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Confronting Queer Issues in the Classroom LGBTQ Approaches Annotated Bibliography

Confronting Queer Issues in the Classroom

Bird, the coordinator for a postgraduate course focused on gender and sexuality difference in New Zealand, describes her course, Difference and Diversity in Education: Frameworks, and its potential implications in contextualizing queer pedagogy. In her essay, Bird details the foundations of the course as well as controversy over its title. She then provides a “discussion of the frameworks used to explore intersections among the diverse issues and their implications both for understanding discrimination and oppression and for hearing and appreciating differences” (1). This course focused primarily on dualisms, which according to student responses, was at times problematic. Bird also questions her focus on dualisms and questions whether they “may have unintentionally reified certain differences, limiting an expansion of queerly creative multiplicity” (2). She ends her essay stating that this course, although needing some revision, is a productive tool for helping students engage in issues— particularly those of gender difference and sexuality—outside of their comfort zones.

In his chapter entitled “‘Promoting Homosexuality’ in the Classroom,” Haggerty asserts that a LGBTQ class can “open confrontation with the various essentialisms that threaten to silence difference in any classroom” and goes on to proclaim that “we must liberate students from the carious oppressions that have shaped their social ‘identities’” (15). Although this does not say much for student agency, Haggerty does state that in addressing homosexuality in the classroom, teacher and students can negate heterosexist practices prevalent in academia. He also emphasizes that we must reappropriate the phrase “promote homosexuality” and actually promote homosexuality by means of discussing “awareness of sexuality, sexual desire, gender difference, and other oppressive ‘otherings’” (12).

In their study, Hubbard and De Welde create a writing assignment which asks heterosexual students to write a coming out letter to someone important to them. Although they are not to send the letter, writing it should emulate some of the feelings their LGBTQ peers experience daily. The purpose of this assignment is multifaceted. It insights empathy and understanding in heterosexual students through investigation of their own homophobia and heterosexism. It helps students understand the emotional process of coming out, and it encourages “students to use their emotions educationally” (77). Students reacted to this assignment in primarily three ways. They reasserted their heterosexuality (in the letters) and expressed negative emotions and alienation, but they also increased their understanding and compassion for LGBTQ peers.

In this article, Rye and Chalmers propose that “negative attitudes toward transsexuals may be transformed into positive and empathic ones” through education and exposure (1). Through study and survey of an introductory human and sexuality classes, they demonstrate this claim. In this class, students had the opportunity to interact with a transgender guest speaker, Janet. In accordance with experiential education theory, students exposed to transgenders have the opportunity to learn from direct experience. This direct experience “of meeting a male-to-female transsexual person resulted in a qualitative change in students’ perceptions of transgender people” (1). Their change in perception was, for the most part, positive. Furthermore, Rye and Chalmers suggest that “for some students, higher-order affective learning fosters a synthesis of new beliefs and attitudes into student’s pre-existing value systems and, but extension, modifies their self-definitions” (14). Rye and Chalmers conclude that not only would exposing students to transgenders “reduce transphobic attitudes” and create compassion and understanding (14), it would also foster higher-order thinking essential for self development and understanding.