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Abstract: The dominant cultural understanding of bullying focuses on a bully/victim binary which fails to acknowledge heteronormative social systems of power that support acts of bullying targeted at LGBTQ and gender nonconforming students. Overt acts of violence against LGBTQ youth (or those who are perceived to be) are only the surface-level, explicit effects of heteronormative school cultures that privilege normative genders and heterosexuality. We must come to understand the problem of LGBTQ student bullying differently if we are to have different outcomes in our intervention efforts. This symposium will examine how dominant bullying discourses limit understanding of exclusions and aggressions targeting LGBTQ students and, therefore, limit the possibilities for school-based social justice work in the interest of LGBTQ students.
The “problem” of LGBTQ students’ school experiences has been shaped by discourses where “overly individualized and psychologized analyses…distort larger issues of inequality” (Pascoe, 2007, p.17) and research examining youths’ negotiations of social hierarchies is neglected(Ringrose, 2008). Interventions include behavior management and protection for victims but overlook “the role that schools play in the reproduction of social relations along axes of class, gender, race and…sexuality” (Youdell, 2005, p.250). LGBTQ identities are positioned as sites of risk and vulnerability, and LGBTQ youth are only acknowledged as victims in need of protection and care (Fields, 2013). Cultural privileging of heterosexuality and gender normativity goes unquestioned, LGBTQ marginalization is reproduced and re-entrenched in new ways, and schools avoid responsibility for complicity in LGBTQ harassment.
This paper explores educators’ stories of LGBTQ harassment and how dominant bullying discourses are shaping educators’ understandings of the needs of LGBTQ students. Data are part of a larger evaluation study on Reduction of Stigma in Schools (RSIS) —a professional development program on the school experiences of LGBTQ youth (Authors, 2010). Participants attended RSIS training, and they volunteered for semi-structured interviews about these experiences. Educators devoted significant interview time to the “state of things” regarding LGBTQ student experiences and bullying in their respective school contexts.
We argue that participants interpret LGBTQ students’ experiences and school climates through a lens that allows them to “see” overt acts of aggression but not the ways stigma and marginalization work “in the most mundane moments everyday inside schools,” or “how school processes act unwittingly to exclude particular students from the educational endeavor” (Youdell, 2006, p.13). Furthermore, “dominant ‘bully discourses’ employed to make sense of and address conflict offer few resources or practical tools for addressing and coping with everyday, normative aggression and violence in schools” (Ringrose & Renold, 2010, p.575). These “normative cruelties” (p.575) are taken for granted as normal gendered behavior. Participants’ perspectives reflect this argument that girls’ gossiping, boys’ rough housing, or “playful” exchanges of insults like “slut” and “fag” are rarely considered to be overtly aggressive behavior. Therefore, low-level aggressions—which actively reproduce normative expectations for gender and sexuality—are rarely noticed, let alone monitored. We find that dominant bullying discourses dictate what they see as actionable.
To counter this, we propose a new definition of bullying to create a more useful framework for understanding the social nature of peer-to-peer aggression and designing interventions to address the cultural roots of this aggression. This definition challenges the bullying discourse and draws attention to daily violence that often fades into the landscape of “normal” adolescent behavior. We argue that it is imperative to keep this subtle aggression in the foreground because it reflects cultural norms embedded in school or community contexts and is the mechanism through which youth regulate boundaries between “normal” and “other.” Finally, we take the position that a majority of peer-to-peer aggression in U.S. public schools is some form of gender policing, and we believe bullying must be redefined to account for relationships between peer targeting and structural inequalities.
To date, research giving voice to LGBTQ youths’ school experiences has predominantly focused on victimization at the hands of individual bullies and their perspectives on school climate. Therefore, it is reasonable to hypothesize that stories of individual victimization would be central to LGBTQ students’ representations of school experience. However, QuERI Arts-in-Action projects indicate that overt acts of bullying are not emblematic of how LGBTQ students experience their otherness in school spaces. To better understand how LGBTQ students understand their own positionings in school spaces, we must explore how they make meaning of their school culture—where they continuously bump into institutional value systems that privilege gender conformity and heterosexuality (Author, in press).
This study explores the experiences of two arts-in-action educators/artists/researchers with bringing a queer visual art and identity workshop project into 15 public high schools in Upstate New York. Students were given canvas and a range of art supplies with the prompt to represent their school experience as a LGBTQ/A student. Data include field notes from each teaching session, 200 pieces of visual and textual artwork created by LGBTQ and Ally youth, and autoethnographic reflections by the educators. The project aimed to utilize art as a medium to engage LGBTQ/A students in conversations about their school experiences, and project design reflected the belief that “strategies for art making that are active and socially engaged enable students to make use of the methods of communication that they already possess but feel disempowered to use” (Watson, 2012). Visual culture and democratic art education principles provide key tools for empowering LGBTQ students to utilize their own experiences as resources in the creative process and provide “permission” to bring these ideas into the classroom. Art curriculum encompassing themes of power, ideology, representation, seduction, gaze, intertextuality and multimodality provides opportunities for learners to examine their identity in school, community, and society (Duncum, 2010) and begins to help students understand the cultural context for their experiences of marginalization.
Findings reveal that none of the 200 pieces of visual and textual art created in this project included a representation of an individual bully or bullying incident. Students’ imagery typically demonstrated loneliness and isolation, a single figure, with the eye looking square at the viewer. Text invoked otherness through “us and them” constructions. Resistance to the expectations of dominant and school cultures for heterosexual romance and gender conformity were expressed through images of forbidden love, symbols of marriage equality, hearts and tears. The tensions between choosing the safety of the “closet” versus the “freedom” of being “out” in school was also addressed through student imagery and their marginalized status was countered through declarations of equality and “sameness.” These images suggest that students experience a hostile school climate not as the result of encounters with an individual bully, but rather through a process of systemic othering intrinsic to the school culture. Understanding their experiences in this way calls for a deeper system of redress than the simple intervention in anti-LGBTQ behavior most often associated with acts of bullying.
Smith, M. Paper title: Bullying, Binaries, Bathrooms, and Biology: Conversations with Elementary Educators about Supporting Transgender Students
Educators’ investment in binary constructions of gender and the absence of nonnormative genders in elementary schools mean that many children emulate their teachers’ faith in the heteronormative “natural order of things” (Atkinson & DePalma, 2009, p. 27). Elementary schools are “cultural sites [that]…engag[e] girls and boys in becoming gendered social beings” (Korth, 2007. p. 57) and “children co-construct their gender through social interactions with others in their culture” (McMurray, 1998, p. 272). The culture of school is a prime site for the development of gender and a child’s sense of “beingness.” These highly gendered cultural sites leave little room for gender transgressions, let alone the comfortable presence of a transgender child.
This paper examines how educators make meaning of teaching transgender students after attending QuERI professional development about transgender identity. The professional development workshop covered differences between sex, gender, and sexuality; research on elementary schools as gendered spaces, limitations of the gender binary for all children, recommendations for inclusive practices for transgender students, and guidelines for changing curriculum and pedagogy to challenge the cultural norms limiting children to binary gender performances. Research participants were 12 school professionals from urban and suburban public schools in the Northeastern US who were directly involved in the education of an elementary transgender child and attended the training. Semi-structured interviews focused on the educator’s personal experience with transgender children, perceptions of their school’s success in supporting a transgender child, ideas about resources and education schools need to support these students, and responses to the training. Data analysis utilized an emergent coding process reflective of Carspecken’s (1996) critical qualitative method.
Findings in this paper focus on participants’ responses to the professional development content, learning about non-normative gender identities and expressions, and learning about systemic marginalization of queer people. Overall, educators resisted recommendations to critically examine their schools’ privileging of normative gender or challenge strict gender norms through gender-affirming curriculum and pedagogy. Instead, teachers remained fixated on “the problem” of securing transgender students’ safety and fitting them into existing heteronormative institutional structures. That is, preventing the bullying of the transgender child and procedural issues such as bathrooms, using correct pronouns, and adjusting school records to reflect a child’s chosen name took precedence over challenging institutional privileging of gender conformity. Teachers interpreted their responsibility to solely be the child’s “safety”- not shifting the cultural practices that might lead to gender non-conforming students being “unsafe” in school. This interpretation of teacher responsibility is reflective of the broader cultural discourse on “bullying.”
Refusal to challenge normative gender as part of “supporting” a transgender student creates missed opportunities to shift the gender enculturation of children in ways that could disrupt youths’ fierce investment in the binary and in policing “normal” gender performance. Furthermore, these findings are indicative of a broader problem preventing the creation of inclusive schools for LGBTQ students: educators and policy makers’ fixation on fitting queer students into normative structures and failure to make structural changes that have potential to disrupt the cultural privileging of gender conformity.
ABSTRACT: Conversations about sexual and gender identity are highly contested terrain in K-12 schools. “Sexualities equality remains the one area of inclusion still largely unaddressed in schools, often because of [educators’] own fear and concerns and because of a prevailing belief that sexual orientation…is not an appropriate focus for education” (DePalma & Atkinson, 2006, p. 333). Since 2006, the Reduction of Stigma in Schools© (RSIS) program has worked with schools throughout a single region in the northeastern United States to open these conversations and generate dialogue on supporting LGBTQ students and parents in schools. RSIS is a research-based professional development program from The Queering Education Research Institute© (QuERI) that aims to educate school professionals about Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ) students’ and families’ experiences in the school environment. A core element of the RSIS design is a “top down” approach to gaining access to schools for professional development (Authors, 2011). Thus, a significant portion of our work with schools has been approaching middle and high school administrators and discussing the need for educator training and schools’ active engagement in addressing the needs of LGBTQ students and families. This paper addresses school principals’ engagement in the support of LGBTQ students in their schools, their understanding of their schools’ “need” for professional development on LGBTQ issues, their resistance and hesitation around supporting LGBTQ students, their concern over conflict with community values, and teachers’ stories of administrators’ failure to provide adequate support and/or creating barriers specifically blocking their efforts to support LGBTQ kids.
ABSTRACT: The “problem” of LGBTQ students’ school experiences has been shaped by discourses where “overly individualized and psychologized analyses…distort larger issues of inequality” (Pascoe, 2007, p.17) and research examining youths’ negotiations of social hierarchies is neglected (Ringrose, 2008). Interventions include behavior management and protection for victims but overlook “the role that schools play in the reproduction of social relations along axes of class, gender, race and…sexuality” (Youdell, 2005, p.250). LGBTQ identities are positioned as sites of risk and vulnerability, and LGBTQ youth are only acknowledged as victims in need of protection and care (Fields, 2013). Cultural privileging of heterosexuality and gender normativity goes unquestioned, LGBTQ marginalization is reproduced and re-entrenched in new ways, and schools avoid responsibility for complicity in LGBTQ harassment. This paper explores educators’ stories of LGBTQ harassment and how dominant bullying discourses are shaping educators’ understandings of the needs of LGBTQ students. We propose a new definition of bullying to create a more useful framework for understanding the social nature of peer-to-peer aggression and designing interventions to address the cultural roots of this aggression. Finally, we take the position that a majority of peer-to-peer aggression in U.S. public schools is some form of gender policing, and we believe bullying must be redefined to account for relationships between peer targeting and structural inequalities.