Teacher agency and access to LGBTQ young adult literature.

In the spring of 2004, I solicited undergraduate students in the English education program I coordinate at The College of New Jersey to participate in an independent study on LGBTQ young adult literature. For several years I had wanted to teach a course on this topic. As a former high school teacher, I was all too familiar with the day-to-day verbal and physical violence described by the LGBTQ students who responded to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network's 2003 National School Climate Survey, close to 84% of whom reported experiencing verbal harassment at school and more than 90% of whom indicated that they regularly hear antigay sentiments expressed in their schools hallways, bathrooms, locker-rooms, and classrooms. (1) In my current role as a teacher educator, I am particularly concerned about teachers' contributions to this violence, especially as I learn more about my pre-service teachers' hesitancy to advocate openly for their LGBTQ students and colleagues.

In my reading and writing methods classes, as my students and I examine the ways in which schools often replicate racial, class, and gender inequities, we discuss and practice approaches that are democratic, student-centered, and contextually relevant. Unfortunately, and despite their preparation and expressed commitment to safe class rooms, when my students encounter evidence of heterosexism and homophobia in school, many remain uncertain about whether they should intervene. Astonishingly 83% of LBGTQ students report that their teachers consistently do not. (2) Aware that teacher advocacy and intervention can make a significant difference in the school experiences of LGBTQ adolescents, I felt a need to examine these issues in an English education course that would engage literary and educational theory, and would provide an integrated model of English teaching methods with discussions about the power and purposes of literature.

I was drawn to a study of young adult literature for two reasons. First, I was curious about the power of stories to elicit empathy. I wondered if these stories could provide my students with an opportunity to experience (albeit vicariously) what their future LGBTQ middle and high school students might be going through--their feelings, their struggles and successes, and the experiences through which they were and were not marginalized. As typically "good students" themselves--students who attend a selective, public liberal arts college and who believe in secondary schools because they were served well by them--my pre-service teachers often have difficulty putting themselves in the place of students whose experiences have not been nearly as successful: students who struggle academically or socially, or who resist school because they find it oppressive, injurious, and/or unsafe. These stories, I hoped, would help make the imaginary real.

The second reason was curricular. Not only did I want my students to become aware of their LGBTQ students' experiences; I also wanted them to be able to share, recommend, and read these texts in their classrooms. The more familiar they were with them, I believed, the more likely they would be to use them in classes And the more they did that, the more opportunities they would have to combat heterosexism and homophobia and stem the tide of violence currently perpetrated on LGBTQ students in schools. At the time, I anticipated that a personal and pedagogical engagement with the literature would produce these kinds of political results.

As I began to advertise the class, several students immediately expressed interest. Five ultimately decided to participate, all heterosexual women, but varied in age, racial background, and life experiences--a remarkably diverse group considering the overwhelming youth and racial homogeneity of the pre-service teachers enrolled in the rest of my classes. (3) Once I had assembled a willing group of participants, I began, in earnest, to construct the course. Attempting to model the kind of teaching I wanted my students to enact, I worked from three pedagogical principles.

First, the course needed to be democratic; it needed to be student-centered and participatory, and, as Michael Apple and James Beane contend, to establish structural, procedural, and curricular "arrangements and opportunities that will bring democracy to life." (4) The course would, therefore, require on-going contributions from each student. Policy, purpose, and meaning would all be mutually constituted as our classroom community became a place in which my students would not only practice, but enact civic participation.

Second, the course needed to "teach queerly" and "transgress" by requiring us to think beyond specific school or classroom instances of violence and examine the effects of the heterosexism and homophobia present in our own lives and the institutions with which we were associated. (5) In addition to studying the experiences of the adolescents in the literature we were reading, we would also need to read our own life stories, casting a critical eye on our own ideologies and how our lives in schools, churches, and families as well as our encounters with the media and other public and private institutions shaped who we were and what we hoped to accomplish as teachers.

Finally, the course needed to provide a model of empowering education so that students would come away from the experience with a greater sense of their own personal and professional agency. It needed to relate personal growth to public life and show how in-class experiences can lead to greater self-awareness and social change. As my students read, conducted research, and shared findings with one other, I hoped the course would provide them with a broader vision of what they could accomplish both in and outside of their classrooms.

At the time, although aware that I could not predict my students' responses to the readings or the course itself, I was fairly certain I had assembled enough evidence for them to understand why too many schools--by failing to advocate for and protect their LBGTQ students--become institutional sites of violence against them. I was also confident that the pedagogical practices I planned to model would help my students intervene in their own classrooms. What actually happened during the semester, however, challenged my understanding of the role that literature can play in the development of pre-service teachers' social consciousness and political agency, and forced me to see beyond the texts and the limited space of our individual classroom.

REACTIONS: READING BEYOND THE TEXTS

While I wanted my students to compare and contrast their experiences with those of the characters they were encountering, I was unprepared for the amount of personal storytelling the texts initially seemed to provoke. (6) Particularly in the first couple of weeks, I found myself increasingly and unexpectedly anxious because we seemed to be talking less and less about the books and more and more about ourselves. What exactly were my students learning? I wondered after our first two seminars. Education, argues Kevin Kumashiro, is about "crisis"; it is "about learning something new, something different; education is about change ... education (especially the process of learning something that tells us that the very ways in which we think and do things is not only wrong but also harmful) can be a very discomfiting process." (7) Although I recognized that my students were using our discussions to build trust, understanding, and a sense of their own identity as a group, I worried that their desire to share their own experiences was more about self-affirmation than it was about the kind of education Kumashiro describes. As each of my students juxtaposed the characters' experiences with their own, the readings became personally meaningful, eliciting memories, emotions, and knowledge that each student had to--in her own way--revisit and reconsider. Yet, even though my students seemed critical as they identified (or not) with the characters in the books, I worried that we were losing sight of the violence against LGBTQ students I had intended the literature to illustrate.

Initially, I was also frustrated with the literal way in which my students were conceiving of the texts' uses. Virtually all of their comments in those first two weeks concerned the texts' "teachability." Citing conservative "current school politics," one of my students, Jessica, was convinced that these materials would never be approved by a school board and make their way into the curriculum. Nevertheless, she saw them as important professional resources. "Even if they cannot talk about [these issues] as a class in the building," she wrote, "it is the responsibility of the teacher to tell the students where they can find the information."

By mid-semester, the group's responses started to change. While my students continued to narrate their experiences alongside those of the characters they were encountering, their comments also began to evidence what Chevalier and Houser describe as a "heightened awareness": "an increased contemplation concerning history and cultural stereotypes, the diminished life chances of members of disadvantaged groups, and the challenges faced by members of diverse communities attempting to maintain their cultural identities." (8) The context in which the characters' stories--and, therefore, their own narratives--took place was becoming increasingly significant. For Sarah, understanding this relationship between the individual and his or her larger community was especially important. "I am recognizing," she wrote,

   that young people who feel like they
   have no community need to find
   one and became they are outside of
   the mainstream community sometimes
   join together to form one. I
   still feel a concern for all people
   trapped in a position where they feel
   outside, but I am beginning to recognize
   a certain understanding for
   portraying communities as a major
   part of identity.

Whereas she had initially approached the texts and her character analyses rather narrowly, she was beginning to understand the importance of examining experiences more broadly in order to see and unpack larger institutional effects.

My students' conversations about the texts' teachability were also shifting--in part, I believe, because of a series of articles I had asked them to read that described teachers actively working to combat heterosexism and homophobia in their schools and classrooms. (9) Contrary to what they had previously thought, teachers were discussing sexuality and sexual orientation with their students. We began to look more specifically at my own students' classroom aspirations and at what they might need to do to make their classrooms safer learning spaces. They also began to contemplate how they would be perceived if they used these texts in their teaching. Their work, they realized, might be subject to the same prejudice, the same individual and institutional violence.

This concern with perceptions of their teaching and themselves indicated a growing awareness that they were both subjects of and agents within a social and political space larger than their classroom. My students' developing sense of themselves as professionals now included an awareness of their position within schools as institutions connected to larger communities. Whether or not the texts themselves were teachable became less important to the group than how their work as teachers might be enmeshed in a network of power relationships that extended into the diverse communities in which they would be teaching.

Because of this, I believe, my students began to wonder how their classroom support of LGBTQ students could and needed to be complemented by similar efforts in larger institutional settings. Similarly, as they were discovering what they could do as teachers, they were also beginning to sense that they might have some agency outside their classrooms as well. This they were curious about. What, they wondered, would they be able to accomplish institutionally in their own schools as well as in the communities their schools served?

THE FINAL PROJECT: BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

In the last month of the course, as my students began to discuss their final projects, they determined that they wanted them to counteract heterosexism and homophobia by providing substantive and socially responsible learning opportunities for the students they would be teaching. Initially, each suggested an individual project: an ethnography of a school that exemplified tolerance and safety for LGBTQ students, a curricular unit that focused explicitly on representations of gender and sexuality, a short play composed of monologues about LGBTQ students' experiences, and so on.

When I had conceived of the course, these were exactly the kinds of consciousness-raising classroom projects I had imagined. Each project, in its own way, attempted to understand and address the violence LGBTQ students face in school. It had not occurred to me that my students might want to move beyond observation and reflection (the ethnography) or applied methodology (the curricular unit and the play), or need to step outside of their (imagined) classrooms to investigate and actively engage the institutional structures that support and undermine their classroom practices. As a result, I was surprised when my students decided to abandon their individual ideas. Instead--and independent of me--they met, discussed, and designed an action research project in which they would investigate adolescents' access to books such as those we had been reading in class in their school and local public libraries.

As Erika, the group's elected representative, explained to me in a meeting she called to pitch the idea, the project had several strengths. First, she argued, it was authentically student-centered in that it had developed out of their emerging questions about the relationship between access to these types of books and the limits of (or limitations on) institutional support for LGBTQ youth. Second, the project would be democratic. Together the students would create an interview protocol which they would all follow. Then, each of the students would visit and conduct interviews with librarians at four libraries including two county/public libraries, one high school library, and one middle school library. Once all of the interviews had been completed, they would compile and analyze their findings. Third, the project would be community-based and provide them with a clearer sense of the process through which library collections were built as well as their various communities' attitudes regarding LGBTQ issues and LGBTQ adolescents' concerns.

This, Erika said, was particularly important because not only did it highlight institutional interrelationships by demonstrating the ways in which two public spaces, the school and the public library, either worked together or at odds with each other; it also provided my students with an opportunity to begin building institutional partnerships as they networked with local librarians. If they were going to combat heterosexism and homophobia in their individual classrooms--if they were going to teach queerly--they would need institutional support and these partnerships would be crucial.

At the time, I was impressed with the thoughtfulness of her presentation as well as with the way in which my students were attempting to engage all of the foundational principles around which the course had been organized, but I was hesitant. Even though I thought the project was interesting, student-centered, and community-based, I was not convinced that it would enable them to advocate for their future LGBTQ students in the same way that their individual projects did. Still caught up in classroom interventions (and even after approving the proposal), I could not see that my students were thinking more broadly about the project's possibilities than I was.

Having hammered out details, the group designed their interview protocol and headed out to their designated libraries. In the protocol, they requested information about the number of volumes in the libraries' adolescent collections as well as the percentage or number of those texts that dealt specifically with issues pertaining to adolescent gender and sexuality. They also asked a series of questions about the process through which books were added to the collection, challenges to books currently available at the library, the librarians' familiarity with books on, by, or about LGBTQ youth, academic and public requests for these books, and the availability of (library-based) outreach programs specifically targeted toward LGBTQ adolescents.

RESULTS AND REACTIONS

As the students conducted their interviews, they were met with both enthusiasm and resistance from the librarians with whom they spoke. Although several responded suspiciously to the students' inquiries, most were helpful and genuinely excited to have an opportunity to talk about their collections. Fourteen of the twenty librarians stated that they were familiar with at least several LGBTQ young adult titles. And, even if they did not have wide-ranging knowledge of the genre or the subject matter, they (along with the other six librarians who had not read any LGBTQ young adult literature) felt confident that they could make informed recommendations when and if they were asked.

What the students discovered, however, was that rarely had the librarians been asked. Very few could recall being approached by students, parents, or other patrons looking for young adult books about adolescent sexuality or with gay and lesbian characters or themes. Librarians at the public libraries cited very few inquiries from teachers. The situation at school libraries differed only slightly. There, librarians felt that their collections enhanced classroom instruction, but they rarely received requests from teachers for book talks on or texts about LGBTQ adolescents or adolescent sexuality. In most cases, they asserted, students were simply not researching these topics in class. Only in one high school library--a school with a very active Gay-Straight Alliance--did a librarian recollect teachers regularly seeking out books on adolescent gender and sexuality.

And, to my students' surprise, most of the LGBTQ literature they encountered in school collections was non-fiction rather than fiction. Only Erika, in her interview with a librarian at a community library that was located right next to the local public high school, encountered a fairly sizeable collection of LGBTQ fiction targeted specifically at young adults. Again, my students were informed, this was because the collections were designed to support school curricula. While the librarians certainly hoped to attend to individual students' interests and needs, this was often not their primary goal. Instead, they were responsible for building "academic collections," collections that reflected the reading expectations and research requirements (the "official knowledge") sanctioned by the school. (10)

Rarely did any of the libraries provide LGBTQ outreach. None of the public libraries provided book talks, discus sion groups, speakers, or programmatic opportunities specifically targeted toward LBGTQ adolescents and their families. (Of course, "one would be held if people showed enough interest," said one librarian.) At the middle schools, outreach was not quite so infrequent, because of their affiliations with high schools. For example, many of the middle school librarians cited support such as a gay-straight read-in, a student/community forum on LGBTQ concerns, and the existence of Gay-Straight Alliances and Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) at their associated high schools. Of the high school librarians to whom nay students spoke, only one of the five expressed serious reservations about providing LGBTQ outreach through the library. Outreach was the responsibility of guidance, she stated, and LGBTQ support organizations "would lead to ridicule and controversy in the district." In contrast, the other four librarians were much more open to and familiar with the aforementioned outreach opportunities.

Reflecting on their experience, all of my students agreed that it had been useful. Because of their research, they were much more aware of what LGBTQ library resources were and were not available to youth in their communities and, therefore, what was available to them as teachers. More importantly, they learned a lesson that went beyond their classrooms, a lesson about the institutions in which and with which they would be working: my students acquired a clearer and more complex understanding of how libraries operate--specifically, of how texts are selected and categorized, who has jurisdiction over those selections, and how selections differ depending on a particular library's patrons and purpose. No longer were public libraries neutral repositories. Instead, my students discovered that libraries actively engaged in political work as their collections either conformed to or challenged local, regional, and national prejudices against homosexuals. It was possible for libraries, like schools, to perpetuate as well as perpetrate violence against LGBTQ youth.

Despite my earlier reservations about their research, my students had been right. The interviews had not been, as Kumashiro warns, about repetition. Instead, they learned that the ways in which we (in this case schools and public libraries) think and do things is harmful. Confronted with a general lack of information, books, perceived interest, and on-going outreach, they learned an important lesson about how institutional violence works.

As a result, several of my students began to take a longer, harder look at their local and school communities. Erika was struck by the "correlations between school libraries and public libraries because it showed how responsive or supportive, or not, the public libraries (and librarians) were of the school district's needs." Jessica, too, found the interviews "helpful because [they] allowed us to see what resources were available to our students in the libraries they frequent" and because the group had "a chance to really look into what our students were being offered in our community."

For others, the interviews prompted them to consider the relationship between individual and institutional power more fully. This was particularly true for Chris as she contemplated the effect a librarians sense of social, political, and educational purpose had on the existing collection. Throughout the project, she came to understand that institutional support for LGBTQ adolescents was inherently tied to (though not reducible to) individual choice: in this case, what resources each librarian chose to order and thereby made available to the students in his or her school. "Examining the way in which this literature is regarded in both public and school libraries was enlightening," she said. "It appears that the kids, are best served by the libraries in their schools. Though even this is in doubt depending on how the librarian sees her job: as a servant or as a sentinel."

The significance of an individual's actions was reinforced in their conversations with the public and school librarians. My students were regularly asked to make book recommendations, recommendations which the various librarians took seriously. If the librarians were not familiar with available and appropriate texts, my students were and they discovered that their knowledge could actually provide an institutional intervention by helping to make sure that texts written by, about, and for LGBTQ adolescents became available to students who wanted and needed them.

In these moments, my students--as teachers as well as members of their respective communities--learned that they could effect institutional change. By making the effort to express an interest and share information, they could help transform school and community libraries into safer, better informed, more inclusive public spaces. This was a particularly empowering realization, one that could not have been achieved solely in a classroom or through the in-class study of LGBTQ young adult literature.

FINAL THOUGHT

As I look back on this experience, I now recognize that my assumptions about the role of literature in developing pre-service teachers' social and political consciousness were shortsighted. Yes, literature can educate by eliciting empathy. But, as I discovered through my students' final project, if we expect new teachers to take action against on-going school violence, consciousness-raising is not nearly enough. students read LGBTQ young adult literature--or any other ligature for that matter--they must be provided with on-going opportunities to understand how and why texts become highly contested political tools. My course as I first conceive of it did not do this, nor did it go far enough in helping my students understand the role they play in determining how those tools are (and are not) put to use.

As for pedagogy: my students' project made me reconsider whether or not I was effectively modeling democratic practices in class and whether such in-class practices are entirely possible. Although I wanted the experience to be student-centered, throughout the semester I found myself constantly reevaluating my own expectations and desires. Who was the course about? What did I want my students to learn? How did I want them to learn it? What Bid they need to know? My answers changed as my students ownership of the course increased. These on-going negotiations were as uncomfortable as they were necessary. They reminded me that democracy can not really be modeled. It has to be lived.

Similarly, whereas I had endeavored to teach queerly by identifying and analyzing sites of heterosexism and homophobia within the relative safety of our college classroom, my students' project challenged me to consider whether or not the pedagogy I envisioned required, instead, that we move beyond conventional classroom boundaries. Instead of merely casting a critical eye on ideologies and institutions, teaching queerly required me--us--to actively engage these sites, questioning and challenging them, rendering their participation in school violence against LGBTQ youth visible.

Finally, my students' research required me to rethink what I meant by empowerment. Even beyond the interventions that occur in classrooms and schools, my students' research taught me that pre-service teachers' professional preparation must extend into much larger public spaces if they are to understand the political context of the school community in which they are to work. And, as their understanding develops, teacher educators need to prepare them for and help them respond to the resistance they are likely to face in their classrooms and communities when they challenge heterosexist and institutional practices.

Yet, while my students became empowered as they took action in this project I hesitate to define their experience as "radical." Radical teaching and radical teachers recognize that the kind of crisis experienced by my students is often on-going. It requires a long-term commitment to being uncomfortable and constantly revisiting, as Kumashiro says, "the very ways in which we think and do things." Therefore despite their newfound awareness, the powerful lesson my students learned about the need for institutional intervention, and their increased sense of political agency, I worry that without regularly discomfiting experiences, they will lose their desire to look beyond their classrooms--to become radical teachers. Without sustained programmatic support, I fear that they will retreat from their active pursuit of institutional equity and focus their energy and attention on the consciousness-raising methodology that I now believe is not enough to combat heterosexism and homophobia. Even having conducted their research, my students evidenced this shift.

As the semester ended, only Erika explicitly continued to imagine institutional alternatives and express concerns about how the work she hoped to accomplish could be enhanced by or within a sympathetic institutional climate. Describing the kind of district in which she wanted to work, she envisioned one that would "support teachers' efforts to widen students' horizons rather than a district that would force me to stand alone on such issues." Jessica and Chris, in contrast, reaffirmed their commitment to literature itself by promising to keep abreast of new titles and regularly updating their personal collections. "I don't know if [my personal collection] would ever become a 'lending library'," admitted Chris, "but at least I could point to a book when a kid asked for guidance or information." Despite her awareness of the ways in which institutional lack of access to the texts constituted an act of violence. Chris's avowed personal (private) commitment to the literature did not seem to directly challenge it.

Jalisa returned to the space of her own classroom. "I will no longer ignore the word faggot in my classroom," she asserted. Instead, she vowed to "stop whatever I'm doing at the time and refer my students to our classroom conduct contract, which lists this type of name calling as sexual-harassment. Then I'm going to reiterate my lesson on sexual harassment." However. whether she and her students would identify and attempt to address sexual harassment outside of her classroom. or whether she would enlist the support and assistance of local institutions and organizations in doing so, I could not tell.

Sarah, too, wrote about the work she intended to do in her classroom. As a result of the course, she felt she could advocate for her LGBTQ students more openly. Yet, at the same time and despite her awareness that her in-class efforts would require institutional support, she seemed to abdicate responsibility for cultivating it. While she recognized that "my classroom and my relationships with my students do not have to be subject to the kind of quiet avoidance other teachers face," she shared, "I still maintain that I should wait until I am an established faculty member before making any movements that will affect an entire school." Even though she successfully challenged several library collections during her interviews, her activism retreated back into the private space of her future classroom.

Thus, while I believe the course did provide my students with an experience that will make them better advocates for their LGBTQ students, and while I contend that engaging in this action-research project was crucial to their developing social consciousness and political agency, how both ultimately affect their teaching remains to be seen. As they graduate and begin teaching, I continue to hope that they will remember and hold onto this experience--that they will continue to engage inequitable institutions--and that increased institutional awareness will inform the way in which they work to counteract violence and fight for truly safe schools.

NOTES

(1) GLSEN. 2003 National School Climate Survey, http://www.glsen.org

(2) GLSEN. 2003 National School Climate Survey.

(3) Most of my students were white, middle-class, heterosexual women in their early twenties. In terms of the five students who enrolled in the course. Erika, Sarah, and Jessica were representative of this particular population. Jalisa was a married African American woman in her early thirties, the mother of a young daughter, and a military veteran. Chris was a married white woman in her early fifties with three college-aged children

(4) Apple, M.W. & Beane. J.A. (Eds.) (1995 J. Democratic Schools. Alexandria. VA: ASCD. p. 7.

(5) Sears. J.T. (1999) "Teaching Queerly and Some Elementary Propositions." In Letts. W.J. & Sears, J.T. (Eds.) (1999) Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue about Sexualities and Schooling. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.; hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

(6) We were reading: Bauer, M.D. (Ed.) (1994). Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence. New York: HarperTrophy; Howe. J. (2003). The Misfits. New York: Aladdin; Garden, N. (1992). Annie on My Mind. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Levithan, D. (2003). Boy Meets Boy. New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers.

(7) Kumashiro, K. (2000). "Teaching and Learning through Desire, Crisis, and Difference: Perverted Reflections on Anti-Oppressive Education." Radical Teacher, 58, p. 7.

(8) Chevalier, M. & Houser, N.O. (1997). "Preservice Teachers' Multicultural Self-Development Through Adolescent Fiction." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 40, (6), p. 426-237.

(9) For example: Allan, C. (July 1999). "Poets of Comrades: Addressing Sexual Orientation" in the English Classroom, English Journal; Bravo, E. & Miller, L. [1994). What Can Teachers Do About Sexual Harassment? In Rethinking Schools: Teaching For Equity and Justice. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools; Gordon, L. (1994). What Do We Say When We Hear 'Faggot'? In Rethinking Schools: Teaching For Equity and Justice. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools; Johnston, A. (2001). Out Front: What schools can do to fight homophobia. Bill Bigelow et al. (Eds.). Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice, Vol. 2. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools.

(10) See Whelan, D.L. (2006). "Out and Ignored." School Library Journal 52, (1), p. 46-50; Apple, M.W. (1993). Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.