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Using queer critical literacies in pre-service teacher education to foster critical allyship
Abstract
The queer critical literacies (QCL) approach to education aims to meaningfully engage with gender and sexuality diversity in educational settings. This article reflects on an English course for final-year Bachelor of Education students at a South African university. In the course, the QCL framework was introduced and texts with diverse gender and sexual identities were prescribed for class discussion and assessment topics. Data were collected from students’ final essay assessments for the course and relevant extracts from selected essays were analysed through thematic content analysis. The findings indicate that the purposeful inclusion of QCL in teacher education courses can enable students to reflect deeply on how they engage with gender and sexuality diversity in their teaching, and the QCL approach can promote positions of critical allyship in pre-service teachers which can make schools more inclusive spaces. However, the data revealed limitations in students’ understandings of diverse gender identities, including the conflation of transgender identities with same-sex sexualities.
Background
Teachers’ support for addressing cisgenderism and cisnormative cultures in schools is necessary to support students’ freedom to express gender in expansive ways and to embrace trans identities. However, few questions are asked about how primary school teachers grapple with trans identities in South Africa.
Purpose
The article fills this gap by focusing on how school teachers negotiate their understandings of gender identity and gender expression by showing their capacities and potential in creating a trans-affirmative climate in primary school.
Participants
Participants were 30 self-identified heterosexual primary school teachers of diverse race and class backgrounds who were located in one primary school in South Africa.
Research Design
This qualitative study employed in-depth face-to-face and telephone-based semi-structured individual interviews. The article draws from new feminist materialist approaches to “assemblages” and decolonial thinking to consider how participants negotiated gender expectations.
Findings
Trans identity is conflated with being gay and misrecognized through a reliance on historically produced religious and cultural norms that are part of the colonial and apartheid legacies in South Africa. While the trans assemblage shows potential to challenge and question the sex-gender conflation, historical legacies, suffused with cis-heteronormative logics, lead to a fundamental misrecognition and erasure of trans as a sign of being gay.
Conclusions/Recommendations
The utility of a decolonial trans assemblage is evident in examining how epistemic erasure occurs through historical mechanisms, while denaturalizing the reliance on binary gendered systems and Western knowledge. If primary schools are to support gender-expansive ways of being, addressing how historical processes, cisgenderism, and cisnormative cultures permeate teachers’ understanding of gender remains vital work.
Shortlisted for the 2023 British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Book Prize
This book combines teaching-informed research studies and research-informed teaching accounts which explore English language education that engages with gender and sexual diversity. Informed by critical theories, critical literacy, post-structuralism, queer theory, and indigeneity/(de)coloniality, the critical perspectives in this volume consider gender and sexuality as dimensions of human life and aim to promote sexual, gender, emotional and relational wellbeing together with the construction of cultural horizons and citizenship. The chapters are organised around three interdependent areas of inquiry: 1) how educators design pedagogies and curriculums around gender diversity, 2) how students and teachers navigate issues of gender diversity in practice, and 3) how issues of gender diversity are and aren't addressed in the materials for teaching and learning English.
The contributors are all teacher educators-researchers and therefore have vast experience in enacting, implementing, designing, and examining the field of English language teacher education from/for the classroom with a gender perspective in diverse settings, with chapters come from Argentina, Bangladesh, Canada, Germany, Norway, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK and Uruguay.
Background: Given the high levels of homophobia that exist in South Africa, including in its schools and universities, it is imperative that university lecturers develop integrated and transdisciplinary curriculums to educate pre-service teachers about sexuality and to empower them to incorporate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI)-inclusive resources into their own classrooms.
Aim: This study aimed to contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning by reflecting on how English literary studies can contribute to sexuality education.
Setting: The context for this study is a specific undergraduate English module that forms part of the foundation phase and intermediate phase teacher education curriculums at the University of Johannesburg.
Methods: This study is a self-reflective analysis of how the methodology of close reading, which is central to English literary studies, can be used to support sexuality education.
Results: Despite the prevalence of homophobia in South African society, when undergraduate students in this English module (n = 356) were asked to write an essay about the representation of same-sex sexuality in a short animated film, none of them made homophobic comments.
Conclusion: Paying particular attention to the analytical methodology of close reading, the author argues that a narrow focus on the storytelling techniques used within a narrative text – in a way that deliberately excludes students’ personal opinions about same-sex sexualities – offers a powerful way of facilitating a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of homophobia and heteronormativity.
(A)gender and (a)sexual diversity are often viewed as taboo and controversial topics in education, sparking resistance from some teachers, students, and communities to engage with these important topics. Additionally, critical approaches to teaching these topics in schools and universities are still emerging, with many educators feeling uncertain of how to frame discussions and lessons, especially in contexts of widespread discrimination against gender and sexual minorities. In this chapter, we build on a tradition of critical literacies and queer theory to develop a conceptual framework for queer critical literacies (QCL) as an approach to teaching topics of (a)gender and (a)sexual diversity. We review how various educators have approached QCL in their classrooms by guiding their students to practise what we identify as five forms of questioning, namely questioning representation, reading practices, the policing of (a)gender and (a)sexuality, knowledge systems, and self. Finally, we offer a pedagogical tool for doing QCL that can assist educators in their practice. The questions we offer allow educators and students to dialogically do the work of identification, deconstruction, disruption, and transformation in contextually relevant ways. Our framework of QCL queers the reading of texts and bodies, foregrounds queer identities and non-normative gender expression, and challenges heterosexism, patriarchy, and cisnormativity in language, texts, institutions, and everyday practices.
There is a critical need for sex, sexuality and relationships education to be LGBTQI inclusive. Numerous studies, internationally and in South Africa, highlight this need but what constitutes an inclusive curriculum has not been sufficiently addressed. This paper seeks to advance this conversation by imagining a curriculum beyond compulsory heterosexuality and considers what knowledges and practices are necessary for the South African context. To do this, the authors consider the corpus of research about how sexualities are characterized in schooling generally and in the teaching of sexuality education specifically. Using the theoretical tools offered by Freire and hooks on critical consciousness, three arguments are made. First, the authors argue for the theoretical and empirical contributions of the sociology of gender and sexualities which are social constructions informed by history, social relations and power. Second, there is a need for a curriculum to recognize the intersectionality of learners and how identity knowledges shape the way that youth sexualities are understood and experienced. Finally, the teaching and learning of an LGBTQI inclusive curriculum will steer away from moralistic and didactic instruction in favor of more participatory pedagogies that acknowledge young people as agents and legitimate sexual beings.
Introduction
Relationships and sexuality education (RSE) for young people in Australia and elsewhere is a contentious topic. While focus has been on sexting practices, curriculum and policy and teachers and schools, few studies have examined how discourses of silencing are reflected in what young people want from their RSE.
Methods
Using thematic analysis on 1258 open-ended comments from a 2018 survey of young people and sexual health and a theoretical framework of ‘Thick Desire,’ this paper explores what students in Australia desire from a RSE program and how they have come to understand those desires.
Results
This analysis reveals that young people in Australia understand and are articulate about the gaps in their RSE. Young people are negotiating a ‘silencing’ of knowledge and education around several important factors and are drawing from broader social, cultural and political influences that shape their experiences. Specifically, young people actively desire a RSE that includes more in-depth information about sexually transmissible infections (STIs) and sexual health issues, programs that are inclusive of diverse genders and sexualities, RSE that is delivered by qualified providers and programs that include discussions concerning relationships, consent and pleasure.
Social and Policy Implications
The findings of this study suggest several important policy recommendations to improve RSE education, particularly focusing on the sexual rights of young people, the lack of consistency and clarity in existing RSE national policy and the impact that silencing can have on young people’s knowledge and safety in engaging in sexual activity.
The recent Must Fall movements shone a light on how South African universities are exclusionary spaces in many respects. In addition to the focus on racial, financial, and epistemological exclusions, the movements also highlighted how gender and sexual minorities are marginalised in university curricula and spaces. In the wake of these movements, I taught a range of courses dealing with gender and sexuality to pre-service teachers at a South African university. Using an autoethnographic approach, I recount some of the challenges I faced in teaching subject matter that many South Africans consider controversial. Students often relied on simplistic discourses of culture and religion to voice resistance to my courses and to "disrupt" my classes, while the subject matter simultaneously disrupted their deeply held concepts of identity. These moments of disruption from students, while largely intended as resistance, offered considerable pedagogical value, especially when viewed through the lens of critical pedagogy that informs my teaching approach. In this article, I use autoethnographic reflections to describe some of these moments of mutual disruption. I examine how the discussions with students have shifted after the Must Fall movements, linking the philosophy and some of the events of the movements to the ways that students are engaging differently. I argue that these pre-service teachers also hold the potential to disrupt discourses of queerphobia, gender-based violence and HIV in the South African school system. Additionally, I contend that gender and sexuality diversity deserve greater focus in teacher education in order to create critical thinking spaces that can foster reflective capacities in teachers around how they relate to learners who are gender and sexual minorities.
The Life Orientation (LO) learning area provides the primary vehicle for the delivery of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information in South African schools. The efficacy and uptake of the LO agenda is understood to rest with the individual educator facilitating this learning area, as located within a particular schooling environment and broader socio-cultural systems. This paper examines the perspectives of education staff responsible for LO lesson delivery, their competencies in understanding the varied challenges and contextual realities of this position as well as their abilities to impact learner engagement. Data was collected from secondary school contexts across three different provinces in South Africa, including high performing and low performing districts and across different economic profiles. Thematic content from educator interviews were enriched with classroom observations and structured questions on educator qualifications, training experiences, and personal orientations. The success of LO lessons and self-efficacy of learners are sourced in a combination of certain cognitive, behavioural and environmental factors. Didactic teaching methodologies and prescriptive approaches to potentially sensitive LO content are potential barriers to learner development as self- efficacious beings. Our findings suggest that LO educators would benefit from further professional and personal development to ensure the realisation of the sexuality education objectives.
John Trengove’s film Inxeba (The Wound) was met with public outcry as it represented the sacred tradition of ulwaluko (“initiation”). The film was effectively banned in mainstream South African cinemas following a ruling by the Film and Publication Board (FPB) to assign a rating of X18 to the film. Many rights groups and activists were troubled by the FPB’s decision and argued that the outcry against the film was due to homophobic reactions to the representation of same-sex sexualities within hypermasculine Xhosa spaces. However, this paper argues for a more nuanced reading of the protests against the film, taking into account the symbolic aggression that the act of “truth-telling” in the film seemed to enact on traditional Xhosa people. I analyse the controversy by using ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis as it relates to film study. I explore the film itself as analogous to Lacan’s concept of the mirror, creating tension between subject (in this case, traditional South Africans) and the image, or the representation of black individuals and cultural practices in the film. Additionally, I explore the radical alterity of the Other in the film, the seat of revulsion, threat and hostility, represented simultaneously by the queer characters and at times by constructs and images of whiteness, the whiteness of the director of the film and the whiteness represented in the text which is seen as threatening to Xhosa culture and values. I argue that the reactions to the film speak to deep psychic tensions in South Africa in terms of culture, sexuality and representation, and I explore how the controversy constitutes a pivotal moment in rethinking and reconfiguring South African queer representations, particularly concerning black subjects.
This study explores sexuality education teachers' identities and examines the ways in which teachers' experiences mediate their agency and resistance in classrooms. Using grounded theory methodology, the study explores the identities and experiences of school-based sexuality education teachers throughout the United States. Findings suggest that the teachers rely on a unique sense of identity in order to justify challenging the regulatory and policy limitations to their curricula. The study illustrates how agency is mediated by individual social location and experience.
Drawing on Rich’s [Rich, A. 2004. “Reflections on ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality.’.” Journal of Women's History 16: 9–11; Rich, A. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5: 631–660] conceptualization of heterosexuality as an institutionalized and compulsory system that supports gender and sexuality inequality, this paper answers the following questions – how do queer youth take up, question and say what they need from sexuality education. The study is based on in-depth interviews with 19 queer learners, aged between 16 and 19 years and living and schooling in the Free State Province, South Africa. This paper contends that what queer youth say need from sexuality education is a curriculum that – recognizes sexuality diversity; is without assumptions about their sexual experience or lack of it and does not focus solely on associating non-normative sexualities with issues of disease, deviance and danger. The findings highlight the inescapable power of compulsory heterosexuality and its perilousness and argue for a more defined and inclusive sexuality education curricula framework.
On 25 February 2016, I searched for the phrases ‘Homophobia in South Africa’, ‘Transphobia in South Africa’, ‘Gender violence in South Africa’ and ‘Gender diversity in South Africa’ on Google. I found that 712,000 results appeared for homophobia in South Africa, 119,000 for transphobia, 3,640,000 for gender violence and 5,470,000 for gender diversity. In each case, there was a mix of search results: from online articles and web posts, to blogs and scholarly work. While I did not go through the millions of results individually, their headlines suggested a rather bleak picture of South Africa in relation to issues of sex, gender and sexuality. Terms such as ‘violence’, ‘inequality’, ‘corrective rape’, ‘silence’ and ‘injustice’ dominate the pages. From patriarchy to heterosexism, South Africa seems flooded with separatist discourses that use both violence and silence to maintain hegemonic norms. © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Elizabeth Walton and Ruksana Osman, individual chapters, the contributors.
In this book, Francis highlights the tension between inclusion and sexual orientation, using this tension as an entry to explore how LGB youth experience schooling. Drawing on research with teachers and LGB youth, this book troubles the teaching and learning of sexuality diversity and, by doing so, provides a critical exploration and analysis of how curriculum, pedagogy, and policy reproduces compulsory heterosexuality in schools. The book makes visible the challenges of teaching sexuality diversity in South African schools while highlighting its potential for rethinking conceptions of the social and cultural representations thereof. Francis links questions of policy and practice to wider issues of society, sexuality, social justice and highlights its implications for teaching and learning. The author encourages policymakers, teachers, and scholars of sexualities and education to develop further questions and informed action to challenge heteronormativity and heterosexism.
Critical discourse analysis In recent decades critical discourse analysis (CDA) has become a well-established field in the social sciences. However, in contrast with some branches of linguistics, CDA is not a discrete academic discipline with a relatively fixed set of research methods. Instead, we might best see CDA as a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement, subsuming a variety of approaches, each with different theoretical models, research methods and agenda. What unites them is a shared interest in the semiotic dimensions of power, injustice, abuse, and political-economic or cultural change in society. CDA is distinctive in a) its view of the relationship between language and society, and b) its critical approach to methodology. Let us take these in turn by first exploring the notions of ‘discourse’ and ‘critical’. The term ‘discourse’ is used in various ways across the social sciences and within the field of CDA. In the most abstract sense, ‘discourse’ ...
In the era of " big data, " the methodological technique of content analysis can be the most powerful tool in the researcher's kit. Content analysis is versatile enough to apply to textual, visual, and audio data. Given the massive explosion in permanent, archived linguistic, photographic, video, and audio data arising from the proliferation of technology, the technique of content analysis appears to be on the verge of a renaissance. In this essay, I discuss cutting-edge examples of how content analysis is being applied or might be applied to the study of areas as diverse as education, criminology, and social intelligence.
Abstract While South Africa is one of the most progressive countries in the world in terms of constitutional and legislative rights for LGBT individuals, education is one of many social arenas where these ideals are not carried out. Interviews with 25 practicing teachers revealed very little description of practice, but widely divergent understandings around sexual diversity that drew upon various authoritative discourses, including religious teachings, educational policy, science, and the powerful Human Rights framework of the South African constitution. Implications for teacher education include directly engaging with these discourses and providing training, teaching materials and practical guidelines based on existing policy.
This paper reports on research with 11 high school teachers in Durban and draws on positioning theory to raise important questions on the teaching of issues relating to homosexuality and bisexuality within sexuality education. Using data collected from classroom observations and in-depth interviews, it demonstrates that issues related to sexual diversity were in most cases ignored or avoided by teachers and when teachers did include aspects of homosexuality, they took up positions that endorsed the idea of 'compulsory heterosexuality'. I conclude by paying attention to ways we can deepen the teaching of homosexual and bisexual issues.
While LGBT*IAGCQM students feel safer at school than ever before, the author advocates for a queer literacy framework to facilitate a new reading and legitimacy of (a)gender and (a)sexuality in the self and others.
Drawing from a yearlong literacy ethnography conducted at a high school in a Midwestern U.S. city, this article extends queer literacies and queer pedagogies scholarship by exploring the frictions and resonances between strategies of inclusion and queering. While inclusion strategies emphasize using expanded representations of sexuality and gender, such as of LGBTQ+ life, queering approaches often trouble inclusion through, for instance, questioning normativities and epistemologies and embracing partiality, uncertainty, and crisis in learning. To unpack interconnections between inclusion and queering, I present an ethnographic case of a lesson in a sophomore humanities course, focusing on the teacherly moves of an English language arts educator leading an instructional conversation about a nonfiction article describing intersections among sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class with respect to food insecurity. Engaging Ahmed's (2006) queer theorization of orientations, I develop the heuristic of literacy (dis)orientations to describe the layered mixture of classroom literacy performances challenging and reifying oppressive values regarding intersections among sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class. The teacher disoriented students away from (homo)normativities regarding knowledge of LGBTQ+ communities and reoriented them toward and around nuanced, intersectional understandings of queer and trans life. However, these anti‐oppressive possibilities were limited by orientations around a banking model of education and binaries. This ethnographic case suggests that educators sanctioning literacy orientations toward intersectional LGBTQ+‐inclusive curriculum presents possibilities for liberatory social change insofar as they disorient students away from education‐as‐banking and epistemological binaries and reorient them around alternative ways of knowing, specifically intersectionality as a queering epistemology.
Successive generations of First Nation scholars have critiqued the ongoing institutional and disciplinary complicity of Higher Education to support settler colonialism. These critiques extend to include Cultural Studies, despite the field’s inter (anti)disciplinary efforts to expose power and inequality in social relations, dominant institutions, popular culture, and everyday life. As part of the university-machine, Cultural Studies is disconnected from the inherently pedagogical experiences and knowledge of Culture and Country for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. With an emphasis on praxis, we critique three autoethnographic examples of interactions between Indigenous agents and the settler colonial academe as a call to mobilize Cultural Studies literacies as a pedagogy of critical allyship to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars. Cultural Studies as critical allyship pedagogy supports non-Indigenous agents to conduct rigorous critique of internalized and institutional settler colonial hegemony, identifying absences and erasures of Indigenous agency, autonomy, and self-determination. These gaps and silences are not for allies – or Cultural Studies – to fill; rather the project is to leverage Cultural Studies methodologies to cede epistemological space in the academe to Indigenous ways of knowing and being without intervention, assimilation, or academic critique.
Since the 1990s, there have been increasing calls to “queer” curricula in order to challenge gender and sexuality norms. In this article, I develop a model of queer literacies that understands queer to encompass anti-normative ways of being and recognizes the agentic potential of queer objects to disorient individuals and spaces. I challenge educators to become sponsors of queer literacies in order to disrupt a range of normative ideologies and open up future possibilities in which difference is acknowledged and accepted. I conclude the article by illustrating how a queer object, Shaun Tan's picture book Cicada (2018), might be read using a queer literacies approach to promote critical literacy, social justice, and well-being.
Performative allyship refers to someone from a nonmarginalized group professing support and solidarity with a marginalized group, but in a way that is not helpful. Worse yet, the allyship is done in a way that may actually be harmful to “the cause.” The “ally” is motivated by some type of reward. On social media, that reward is a virtual pat on the back for being a “good person” or for being “on the right side” of a cause, or “on the right side of history.” It is entirely possible to be opposed to racism or anti-Semitism while at the same time feeling free to say nothing. This is preferable to simply repeating what you’re being compelled to say. Either be a true ally, or be comfortable being silent.
This article reviews the developing literature on anti-oppressive education (i.e., education that works against various forms of oppression) by summarizing and critiquing the four primary approaches that educational researchers have taken in conceptualizing (1) the nature of oppression and (2) the curricula, pedagogies, and policies needed to bring about change. These four approaches to anti-oppressive education are Education for the Other, Education About the Other, Education that Is Critical of Privileging and Othering, and Education that Changes Students and Society. Engaging in anti-oppressive education requires not only. using an amalgam of these four approaches. In order to address the multiplicity and situatedness of oppression and the complexities of teaching and learning educators also constantly need to "look beyond" the field of educational research to explore the possibilities of theories that remain marginalized, including post-structuralist and psychoanalytic perspectives. This article concludes with implications for future research.
Costs of Coming Out Can Be High for SA's LGBT Community. Institute of Race Relations
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