Combating Gender and Sexuality Norms Through Queer Contemplative Pedagogy

From the AERA Online Paper Repository http://www.aera.net/repository Paper Title Combating Gender and Sexuality Norms Through Queer Contemplative Pedagogy Author(s) Stephanie Anne Shelton, The University of Alabama Session Title Diverse Perspectives on Social Justice Inquiry in Education and Psychology Session Type Paper Presentation Date 4/7/2019 Presentation Location Toronto, Canada Descriptors Curriculum in Classroom, Gay/Lesbian Studies, Gender Studies Methodology Qualitative Unit Division C - Learning and Instruction DOI https://doi.org/10.3102/1440369 Each presenter retains copyright on the full-text paper. Repository users should follow legal and ethical practices in their use of repository material; permission to reuse material must be sought from the presenter, who owns copyright. Users should be aware of the AERA Code of Ethics. Citation of a paper in the repository should take the following form: [Authors.] ([Year, Date of Presentation]). [Paper Title.] Paper presented at the [Year] annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Retrieved [Retrieval Date], from the AERA Online Paper Repository. Combatting Gender and Sexuality Norms Through Queer Contemplative Pedagogy Objectives/Purpose U.S. schools are highly politicized settings, reflecting the values of myriad stakeholders who shape what is permissible and impossible within educational contexts. The influences that inform schooling are inextricably linked with sexuality and gender. Jen Gilbert (2014) wrote, “There can be no thought of education without the propulsive charge of sexuality enabling and disturbing the work of teaching” (pp. xiv-xv). One of the groups most directly affected by schools’ investments in and rejections of sexuality and gender are those who fall outside normative enactments and understandings of those two categories. The terminology most often used and that will be applied in this paper are both the acronym LGBTQ and the term “queer,” which refer broadly to not only lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) students, but to any students who self-identify as members of the LGBTQ community. In reference to this population, a recent survey of 7,800 U.S. high school and middle school students found that despite growing national efforts to address LGBTQ bullying and harassment, over 80% of LGBTQ-identifying students reported experiencing some form of harassment linked to sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender expression (GLSEN, 2016). Given the stakes, the ways that school spaces address issues of gender and sexuality matter very much. In many school buildings, there are a variety of resources intended to support LGBTQ students, including school-based organizations such as Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) and “Safe Spaces” (e.g., Lipkin, 2004; Pascoe, 2012). However, perhaps the most substantial interventions are curriculum-based efforts that explicitly integrate conversations on gender and sexuality into classrooms (Blackburn, 2014; GLSEN, 2016). A steadily growing body of research on contemplative practices in education has demonstrated the value of contemplative pedagogies in education. However, despite contemplative education’s significance, including within social justice education, there have been no discussions that have explicitly adopted contemplative education in relation to queer topics. This paper focuses on one participant, a high school teacher, and her efforts to adopt a contemplative queer pedagogy, specifically in relation to students’ meditations and writing. The guiding research questions were, How does contemplative writing support a queer pedagogy? How does contemplative writing challenge gender and sexuality norms? Over the course of the study, “Eleanor” and I interacted on a daily basis over the course of a four-week secondary summer program. My role as a researcher provided me access to her classroom on a near-daily basis over the course of the entirety of a four-week experience. As I observed her teaching, I noted the ways that she and her students shared a determination to examine the ways that their positionalities, assumptions, and writings informed, enforced, or challenged those norms. Conceptual Framework My conceptual framework, which informed my data analysis and findings, was directly based on the concepts and methods that informed participant Eleanor’s pedagogy. Eleanor was informed by both Britzman’s notions of “queer pedagogy” (1998) and a “contemplative pedagogy” that combined notions of meditation and “contemplative writing” practices. The classroom strategies aimed to support students’ and Eleanor’s interrogations of normative gender and sexualities in class activities. Queer Pedagogy Queer pedagogy is based on key concepts found within queer theory. Britzman adopted elements of queer theory to argue for a “queer pedagogy” (1998, p. 225). Most essential to this paper was Britzman’s concept of “alterity” (p. 225). Britzman insists that students “begin with an acknowledgement of difference as the grounds of identity” (p. 225) and consider what elements of their readings, writings, and discussions make them uncomfortable and/or uncertain. Informed by Britzman’s concepts, Eleanor asked her students to actively reflect on moments/sources of discomfort and elements of difference. She pushed students to consider how their previous readings and discussions might have been based on personal over-identifications, and challenged them to disengage from those understandings in order to find queer spaces that break “selfknowledge from itself” (p. 225). Contemplative Pedagogy Following her extensive reading on mindfulness in teaching, Eleanor selected Ledoux’s (1998) discussions on meditation practices in his philosophy classes and Kahane’s (2014) implementations of social justice-based contemplative writing to inform her practice. When Eleanor and her students meditated, sometimes with a prompt or text in mind, the goal was “training the mind to focus in a steady and non-judging way on the different phases of human experience [….], paying clear, steady, non-reactive attention to the sensations of one’s own breathing and then extending this wise and compassionate attention [….] to focus on any aspect of life whatsoever with this calm concentration” (Ledoux, 1998, n.p.). This attention on embodied meditation paired well with the gender studies course’s emphasis on the embodiment of gender. For the reading and writing component, Eleanor adapted Kahane’s free-writing (2014, p. 126); the goal to release students from structural writing components and possible disagreements with peers, in favor of writing providing space for honest contemplation, especially on sources of discomfort. Data/Methods Classroom Observations. My ethnographic classroom observations in Eleanor’s room focused on the culture that Eleanor and the students built, as they worked to be mindful of and critique cultural norms. My fieldnotes were informed by the notion of interactional ethnographic observations (Putney & Frank, 2008). This approach, which was employed over the course of multiple observations, emphasized the ways that group interactions create, maintain, and change cultural understandings through writing and discussion. The point was to examine the ways that “local cultures in classrooms are continually being constructed and reconstructed through interactions among teachers and students,” and through individual reflections which contribute to the collective environment (p. 212). Individual Interviews. Over the course of the summer, I conducted two formal semistructured interviews with Eleanor—one soon after the gender studies course had begun and one in the final week. The interviews were face-to-face and phenomenological, to encourage narrative responses (deMarrais, 2004). I asked Eleanor to provide “detailed descriptions of the particular experiences being studied” (p. 57). Additionally, Eleanor and I had a number of informal, unstructured interviews. These often occurred after students had left for the day, as we walked to/from class, and at mealtimes. I took notes as soon after these interactions as possible, and member checked all data with Eleanor. Data Analysis The data collection methods produced predominately narrative responses. I wanted to keep the narratives as whole as possible and therefore selected Butler-Kisber’s (2010) “finding the story” approach (pp. 72-77). The point of this approach is to minimize the degree to which a researcher might decontextualize participants’ statements or cherry pick from observation notes, and instead to preserve participants’ responses or interactions as fully as possible, so that their contributions might help to guide findings more fully than analysis of brief excerpts, possibly pieced together by the researcher from multiple interactions, might. Using this method, I selected key narratives related to the research questions while excluding information that reiterated statements/sentiments made elsewhere in the data. In doing so, I was left with interview excerpts that retained what I understood to be main points of the narratives while producing manageable sections for analysis. Results Due to space/word limits, I present a single example of my findings here. Eleanor initially struggled with introducing and incorporating a queer pedagogy. She had learned about contemplative education while a pre-service teacher, and she told me in the first interview when class still was not going well, You know, this whole queer pedagogy thing just isn’t working. I mean, the kids and I are constantly asking, “Oh, how is this queer? How could we queer this?”, but at the end of the day they aren’t really doing any self-evaluation. I mean, just today—you saw— “Brett” was going on and on about how trans women weren’t “really” women because they don’t experience menstrual cycles. I guess I’m glad that she felt safe enough to share that, but she was also the one who said earlier this week that she didn’t have any issues with transphobia or sexism. The next day, I sat taking notes in Eleanor’s class as she laid out her new approach. Typically, Eleanor sat with the students in a circle of desks, but today she perched on the front of her desk and sighed heavily. “Y’all, I don’t think our efforts at queer pedagogy have gone very well. And, based on what you’ve said during breaks and after class, I don’t think that you do, either. I’m gonna propose something that’ll probably seem crazy. We’re gonna meditate.” “Azar” spoke up, “Like, meditate on what to do?” Eleanor laughed softly and shook her head. “No, sorry—I wasn’t clear at all, was I? No, I mean we’re going to meditate and then write before we discuss.” After Eleanor and the students had sat for about two minutes concentrating on breathing and their bodies, Eleanor gently interrupted, “Now, I want you to move your attention from just your breathing to other aspects of your body. Your heartbeat. The sensation of your eyes being closed. The feeling of your feet being crossed or flat on the floor. Hear the rest of your body.” After two minutes, Eleanor invited students to share. Brett, who had previously asserted that ‘real’ women were the ones who dealt with physical aspects of womanhood spoke up. She sighed heavily. “You know, we talked about at the start of this class that ‘to queer’ is to disrupt, to make strange, to reject a binary. I totally thought that I got that. I mean, was sure that I did. But, this stuff—this meditation writing stuff?” Azar interjected, “Maybe ‘meditative writing’?” Brett nodded, Yeah, okay. That makes sense. This meditative writing really is queer stuff. I mean, I feel all out of sorts right now. But really at peace, too, which is weird. Like the meditation, it was productive, sure, but I don’t think that it challenged me because I didn’t challenge me. The first time we wrote, though, I started to make some important connections. I wrote all about how I’m a genderqueer lesbian, and how different pieces of my body outwardly support and contradict those identities for others. And then after Cameron, I went back to what I’d just written and then to what I said the other day about “real” women. I mean, I realize now that I suck. Like, really suck. I wrote this time about this concept of “alterity” that we discussed at the beginning. I was so busy pretending that I valued diversity, but anytime something got a little outside what I’d decided was normal, what I thought was true, I used all kinds of norms to shove stuff back into boxes. Brett thumped her pen onto her paper. “I mean, it’s all right here. I even drew a little stick person shoving other stick people into a box. ‘Cause that’s me.” Significance By pushing students to more mindfully examine themselves, others, and the embodiments and performances of gender, it was contemplative education, and more specifically contemplative writing, that worked to push students into new spaces. They actively examined not just non-normative gender and sexuality, but also their roles in upholding problematic structures. As Brett’s comments following the two contemplative writing activities demonstrated, the meditation had been useful, but it was only when that process was combined with stages of contemplative writing that, as Eleanor put it, “They’re layering the contemplation across multiple planes of thought, across multiple people’s perspectives.” No one viewpoint was privileged, while students examined the embodied, social, political, and personal implications of gender and sexuality. Though contemplative approaches have been important in a range of fields for a sustained period of time. However, contemplative education and queer pedagogy have barely been examined together at all—though the two complement one another in meaningful ways. Both work to center awareness, and to push against more commonplace modes of understanding, in efforts to encourage thoughtful consciousness and actions. The gentle patience and careful interrogations inherent in contemplative approaches hold powerful potential in helping to question and dismantle forms of discrimination and to continue to queer notions of gender and sexuality in schooling and beyond. References Britzman, D. (1998). Is there a queer pedagogy? or, stop reading straight. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum: Toward New Identities (pp. 211-227). New York, NY: Garland. Butler-Kisber, L. (2010). Qualitative inquiry: Thematic, narrative, and arts-informed perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. deMarrais, K. (2004). Qualitative interview studies: Learning through experience. In K. DeMarrais & S. D. Lapan (Eds.), Foundations for research: Methods of inquiry in education and the social sciences (pp. 51‐68). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gilbert, J. (2014). Sexuality in school: The limits of education. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. GLSEN. (2016). 2015 national school climate survey. 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