What do we mean when we talk about 'queer teachers'? The authors here grapple with what it means to be sexually or gender diverse and to work as a school teacher within four national contexts: Australia, Ireland, the UK and the USA. This new volume offers academics, educators and students a provocative exploration of this pivotal topic.

What do we mean when we talk about 'queer teachers'? The authors here grapple with what it means to be sexually or gender diverse and to work as a school teacher within four national contexts: Australia, Ireland, the UK and the USA. This new volume offers academics, educators and students a provocative exploration of this pivotal topic.

How do gay and lesbian teachers negotiate their professional and sexual identities at work, given that these identities are constructed as mutually exclusive, even as mutually opposed? Using interviews and other ethnographic materials from Texas and California, School’s Out explores how teachers struggle to create a classroom persona that balances who they are and what’s expected of them in a climate of pervasive homophobia. Catherine Connell’s examination of the tension between the rhetoric of gay pride and the professional ethic of discretion insightfully connects and considers complicating factors, from local law and politics to gender privilege. She also describes how racialized discourses of homophobia thwart challenges to sexual injustices in schools. Written with ethnographic verve, School’s Out is essential reading for specialists and students of queer studies, gender studies, and educational politics.

Much of the focus of anti-homophobic/anti-heterosexist educational theory, curriculum, and pedagogy has examined the impact of homophobia and heterosexism on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) students and teachers. Such a focus has provided numerous theoretical and pedagogical insights, and has informed important changes in educational policy. Queering Straight Teachers: Discourse and Identity in Education remains deeply committed to the social justice project of improving the lives of GLBT students and teachers. However, in contrast with much of the previous scholarship, Queering Straight Teachers shifts the focus from an analysis of the GLBT «Other» to a critical examination of what it might mean, in theory and in practice, to queer straight teachers, and the implications this has for challenging institutionalized heteronormativity in education. This book will be useful in courses on educational foundations, curriculum studies, multicultural education, queer theory, gay and lesbian studies, and critical theory.

Based on a qualitative research study of gay and lesbian teachers, Unmasking Identities explores how these educators negotiated their gay and teacher identities in a climate where the two have historically been pitted against each other. This process of integrating their sexual identities with their roles as teachers was impelled and impeded by several factors, including community atmosphere, school culture, and family status. Janna M. Jackson demonstrates that these gay and lesbian teachers made direct and indirect connections between their experiences related to being gay or lesbian and their classroom practices of creating safety, promoting social justice, and building on students' understandings. This unique book explores what happens when identities are oppressed and suppressed and the consequences when they finally break free. Unmasking Identities provides theoretical understandings and practical advice for teachers, administrators, and policymakers who are concerned about gay and lesbian issues. This engaging text will appeal to those interested in gender studies and issues in education. Book jacket.

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.

This book draws upon contemporary Irish and international research which explores the critical interplay between education studies and sexualities. Scholars from Ireland, Canada, Spain, the U.K. and Sweden employ the conceptual lens of Queer Theory to interrogate and destabilise long-standing regimes of truth/knowledge, and in so doing, highlight the suitability and applicability of this theoretical perspective within educational discourses. By reframing and repositioning gender identity/expression as a performative expression on a fluid continuum, this book provokes readers to (re)view how they see education, pedagogy and schooling. The book interrogates what happens to teaching, and teachers, when queerness permeates their practice, thus exposing the ways in which heteronormativity informs and shapes our places/sites of education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Irish Educational Studies journal.