Sexual Orientation and Teacher Identity

Professionalism and LGBTQ Politics in Teacher Preparation and Practice

Edited by Patrick M. Jenlink

Sexual Orientation and Teacher Identity: Professionalism and GLBT Politics in Teacher Preparation and Practice examines the nature of LGBTQ issues and teacher identity as social, cultural, and political constructs. In particular, the contributing authors to this collection of chapters present a collection of chapters (contemporary discourses) that will illuminate and critique the practices, structures, and politics in both teacher preparation programs and public school settings that affect LGBTQ teachers and their identity in relation to the struggles of teachers as professionals face in obtaining recognition. The contributing authors of the book focus on teachers are entering educational settings where difference connotes not equal, and discourses of LGBTQ politics, identity, and difference are interwoven with a realization of discrimination and marginalization. The authors, drawing on their personal and professional experiences, give much needed voice to recognition and the formation of identity from a LGBTQ viewpoint as they relate to teachers, teacher educators, and other cultural workers responsible for shaping professional identities of teachers and for teaching students in schools and classrooms across the nation.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 178 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9⅛

978-1-60709-921-5 • Hardback • November 2019 • $75.00 • (£58.00)

978-1-60709-922-2 • Paperback • November 2019 • $38.00 • (£30.00)

978-1-60709-923-9 • eBook • November 2019 • $36.00 • (£30.00)

Subjects: Education / Higher, Education / Educational Psychology, Education / Research, Education / Philosophy, Theory & Social Aspects

Sexual Orientation and Teacher Identity

Professionalism and LGBTQ Politics in Teacher Preparation and Practice

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Sexual Orientation and Teacher Identity: Professionalism and GLBT Politics in Teacher Preparation and Practice examines the nature of LGBTQ issues and teacher identity as social, cultural, and political constructs. In particular, the contributing authors to this collection of chapters present a collection of chapters (contemporary discourses) that will illuminate and critique the practices, structures, and politics in both teacher preparation programs and public school settings that affect LGBTQ teachers and their identity in relation to the struggles of teachers as professionals face in obtaining recognition. The contributing authors of the book focus on teachers are entering educational settings where difference connotes not equal, and discourses of LGBTQ politics, identity, and difference are interwoven with a realization of discrimination and marginalization. The authors, drawing on their personal and professional experiences, give much needed voice to recognition and the formation of identity from a LGBTQ viewpoint as they relate to teachers, teacher educators, and other cultural workers responsible for shaping professional identities of teachers and for teaching students in schools and classrooms across the nation.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 178 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9⅛

978-1-60709-921-5 • Hardback • November 2019 • $75.00 • (£58.00)

978-1-60709-922-2 • Paperback • November 2019 • $38.00 • (£30.00)

978-1-60709-923-9 • eBook • November 2019 • $36.00 • (£30.00)

Subjects: Education / Higher, Education / Educational Psychology, Education / Research, Education / Philosophy, Theory & Social Aspects

Author

Patrick M. Jenlink is Regents Professor, E.J. Campbell Endowed Chair in Educational Leadership, and Professor of doctoral studies in the Department of Secondary Education and Educational Leadership, Stephen F. Austin State University.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1– Negotiating Identity as Teacher—A Critical Pedagogy of Learning to Teach

Patrick M. Jenlink

Chapter 2– Performativity and Disidentification: Subverting Identity Politics Through Stereotypical Embrace or Rejection

Adam j. Greteman & Ira David Socol

Chapter 3– LGBT Teacher Identity: Transgressing the Linear and Into the Spherical Identity Model

Megan S. Kennedy

Chapter 4– Understanding and Undermining Heteronormativity

Heather Hickman

Chapter 5– Shh . . . Out: From Silence to Self—How Experiences as Gay and Lesbian Teachers Inform Teaching

Jana Jackson

Chapter 6– Teachers as Sexual Strangers

Steve Fifield

Chapter 7– The Personal is Professional: Understanding Schools as Cultural Institutions through the Identities of Mother/Educator/Lesbian

Laura A. Bower

Chapter 8– Dismantling Straight Privilege: Alternate Conceptions of Identity and Education

Tonette S. Rocco, Hilary Landorf, and Suzanne Gallagher

Chapter 9– GLBT, Teacher Identity and the Pre-service Teacher

Stephanie Lynn Daza

Chapter 10– Epilogue: Sexual Orientation, Identity Politics, and Teaching: LGBTQ Teacher Identities (Re) considered

Patrick M. Jenlink

Editor and Authors

Reviews

A powerful and timely collection that uses a LGBTQ perspective to interrogate the normative ideological effects of heteronormativity on teacher educators and preservice and practicing teachers, especially when transgressing the inherent reproductive conservatism of public schools. This books calls for a deep equity by advancing research and scholarship as to how a critical pedagogy of identity can improve teaching and teacher education. Viewed through an intersectional lens of LGBTQ and teacher identities along with pedagogy, each chapter offers educators at all levels a transformative standpoint on teaching and learning.
— Michael Vavrus, Professor Emeritus, The Evergreen State College; Past-president of the Association of Liberal Arts Colleges for Teacher Education

In this edited volume, Patrick Jenlink introduces authors who critically engage issues of identity for LGBTQ teachers, student teachers, and students in k-12 and teacher education spaces. Utilizing the voices of LGBTQ teachers and student teachers, authors trouble the reader’s conception of teacher identity and provide nuanced snapshots of the impacts of heteronormativity, coming out stories, and straight privilege that will certainly influence teacher education/teaching practices in various classroom spaces. Throughout the book, authors take up queer and other critical theories to nuance teacher identity models and offer students an opportunity to affirm their multiple identities, whether or not those identities include queer. As Jenlink asserts, “there is a need for a pedagogy of identity that understands the necessity of providing a space within which one can become the author of one’s own interpretation of one’s identity as teacher.” This combination of theory, practice, and student/teacher voices – that also highlights the importance of identity as performance – makes this book a must read for those across the teacher preparation landscape.
— J.B. Mayo, Associate Professor, Social Studies Education; Associate Chair, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Minnesota

Sexual Orientation and Teacher Identity: Professionalism and LGBTQ Politics in Teacher Preparation and Practice offers a glimpse into the work of teachers as they negotiate the complex and contradictory ways their educator and LGBTQ identities develop and intersect. The chapters contributed to this volume demonstrate the generative work that teachers can do to disrupt heteronormativity that manifests in everyday language, textbooks, binary thinking, moralizing, as well as silences. Moreover, this book illustrates the ways teachers' identities are policed and restructured across contexts as they reveal social and institutional discourses about "normal" ways of being and knowing.
— Susan W. Woolley, Assistant Professor of Educational Studies; Interim Director of Women's Studies Program, Colgate University