No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Religiosity
Abstract
This chapter explores “religiosity” as a critical concept for advancing the dialogue about queer studies and education for the twenty-first century. Religiosity, or an inappropriate devotion to the rituals and traditions of a religion, is particularly problematic for sexual and gender minorities in publicly funded faith-based schools where homophobic and transphobic doctrines of the faith are more commonly enforced than other doctrines. The plight of sexual and gender minority groups in Canadian faith-based schools is a neglected research topic due to Canadians’ deep respect for the fundamental freedom of religion and a corresponding prevailing belief that religiously inspired discriminatory practices occurring in publicly funded schools are a normal part of religious freedom that should continue to go unchallenged. The author calls upon anti-oppression education researchers to overcome their reluctance to include religious schools in their research.
... She noted how most staff were appreciative of the training and planned to adjust their practice moving forward (Taylor et al., 2016), but there was one teacher who dismissed and resisted the content. She also outlined how, as with Catholic education (Callaghan, 2016b), religiosity can also impede GSRM students' right to equitable learning environments in public secular schools. Although, unlike publicly-funded Catholic education, this is more of a personal rather than institutional issue in public secular schools. ...
... Here, Morgan communicated that religiosity impacted students' ability to form a GSA (Callaghan, 2016b). As was the case in Callaghan's (2016a) study, the prior principal steered students away from sexuality content and insisted that they focus on the broader goal of acceptance and inclusion a more palatable endeavor in a Catholic educational context. ...
... As opposed to other acronyms, the name, 'GSA,' is a highly recognizable and meaningful brand in North American schools, as Grace and Wells (2015) Callaghan, 2014a). More than apprehension, the administrator exercised power to uphold Catholicity (Callaghan, 2016b) and contain sexual and gender diversity within a broader façade of social justice. ...
This study provides an in-depth examination of the educative and activist function of GSAs in two public secular and two public Catholic Ontario secondary schools. Queer theory, as elaborated by Foucault (1978), Sedgwick (1990/2008), Butler (1990, 1993a/b/c), Warner (1991), and Britzman (1995), provides a foundation for critiquing the heteronormative underpinnings of schooling, and the trans-informed insights of Namaste (2000), Stryker (2006), Serano (2007/2016, 2013), Malatino (2015), and Connell (2009) offers a lens to scrutinize cisnormative infrastructure, pedagogy, and practice as they pertain to the role and educative function of GSAs in selected Ontario schools. To generate knowledge on the particularities of the four GSAs (Patton, 2002), a multi-sited case study approach was undertaken (Patton, 2002; Stake, 2005). Data were gathered by completing semi-structured interviews with 14 youth and five educators across the school sites, observing and participating in GSA meetings, collecting semi-structured diaries from 13 youth, and analyzing club-related visual materials - all of which were made sense of by employing queer and trans-informed theoretical perspectives. There was a concerted effort to speak with trans and gender diverse GSA members in order to (de)subjugate their embodied knowledges and understandings (Stryker, 2006), authorize their voices (Cook-Sather, 2002, 2006), and document their agency in schooling by way of their club-inspired education and activism (see Elliott, 2015, Schindel, 2005, 2008). Three prominent themes emerged within the data: 1: each GSA was a student-driven democratizing space that enabled youth to explore and circulate anti-hetero/cisnormative discourses (Fraser, 1990); 2) all GSAs served as a proxy in the absence of an ongoing systemic commitment to queer and trans-informed education; and 3) pastoral care and its regulatory moral authority within Catholic education impeded GSA development and functioning (Martino, 2014). The implications of the study are outlined in terms of the need for systemic support for anti-heteronormative and anti-cisnormative education so that the burden and responsibility for this education does not just fall on the shoulders of GSA members and gender and sexual minority youth in particular.
Heteronormativity, gender bias, and whitewashed notions of education threaten queer identities in K–12 educational spaces, specifically queer women educators of color seeking leadership roles within the public school system. The understanding of race, gender, and sexuality in K–12 education spaces are each worthwhile as focal points of educational research. However, the intersection between race, gender, and sexuality requires consideration. Prior scholarly research focuses on educators of color, female educators, and LGBTQ+ educators, not on the intersection of these identities. The lived experiences of educators who identify as queer women of color lack attention. Hence, this autoethnography focuses on the maze of challenges and opportunities I experienced while navigating elementary educational spaces in a US Texas/Mexico borderland city as a queer Latinx woman of color. I accomplish this by reflecting upon, and analyzing, my (re)memberings and previous experiences in my journey from K–8 teacher to K–8 administrator. Finally, I provide recommendations to inform both scholars and practitioners.
This essay shares findings from an exhaustive review of the English-language published scholarship on integrating gender and sexual diversity in teacher education (GSDTE) since 1982. The 158 sources substantiate a largely USA-based field with an array of studied pedagogies and a citational reliance on statistics that reveal the school-sited suffering of gender and sexual minority youth. Implications for the field are shared, including: critical questions about the field's construction, objects and beneficiaries; the importance of citing GSDTE and teacher education research and not only youth outcome research; and preparing teachers for gender and sexual diversities that are presently unimaginable.
This article seeks to chart a course through the contested areas of gender and sexual orientation in hopes of establishing a theoretical framework and an agenda for much needed future research. In building this article, the author draws from two research traditions, particularly in the areas of history and law. Her stance is that of a critical policy scholar, that is, drawing on neo-Marxist theory generally and Queer Legal Theory specifically. Public schools are governmental entities ruled by laws, regulations, and policies. The people who teach, lead, study, play, and otherwise live within a public school's walls must conform to these dictates or face various legal sanctions including expulsion and job termination. These legal mandates are established through political processes that include court decisions at the state and federal levels. Therefore, legal theories can help analyze and explicate the basic structures that shape daily educational practices. In the areas of gender, sexual orientation, and a possible new politics of education, Queer Legal Theory can be particularly insightful.
This paper examines the mutually-reinforcing problems of sexism and heterosexism, and the actions that may be taken by social educators to ameliorate such injustices. Various approaches to anti-heterosexism education are organized in relation to the three dimensions of handling social conflict: intervention procedures (in particular the management of sexual and heterosexist harassment), teaching knowledge and skills (in particular skills for recognizing the role of gender and sexuality in culture and for managing controversy), and restructuring patterns of relationship (in particular reducing the climate of heteronormativity and status competition that exacerbate harassment and exclusion). (Contains 1 diagram.)
Make sure your Catholic school's LGBT students are getting the support they need.
Research on religiosity and homophobic prejudice has typically employed unidimensional measures of antigay prejudice that measure homophobia as a single collective set of attitudes. To better understand the religiosity-homophobia relationship, the study reported here examined the relations of authoritarianism and several measures of religiosity to a multidimensional measure of homophobia that assess respondents' social contact apprehension, morality beliefs, civil rights attitudes, and stereotypic beliefs regarding gay men and lesbians. A canonical correlation analysis on 443 heterosexual undergraduates indicated that the religiosity-homophobia relationship was influenced by the component of homophobia assessed. The results reported here suggest that the relationship between religiosity and homophobia may be more complex than previous research with unidimensional measures indicates.
The purpose of this article is to provide an historical overview of changing perspectives in education practice and literature on addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) issues in public K-12 schools. This article describes how the presentation and analysis of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues in the past 80 years have evolved into one of the primary points of contention in the battle over what values related to sexuality and gender schools should reflect. Three broad historical eras during which dominant conceptualizations of LGBT issues in education reflect important shifts in perspective are outlined: (1) Homosexual Educators as a Threat to Children (1920-1979), (2) Identification of Lesbian and Gay Youth as a Population At Risk (1980-1989), and (3) Focus on Schools as a Risk Environment for LGB Youth (1990-2002). The article concludes with a brief description of future directions that research and educational policy on LGBT issues in schools might take to build on the foundation of events from 1990-2002.
An 18-month study investigating the implementation of a Canadian anti-homophobia school policy found that such policies need to address homophobic ideas, institutional forms of homophobia and heterosexism, and individual expressions of homophobia. Teacher development is identical as an area in which Canadian policy implementation can be improved. More resources are needed to support the complex negotiations that educators must undertake when their professional and personal commitments to equity and human rights education collide with their own and others' personal and community religious beliefs about homosexuality.
This paper draws on research into male teachers in one single sex high school in the Australian context to highlight how issues of masculinity impact on their pedagogical practices and relationships with boys. The study is situated within the broader international field of research on male teachers, masculinities and schooling in Australia, the UK and the US and provides further knowledge about the gendered dimensions of male teachers’ pedagogical practices in secondary schools. The authors argue for the urgent need to interrogate the impact of masculinities in male teachers’ lives at school, given the call for more male role models to ameliorate the supposed feminizing and emasculating influences of schools on boys’ lives. A particular Foucauldian perspective, which draws on surveillance and its key role in practices of gender subjectification, is used to provide insight into how two male teachers learn to police their masculinities and to fashion pedagogical practices under the normalizing gaze of their male students.
The construct of homophobia and the psychometric properties of instruments purporting to measure homophobia are critically evaluated. The history of the term and its various definitions are briefly reviewed. We conclude that existing measures of homophobia have been inadequately psychometrically evaluated and therefore it is not clear whether currently this construct can be accurately measured. It is also concluded that the construct of homophobia, as it is usually used, makes an illegitimately pejorative evaluation of certain open and debatable value positions, much like the former disease construct of homosexuality. Finally, proposals for theory development and construct definition in the domain of reactions to homosexuals and homosexuality are provided.
Photocopy. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (p. 256-268).
This study explored the relationship between homophobia and several personality traits (empathy, religiosity, and coping style) in the context of respondents' gender and age. The sample consisted of 714 college students who responded to the Homophobia Attitude Scale (HAS) and personality trait scales. Results revealed that women endorsed fewer homophobic attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors than men and that age was negatively correlated with homophobia. Empathic concern and perspective taking were significantly correlated with lower overall homophobic attitudes, less affect discomfort in regard to gays, and less likelihood to abridge the human rights of gays. Religiosity was significantly correlated with more biased beliefs about the origins of homophobia, greater affective discomfort around gays, less endorsement of human rights for gays, and greater homophobia. Use of denial and isolation as coping styles were positively related to homophobia and use of turning against style was negatively correlated.
Analyzing the curriculum
- G J Posner
- GJ Posner
Faith-based schools under scrutiny: Province to review enforcement of human rights. The Calgary Herald
- M Mcclure
Queering straight teachers: Discourse and identity in education
- N M Rodriguez
- Pinar
Catholic jobs lost over lgbt issues on the rise
- B Shine
The no-nonsense guide to sexual diversity
- V Baird
Talking equity Halifax: Fernwood
- D Khayatt
The null curriculum: Its theoretical basis and practical implications
- D J Flinders
- N Noddings
- S J Thornton
- DJ Flinders