all the ways gender is lived and experienced.

Author

• Lee Iskander, The University of British Columbia