Alternative Approaches to Politics - By: Adela

For educators, knowing one's biases and working against them is critical for teaching LGBT-themed texts. Such work is political and challenges inequitable power dynamics. Most people in the United States have been raised in homophobic contexts, to various degrees. That we have taken on some of those values is not surprising. It would be more surprising if we had not. It is imperative, however, to acknowledge them and strive to change them. Because we are all always Clearance MBT Shoes learning, we must be prepared to make mistakes, reflect on them, learn from them, and improve on them. This is a valuable process, not an embarrassing one. We need to take pride but never be complacent in our learning.

For us, learning about our own biases and working to change them has happened most effectively with the Pink TIGers, a group that has been together for five years. In this teacher inquiry group, we took responsibility to name instances of homophobia, even though it was considerably more difficult when we saw it in one another than when we saw it in students, colleagues, administrators, or students' parents. Working together over time, we developed trust that our relationships could survive the difficulty of naming homophobia, among other forms of prejudice, in ourselves. As a result, we became a group that talked about efforts to combat homophobia in schools and through this talk came to understand our mistakes as well as alternative ways of doing our work. With this group in mind, we advocate for teachers to connect with colleagues who share similar commitments.

Just as important is our responsibility to make educational contexts more LGBTQ-friendly every day. The youths in our book discussion group, for example, talked about the risks of reading a book such as Boy Meets Boy, where the pink words of the title on the cover enclosed in three candy hearts make its LGBT theme clear. They discussed the harassment they endured because of reading such books in school. It is worth noting that after reading this book, they next chose Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a book with a stark cover that does not indicate in any way that a character in the book is gay. In these ways, the book discussion group reminded us that reading LGBT-themed texts in schools requires considerable and constant work to combat and prevent homophobia.

As teacher educators, we have long argued that teaching cannot and should not be value-free, neutral, or apolitical. We return to our classrooms prepared to continue that discussion. For those who cannot imagine MBT Shoes how novice middle and secondary teachers can do antihomophobia work without professional risk, we empathize but cannot fully console. This work is risky, and as long as heterosexism and homophobia are institutionally supported forms of oppression, it will continue to be so. But this risky work has the potential to dismantle such oppression, and this makes it worth doing.

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