In the news, still on the margins: LGBTQ, Indigenous, and environmental inclusion efforts in education

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Educational scholars - cognizant of the complex relationships among the nature of learning, identity, and social relations in pedagogical contexts - have long advocated for an inclusive approach to education that reflects the diversity of student experiences. As educators make efforts to identify and include students on the margins of schools and classrooms, their efforts have also increasingly made their way into mainstream political discourse. The political debates about ethnic studies, African American/Black studies, queer studies, environment and food studies, and Indigenous studies being taught in school gain more political attention than the actual ethnically diverse, queer, rural, and Indigenous students that these fields aim to serve. Famously, the State of Florida has been at the center of a sweeping set of attacks on AP African American Studies, and what is popularly referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Yet, students that identify as queer or Black in classrooms across Florida are not the considerations of this debate - it is merely a debate on the ideas of queerness and Blackness. This panel asks: How do ideas about students and their identities gain more attention in political discourse than the students themselves do in classrooms? This reveals a remarkable gap between the theatrical discourse about marginalized students and the ongoing marginalization of students themselves. We offer some perspectives from some of these fields, and from ‘theories in the flesh,’ as Gloria Anzaldua puts it, in order to understand this gap comparatively and reflect on possible solutions. We offer three empirical studies: one from queer studies, another from environmental studies, and lastly another from Indigenous studies, where ideas about student identity are being carefully examined with regard to the actual experiences of students themselves.

This is not a new phenomenon; during the era of Brown v. Board of Education, a few efforts to desegregate schools gained more political attention than the many students of color in underfunded classrooms. Fast forward into the 2020s, debates about gender, sports, and bathroom use in Florida and North Carolina appear to gain more political theater than the actual queer and transgender students in classrooms. Despite political candidates on the right and on the left making these issues part of their platform and political agenda, the students themselves remain confined to a small corner of the metaphorical classroom, their needs being largely ignored.

The first qualitative study in the panel “Impressions from Scotland: Weighing Pedagogical Approaches for LGBTQ-Inclusive Education” asks how the United States might learn from a particularly successful LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum implemented in Scotland. Analyzing this issue from reformist and anti-oppressive lenses offers us suggestions on two possible paths forward, and turns our attention to the voices of LGBTQ students and educators gathered empirically in the field rather than the dramaturgical and reactionary discourse of electoral politics.

Following a similar goal, the second study in the panel “Beyond inclusion: Walking in the forest as a liberatory pedagogical practice” focuses on inclusion as the political struggle of the Siddi community, an Afrodescendent Indigenous community in India. Despite much media attention and political fanfare about an Afro-Indigenous community in India, Siddis have been subject to land grabs and the privatization of their forests in the name of educational development. This micro-ethnographic study follows them on their forest walks, only now as encroachers on their own land, to understand how they continue to story the land regardless of legal status, revealing how communities can continue to resist efforts to marginalize and erase them simply by maintaining their cultural practices and relationships to their environment.

Lastly, “Inclusion, Food, and Relationality” considers the nature-culture gap and proposes that the discourse surrounding climate change education gains more political attention than the actual students and educators working to address disconnections between themselves and their environment. This qualitative study collects student-produced data from a classroom-based unit about alternative sources of food through foraging and backyard harvesting, and argues that the inclusion efforts of students cannot view students merely as individuals, but as connected to wider socio-ecological systems. It empirically investigates how food can be used as a pedagogical tool to reimagine relationality between humans and nature, and that inclusion efforts can be extended to more-than-humans by reshaping our relationship to food.

Sub Unit

• Inclusive Education SIG

Organizer

• Arjun Krishna, University of California Los Angeles

Chair

• Arjun Krishna, University of California Los Angeles

Individual Presentations

• Comparing efforts for LGBTQ-inclusive education in schools: Reformist vs. Anti-Oppressive approaches in the United States and Scotland - Darek Ciszek, UCLA

• Beyond inclusion: Walking in the forest as a liberatory pedagogical practice - Arjun Krishna, University of California Los Angeles

• Food, relationality, and the climate: Implications for agency and inclusion - Michaela Ensweiler, UCLA