Queer Theories and Education

This group was comprised of four students, LaShawnda Brooks, Erin Waddles, Michaela Ward, and Amiri Banks, who were interested in applying queer theory to educational praxis, within and beyond the classroom. They conducted class for two weeks, with the first class including a reflection and discussion of readings. They invited community members representing different queer positionalities and praxes for the second class.

Student Profiles

LaShawnda Brooks

LaShawnda earned her M.S.Ed. from Penn GSE’s Education Policy Program, where she also worked as research assistant for the Racial Empowerment Collaborative. A first generation graduate of the University of Virginia, Brooks joined Teach for America in 2009, serving for two years in Atlanta and later worked as an instructional coach for City Year. She now directs Philips Andover Academy’s Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers.

Amiri Banks

A student in GSE and a writer at heart, Amiri holds strong convictions about the universal right of human beings to be treated with dignity, afforded freedom, and allowed to seek fulfillment. His hope is to live in such a way that his work affirms and honors this belief, and that he never relinquishes his abiding passion for candor, empathy, education, advising, inquiry, programming and art

Michaela Ward

Michaela is a student in Education, Culture, and Society program. She’s interested in youth-led activism and the intersection between legal advocacy and community organizing, with an overarching interest in anti-racist policy and resource allocation in public schools.

Erin Waddles

Erin Waddles was a master’s student in the University of Pennsylvania’s Higher Education Division. To enhance her experience, she worked as a graduate intern at the Greenfield Intercultural Center, where she supported all of the programming and training at this center. Her professional interests center on promoting equity, access, and diversity in higher education.

Podcast

Hosted by LaShawnda, Erin, Amiri, and Michaela, this episode features two conversations with queer folx. In conversation with working group members, the guests explore queer theory and its applications to everyday life in Philadelphia. What are the limits and value of queer theory language? How do contexts like work and school shape what we desire from others and for ourselves? The guests offer a critical and personal reflection on struggle, space, and culture practice of queerness.

Week 1 Syllabus

Required Readings

“Queer Theory.” (2016). Sage Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies
C. Riley Snorton. (2014). Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low. “Introduction”
Kevin Kumashiro. (2002). Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy. “Introduction”

Supplemental Readings

Kevin Kumashiro. (2002). Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy. “Chapter 2: Theories and Practices of Anti-oppressive Education”

Judith Butler on Gender

Week 2 Syllabus

Required Readings

-Cathy Cohen. (1997). “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies, 3(4): 437-465.
Michael Hames-Garcia. (2011). Queer Theory Revisited.
Audre Lorde. (1985). I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities.
NPR Ed. (2018). “The Education Department Says it Won’t Act on Transgender Student Bathroom Access.” https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/585181704/the-education-department-says-it-wont-act-on-transgender-student-bathroom-access
Website: National Center for Transgender Equality. “Know Your Rights.” https://transequality.org/know-your-rights/schools

Supplemental readings

Darla Linville. (2017). “Introduction: Queering Education.” Occasional Paper Series, 2017 (37). Retrieved from https://educate.bankstreet.edu/occasional-paper-series/vol2017/iss37/1
Eric Darnell Pritchard. (2013). “For Colored Kids Who Committed Suicide, Our Outrage Isn’t Enough: Queer Youth of Color, Bullying, and the Discursive Limits of Identity and Safety.” Harvard Education Review, 83(2): 320-345.

Hetrick-Martin Institute 35 Year Anniversary

Week 1: Theory and Its Implications

Lesson Plan

Week 1 Slides

Opening Activity

This class session began with two live polls. They posed the following questions:

1. What associations does “queer theory” bring up?

2. When did you first hear of queer studies?

Undergrad

Outside of school
When I did these readings

Elementary school
Middle school
High school

Responses to the first question were presented as a word cloud. Responses to the second question were recorded in a bar graph.

Community Agreements and key terms

The working group devised an activity to build a set of community agreements and a collective vocabulary to work with throughout the inquiry. On post-it notes, the class write community agreements for our conversation, then placed on the board. As a class we reviewed them, interrogated each suggestions’ meaning and politics, and consented to carrying ourselves accordingly.

Following, in beak-out groups, we brainstorm key terms from the readings, which were written on the board. Then we wrote our individual understandings of these terms and posted them beneath the terms. We synthesized these as a group.

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Reflection

Similar to previous weeks, time was set aside for us to journal quietly or reflect with a partner on the following experiences:

What is your understanding still lacking?
Did the readings cause you to “trouble your own identities”?
How does Queer Theory challenge or parallel other social movements that we have focused on in class?

Activity

To explore queer theory’s possible applications for schooling, the working group created an activity called “Queering the School” which asked teams to design a queered school.

Download Activity

Week 2: Application and Embodied Practice

Lesson Plan

Week 2 Slides

Panel Discussion

For week two’s class session, the working group invited four identifying speakers to share their activist practice. This occurred in an open-discussion format moderated by the working group.

Invited Guests

Activist Corner

Monique Perry

Monique / Mo Perry is a doctoral student in the Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education program at the Penn Graduate School of Education. Monique participated in the first iteration of Activism Beyond the Classroom, in Spring of 2017, while a master’s student in Education, Culture, and Society. Perry is also a trainer for the Penn LGBT Center and previously a graduate student assistant for the Alice Paul Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies.

Black and Brown Workers Cooperative

Our mission is to actively challenge, resist and dismantle systems of oppression that adversely impact the Black and Brown worker. Thus, we push for the social and economic liberation of the Black and Brown worker...Our mission stands at the intersection of both the Worker's Rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Sarah Simi Cohen

Sarah is a graduate of Penn GSE’s Education, Culture and Society program, and a doctoral student in Higher Education at the University of Texas: Austin. They are a Boston native, former Americorps member, and organizer on Penn’s campus. In their time at Penn, Sarah founded FGLIQ, a group for First Generation Low-Income Queer students, and conducted research with Dr. Ed Brockenbrough.