“These are Dangerous Words”: Teacher LGBT Advocates and an Ecology of Fear.

Elizabethe Payne

Paper Title: “These are Dangerous Words”: Teacher LGBT Advocates and an Ecology of Fear.

As she rose from the conference table, Jamie spoke of her trip to her school that summer morning to pick up her folder on LGBT issues for the afternoon meeting we had just adjourned. “I started thinking that I was being watched,” she said, “that there were cameras and that they (the school administration) were tracking me.” She holds up her paper two pocket folder with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender handwritten in marker on the front cover. “These are dangerous words,” she said. This paper will explore the stories of fear and surveillance told by middle and high school teachers in a Central New York suburban school district who participated in a teacher in-service program, The Reduction of Stigma in Schools, in support of LGBTQ students. After attending the district sanctioned workshop, teachers posted “Safe Space” stickers in their classrooms. Within two days, they were ordered to remove the stickers. As teachers wrestled with their response to this administrative action, they shared their stories through individual and group interviews. Fear of the district and school administration emerged as a central theme in the stories of teachers who felt they “should” be advocating and actively supporting LGBTQ students but believed that they would suffer personal and professional consequences for speaking out, for pressing the administration for change, for giving LGBTQ students “safe space.” Studies show discrepancy between administrator and teacher perceptions of school climate for LGBTQ youth, with administrators confident that it is “just fine” and teachers asserting that their schools did not promote tolerance and acceptance (MacGillivary, 2000, p. 319). There is, however, little research on the harmful consequences of school administrations’ use of fear as a tool for controlling teachers’ speech and advocacy, and little research on teachers’ experience of administration abuse of power (Blasé & Blasé, 2002). This study seeks to explore teacher experiences of fear as an impediment to creating affirming environments for LGBTQ students and as an administrative tool in maintaining school as a heteronormative space. Data for this paper are a sub-set of data from a larger evaluative study conducted in 2008 and 2009 on educator experiences of the Reduction of Stigma in Schools Program (research in collaboration with Melissa Smith). This participant subset is composed of educators from a single district who attended the workshop in the spring of 2009. Individual interviews, focus group interviews, and field notes from the workshop were collected. Teacher stories were explored using a critical life story approach (Payne, 2009) combining an understanding of the narration of self (Linde, 1993) with critical theory and methodology (Carspecken, 1996). Analyses of the data for this study is on-going.