Emily Margaret Gray

GLBTIQ teachers in Australian education policy: protections, suspicions, and restrictions

Recognition of human rights on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status by the United Nations has led to the development of new policies concerning homophobia and transphobia in educational contexts. This paper examines new Australian education policies impacting gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (GLBTIQ) teachers. A policy review uncovered a range of protections for GLBTIQ teachers in contexts such as the State of Victoria, alongside restrictions. Experiences of policy discussed in pilot study data from surveys of 63 Victorian GLBTIQ teachers, and in-depth interviews with nine Victorian GLBTIQ teachers, revealed that GLBTIQ teachers were relatively unaware of the protections available to them, compared to their awareness of protections for students. Many teachers were out as lesbian or gay to some staff members but fewer had come out to students. Teachers in religious schools had more difficulties, causing some to leave the sector. Further promotion of protections and more research are recommended.

Australian LGBTQ teachers, exclusionary spaces and points of interruption

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) teachers are a marginalised group that historically have been absent from research on sexuality and schooling. Rather, much research in the field has focused upon the experiences of same sex attracted and increasingly, gender diverse young people in schools, as well as the delivery of sexuality education. Up until recently, very little research has been carried out that explicitly addresses the experiences of LGBTQ teachers, particularly within the Australian context. This article focuses upon key issues arising from the semi-structured interviews that the Out/In Front team carried out as part of a pilot study that took place between April and July 2013 in the state of Victoria, Australia. We interviewed nine current or former teachers working within primary and secondary education across the public, Catholic and private sectors. This paper focuses upon the notion that LGBTQ teachers exist within a ‘space of exclusion’ that is dominated by discursive mechanisms that (re)produce heteronormativity. We also argue that the Victorian policy context – as well as increasing socio-political tolerance for LGBTQ people within Australia – enables LGBT teachers to interrupt the discursive frameworks within which their professional lives are situated.

LGBTQ Teachers and the Location of Difference in English Schools

Until recently, most research in the area of sexuality and schooling has focused upon young people and largely overlooked the experiences of LGBTQ adults working within schools. This chapter examines the experiences of LGBTQ teachers in England as they negotiate professional lives that are characterised by practices that minoritise non-heterosexual identities, illustrated by participants’ experiences of explicit homophobia and heterosexist gender regimes within their schools as well as more subtle forms of othering Drawing on the Every Child Matters government initiative, and anti-bullying strategies, this chapter gives voice to LGBTQ teachers’ reflections, articulations and understandings of themselves and of the schools within which they work offers insight into the differing ways in which sexual diversity is framed within English schools.

Zombies, Monsters and Education: The Creation of the Young Citizen

There is a persistent concern amongst contemporary governments about the nature of the citizens that young people will become, a concern that manifests itself in a growing body of education policy which describes, and prescribes, the young citizen whom schooling is to shape. This policy is dressed in the language of freedom, initiative and self-improvement that have become so much part of the neoliberal zeitgeist. It purports to enable all young people to be healthy, active citizens with the capacity to direct their own lives as well as to improve the fabric of society. Such citizens are in contrast with those young people who are seen not only to be undemocratic and unhealthy but also to be deviant and dangerous, even monstrous. In this chapter, we deploy the metaphors of the zombie and the monster as a means through which to unpack contemporary educational policy within the Australian context. In the first section of the chapter, we introduce what we mean when we talk about zombies and monsters and how these metaphors can be used to discuss contemporary policy and the citizen they aim to (re)produce – the zombie citizen. We then bring this analysis to bear upon the policy itself as zombified. Finally, we argue that contemporary classrooms deploy the monstrous in order to encourage young people to become ideal neo-liberal citizens.

Queer superheroes: the impossibility of difference, a neoliberal promise of equal (teacher) love

This paper troubles the im/possibilities of exploring difference through queer popular culture within the teacher education classroom. This article locates such pedagogical practice as existing in opposition to dominant neoliberal discourses around the marketization of higher education as well as queerness in mainstream popular culture, and the expectation of students that all education coursework should be ‘relevant’ to mainstream marketplace classrooms. In response to previous research and our own empirical evidence that highlights the ways in which students’ (and teacher education courses’) conception of ‘relevance’ is not critically theorized in either pedagogical or curricular ways, this paper problematizes such notions of ‘relevance’ within a changing ecology of teacher education classrooms. Here we argue that the hopes for challenging normativity within teacher education spaces can be at odds with the possibilities that popular culture devices offer, as they are inevitably shaped, informed and foreclosed by governmental policy and social expectations. Such neoliberal influences do not necessarily align well with the high hopes held by critical educators for the use of popular culture as a tool for challenging notions of ‘difference’ within the teacher education classroom.

Introduction: Marked presence/unremarkable absence: Queer teachers, 'identity' and performativity

This short volume aims to engage with the study of queer teachers internationally. It offers new ways of thinking about queer teacher practices and perspectives, away from the deficit positioning of queer teachers and towards a critical engagement with queer teachers as local, national and international queer subjects. As a truly international collective of researchers we address the complexities of what it means to interrogate ‘queerness’ in a contemporary western climate that would like to believe that we are all, finally, equal, yet which continues to marginalize queer students, teachers and others. We hope that this new volume offers academics, educators and students a provocative extension of this pivotal topic for contemporary educators and sociologists more broadly.

'Someone has to keep shouting': celebrities as food pedagogues

ABSTRACT In a recent interview with the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver stated that ‘Food is the most basic issue […] it’s about health […] someone has to take responsibility for this. Someone has to keep shouting’. Oliver’s statement reflects his position as a chef, a public pedagogue and, importantly for the purposes of this article, a celebrity. Oliver’s is one of many voices that have entered the public realm to educate the public about the dangers of unhealthy eating. In this article we discuss the work of three celebrities: Jamie Oliver. Sesame Street Workshop’s character Cookie Monster and Australian food celebrity Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Foundation for schools. Whilst acknowledging that these three food pedagogues represent only a few of the voices that seek to intervene in the food consumption habits of citizens in contemporary times, they can be understood as a public pedagogical response fuelled by the obesity epidemic. We argue that whilst on the surface it appears that our three food pedagogues offer benevolently inspired propositions, we understand such posturing as deeply political. Specifically we are interested in examining the educative effects of these messages and their troubling implications for how individuals understand and experience food-related imperatives. We ask readers to consider who is metaphorically ‘shouting’ whilst drawing on various pedagogical forms and devices and we ask who is being ‘shouted’ at, and to what effects. We suggest that these celebrities function as powerful pedagogues who seemingly attempt to offer particular visions of health, consumption and citizenship, and, above all, attempt to cultivate a moral duty to eat well.

Teaching and tolerance: aversive and divisive pedagogical encounters

ABSTRACT This paper takes as its subject the circulation of tolerance discourse within two pedagogical encounters in two Australian educational settings, and draws from the work of Wendy Brown on tolerance as a regulatory force. Brown argues that discourses of tolerance are produced within historical and cultural milieu that enable tolerance and aversion to exist simultaneously. This has significant implications for how we might come to understand the project of working towards a socially just educational system and the various struggles encountered within pedagogical sites. I also examine the pedagogical affects that are produced within different educational moments as we work to teach in or around difference and when we embody the Other in the classroom. I engage with how these experiences speak to the way in which tolerance as national ideal acts to both alleviate and circulate discourses of inequality such as sexism and homophobia.