Sexual Orientation and Teacher Identity

Reviews / Votes

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