Negotiating the Self

Identity, Sexuality, and Emotion in Learning to Teach

Kate Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415932554
• eBook ISBN: 9781136703560
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Kate Evans' book is the first ever study of lesbian and gay pre-service teachers. It includes experiences as a student of teaching in the university, as well as teachers or assistant teachers in public schools. Integrating personal stories from interviews with broader global theories on notions of identity and queer theory, she gives a moving and insightful look at the positions these teachers hold. Her study provides for thought-provoking debate on the negotiation of self and subjectivity and gives valuable perspective to this growing field in education.

1

Situating the Study, Situating the Self

About 15 years ago, when I was enrolled in a teacher education program at a California university, a professor asked us preservice¹ teachers to prepare a lesson to be performed for the rest of the class. We were to pretend it was the first day of school, presenting ourselves and the course outline as we imagined we might to a group of adolescents. I recall that I went to the board and signed my name, “Ms. Louden.”² I then explained to the other preservice teachers that by the first day of school, several months hence, my last name would no longer be “Evans” because I was soon getting married. I then sat on the edge of the teacher’s desk at the front of the room and welcomed my students to loth-grade English. All I remember about the written feedback from the professor was the request that I consider not sitting on the desk because the students might view that as too casual and therefore not take me seriously as a teacher.

My story reveals some assumptions about the preferred qualities of a teacher. In playacting the role of teacher, I was asked to project seriousness. A teacher is not casual. The professor attached Seriousness to Teacher³ as though seriousness is an incontrovertibly desirable teacher quality. And another attachment to Teacher in the above story is Heterosexuality. I was fashioning myself—and being fashioned—into being a teacher and a heterosexually married woman. The part of me that was engaged to be married felt somehow related to the part of me that was becoming a teacher; I pictured my future self as a married woman/teacher. My plan was to begin teaching with this new identity as a wife (albeit, I chose “Ms.” over “Mrs.” because I was a feminist). I was 22 years old: a young, white, middle-class, heterosexual woman. So apparently young, in fact, that I was sometimes asked for my hall pass when I was student teaching. So apparently heterosexual that during my student teaching, one of my male students asked me to his senior prom.

About 10 years after that incident, my life had changed: I had been divorced for five years and was newly in love, with a woman. I was still teaching English, but at the college level. And suddenly I became aware of a tension I had not experienced in the past. When I identified as heterosexual it seemed natural, in the context of class discussion, to illuminate a point by telling a story about a weekend trip with my husband or some funny incident about my own senior prom. Five years later, to consider sharing about a heterosexually normed event like a prom made my mind swirl: Would my students think I was straight? Did that matter? What would happen if I told them I identified as a lesbian, or if I casually mentioned Annie in the same way I had my husband? I worried about the possible effects of saying something, or nothing.

I was suddenly and anxiously aware that whatever I said positioned me somehow in relationship to others—and not just any relation, but one of “abnormal lesbian” to “normal heterosexuals.” I had not previously considered (at least consciously) how my identity could affect my teaching. I had not considered it when I prepared, and enacted, my “Hello, I’m Ms. Louden” skit in my teacher education course. I had not consciously considered it when I taught high school. I had assumed in telling my classmates and professor that I was getting married that (coupled, white, middle-class) heterosexuality was the unquestioned norm. I had assumed in sharing aspects of my life with my students that I was becoming a “real person” who cared about them and was invested in their learning. I thought I was helping to develop a safe, warm classroom climate by humanizing myself, which ostensibly paved the way for students to share themselves. I hadn’t considered that I had been privileging heterosexuality, implying it was as natural as the chalk-dusty air. I hadn’t considered that humanizing myself meant making myself visibly heterosexual. At the time it had not occurred to me that naturalizing one way of being might position other ways of being as unnatural, other, even deviant.

Eventually, when I began teaching in a teacher education program as an out, lesbian instructor, I wondered how my experience as a preservice teacher in a teacher education program, and as a high school teacher, might have been different had I then identified as a lesbian or bisexual woman. In my position as a teacher educator, I began to meet preservice teachers who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered. Some explicitly identified themselves as such in the classes I taught; others came to my office to talk to me in confidence. Though their backgrounds and experiences varied, they all were facing a tension between Queerness⁴ and Teacher. Some were certain that they would or would not be out as gay while student teaching, or during their tenure as teachers; others had no idea. But all of them seemed to have in common the feeling that becoming a Queer Teacher was rocky terrain. It was in the spirit of exploring this terrain that I began a study of self-identified gay/lesbian/queer preservice teachers.

Studying the Self in Negotiation

As the story that opens this chapter illustrates, my position as a queer teacher felt more complicated than my position as a straight teacher. As a straight teacher I had seamlessly incorporated my heterosexuality into the classroom, although at the time I had not thought about it that way. Then, upon being partnered with a woman, what I had done with ease suddenly felt strange, rocky, anxiety provoking. Why couldn’t I just keep my “private life” out of teaching? Why did questions about what to do with myself bedevil me? Why had the shift in my sexual identity changed my relationship to students and to teaching? Why had the shift affected my feelings?

I began to realize that one of the underlying issues here is relational: Who I am and how I feel is not just about me in a vacuum. It is about me in relationship to others, and them in relationship to me. And this relationship can shift by something as simple as using a different pronoun when referring to one’s spouse. These relationships are imbued in language, and how we speak to one another carries historical weight. This language that we use precedes us, and when we use it, it not only enacts something at a particular moment, but brings with it a complicated mix of historical and social significances. So with this focus on relation and language, it is significant to point to the fact that much of education involves talking with others and being in relationship to others. And we are not only in relationship with other people, we are also in relation to historically developed social roles, such as Teacher, Student, Heterosexual, Gay, and so on.

This sociohistorical positioning is often implicated in taken-for-granted dichotomies, such as public and private. Who determines what is considered public and private, and to what effects? Part of the work of this study unsettles the notion that public and private are easily delineated concepts. It also problematizes, or calls into question, other dichotomies, such as natural/unnatural, teacher/student, homosexual/heterosexual, and male/female (Bing & Bergvall, 1996; Sedgwick, 1990). In the process, this book asks how feelings, or emotions, are implicated in this process of being in relation to other people and to idealized roles. By idealized roles I mean the multiple and often conflicting cultural messages we receive and enact about what particular roles are supposed to be: what a Teacher is, what a Homosexual is, indeed, what a Person is.

This study’s theoretical focus, then, is grounded in relation and language. With relation and language at the helm, the two foundational concepts of this study are negotiating identities and local/global. These theoretical concepts are important because in looking at the experiences of four individual queer preservice teachers, this study strives to illuminate broader theories of selves and education (Lightfoot, 1998).

1) Negotiating the self. By saying that we are in relation to one another and to historically developed social roles, I am suggesting that context affects self.⁵ “Context,” here, refers to both individual circumstances and the larger sociohistorical language arena. Because individual circumstances continually change—and because sociohistorical contexts are vast and varied—our identities are involved in movements, shifts, and surprises. Some of these movements are more conscious than others, and I am calling these movements negotiation. This means conceptualizing identity not as a stable thing but as a process of connection, disjunction, and movement (Butler, 1997b; Dorenkampt & Henke, 1995; Probyn, 1996). I am positing that identities are not static but are an effect of interacting with others and with larger concepts that are conveyed through circulating discourses. For example, when a student in class asks me “Are you married?” I am negotiating my identity in relationship to the ostensible heteronormative moment, as well as to my conceptions of what it means to be a teacher in relationship to this student. The anxiety I might feel when a student asks me if I’m married points to the emotional aspect of identity negotiation. Emotions and negotiation are linked through emotional work. As explored in depth in chapter 2, in this book “emotional work” refers to the emotional component of identity negotiation, the work that people do consciously and unconsciously as their individual experiences interact with broader conceptions of self. Emotional work comprises the conscious and unconscious efforts of the individual to express a (many-faceted) self. My feeling fearful in class when a student asks “Are you married?”—and what I do with that fear—is an example of emotional work.

2) The local and the global. We negotiate our identities in relation to daily lived experiences as individuals (the local) and to larger concepts (the global) (Probyn, 1996). This is similar to the well-worn concept of the individual and society. However, by using “local” and “global,” I am attempting to denaturalize the individual/society dichotomy. In other words, it is not always clear how to delineate the two, particularly when examining speech acts, which are the focus of analysis in this study. Local and global are in complex interaction. This helps envision people as neither fully controlled by social structures nor completely autonomous individuals (Allen & Hardin, 1998). What may at one glance look like an individual choice may be affected by global sociohistorical issues. For instance, my anxiety about being a lesbian teacher could be examined only on the local level and be summed up as “Kate is nervous in front of her students.” But my feelings are infused with global issues that preceded me—such as “Lesbian is sexual and therefore inappropriate in the classroom.” How my experience in the classroom interacts with that broader message is at stake when considering the local and the global.

My descriptions of these two concepts—negotiating the self (with its attendant emotional work), and local/global—are necessarily oversimplified so far. These descriptions are initial forays into concepts that I will flesh out in chapters 2 and 3, and then will illustrate in conjunction with the interviews with pre-service teachers in chapters 4 and 5. Also, these concepts are key to the research methods used for this study, as explained later in this chapter.

This study’s attention to negotiation of identities, and the attendant emotional work, raises a series of questions, such as: What happens when one’s senses of self interact with a new role or identity? What kinds of conflicts, mediations, tensions, and movements occur when one is making sense of the notion of self as Teacher within a teacher education program? And what happens when a preservice teacher is a sexual minority (lesbian, gay, queer), an identity historically at odds with Teacher?⁶ Looking at the specifics of queer preservice teachers’ experiences lends itself to examining, as Elspeth Probyn (1996) says, “how various forms of belonging are articulated . . . and how desires to become are played out in everyday circumstances” (p. 5). This is the power of the contexualized, individual story, for “the local is where the global is at its most immediate” (p. 147). This study, then, addresses broader social structures (the global) embedded in the lived experiences (the local) of individuals, in this case queer preservice teachers.

Negotiating the Self Locally and Globally

By highlighting the local and the global, I mean to emphasize how the purpose of this book is twofold: to highlight queer voices in educational literature, as well as to theorize about sexualities, the self, and emotions in education. This topic deserves exploration not only because there is insufficient educational literature that speaks to the unique experiences of queer people who are becoming teachers, but because all teachers and learners can be affected by interchanges between the identities they bring with them into a learning environment and what they experience therein. Therefore, while working to better understand how some sexual minorities experience becoming a teacher, this book also seeks to better understand how people shape and are shaped by language, and how people negotiate the multiple aspects of their selves.

One of the advantages of focusing on queer sexualities in this study is that given the history of discourses about sexual identities (as discussed in chapter 2), these discourses are a fruitful place to interrogate how larger social notions of normal and deviant work. Michel Foucault (1975/1995) studied prisons and schools because they were productive places to examine through the lens of theories of discipline. Likewise, I am studying queer educators because the negotiation of identities is prominent in the depictions of their experiences, as I came to understand through a pilot study I conducted prior to this larger study. What I have attempted to do, then, is akin to what Elspeth Probyn (1996) describes as “plac[ing] sexuality at the point at which various systems that regulate the social . . . are openly displayed” (p. 130). In other words, this is both a study of queer-identified preservice teachers and a study of broader theories of the matrices of sexualities and the self in dialogical, emotional relation.

Frank Conroy (1989) writes that the “physical body exists in a constant state of tension as it maintains homeostasis, and so too does the active mind embrace the tension of never being certain, never being absolutely sure, as it engages the world” (p. 43). “Engaging the world,” a trope of movement, suggests that being oneself in the world is active, not static. The concept of the self as an action as opposed to an inert state is key to this study. One of the important products of this movement of the self is emotion. Conroy’s phrases regarding “never being sure” and “tension” allude to emotional response. Being unsure highlights how part of engaging in the world involves surprise, particularly when parts of one’s self or one’s experience contrast with expressed or implicit norms and expectations. And because contexts are always changing, various aspects of our selves are forefronted in different contexts. This, then, means conceptualizing identity not as a monolithic, stable thing but as a continually shifting sense of self made in relation.

So for the sake of this project, it is less helpful to ask “What is identity?” than ‘What do identities do?” In the same vein, it is more helpful to ask “What do emotions do?” This is why the notion of identities in negotiation and the work of the emotions are highlighted. The focus on action in identity and emotion suggests a conception of the self and feelings as not fixed or static, but instead as used or experienced in (historically imbued) interaction with others in specific local circumstances (Maclure, 1993). For identity and emotion as conceptualized here are “not a function of an individual’s intention, but… an effect of historically sedimented linguistic conventions” (Butler, Benhabib, Cornell, & N. Fraser, 1995).

The negotiation of the self, and its attendant emotional elements, have not been researched, per se, in educational literature in relationship to queer-identified preservice teachers. Therefore, I have turned to some other literature that is related to my study in more tangential yet important ways. For instance, the ways in which learning to teach is affected by the socially situated self have been explored by Deborah Britzman (1991). In her study of preservice teachers, Practice Makes Practice, Britzman addresses the potential of thinking about learning to teach “as a social process of negotiation rather than an individual problem of behavior.” Britzman argues that cultural myths about teaching essentialize the identity of Teacher as someone who is born a teacher, someone who is “self-made.” Such myths also “promote the view of the teacher as rugged individual” and equate learning with social control. These myths, or dominant discourses, disguise the complexity of “social negotiation, interaction, and social dependence” in learning to teach. Britzman critiques the normalizing strategies that can serve to emphasize pedagogy as “not rooted in the production of knowledge but rather in its public image … so at first glance, becoming a teacher may mean becoming someone you are not” (p. 4).

The messages about who a queer preservice teacher is supposed to be becoming in the process of learning, and the tactics that sexual minorities take in the process of negotiating their teaching identities, has not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1. Situating the Study, Situating the Self
• 2. Negotiating the Self and Emotional Work
• 3. Speaking of (Teachers’) Sexualities
• 4. Negotiating Sexualities
• 5. When Queer and Teacher Meet
• 6. Endeavoring to Flourish
• Notes
• References
• Appendix A: Category Guides for Interviews
• Appendix B: Discursive Categories for Analysis
• Index