Cult Stud of Sci Educ (2011) 6:293–304 DOI 10.1007/s11422-011-9325-7 FORUM
Queer (v.) queer (v.): biology as curriculum, pedagogy, and being albeit queer (v.) Francis S. Broadway
Received: 24 December 2010 / Accepted: 24 January 2011 / Published online: 21 April 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract In order to advance the purpose of education as creating a sustainable world yet to be imagined, educationally, queer (v.) queer (v.) expounds curriculum, pedagogy and being, which has roots in sexuality—the public face of the private confluence of sexuality, gender, race and class, are a necessary framework for queer. If queer is a complicated conversation of strangers’ eros, then queer facilitates the creation of space, revolution and transformation. In other words, queer, for science education, is more than increasing and privileging the heteronormative and non-heteronormative science content that extends capitalism’s hegemony, but rather science as the dignity, identity, and loving and caring of and by one’s self and fellow human beings as strangers. Keywords Queer theory Science education Curriculum Pedagogy Identity/difference
‘‘The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house’’ (Lorde 1984, p. 110) Albeit that Jesse Bazzul and Heather Sykes (2011), following Vicky Snyder and Broadway (2004), successfully engaged in queering biology text, they did not queer their queering, ‘‘queer theory must persist in self-critiques’’ (Luhmann 1998, p. 151) even though to queer is the most important issue raised in Bazzul and Sykes’ paper, The Secret Identity of a Biology Textbook: straight and naturally sexed (2011). Upon rereading Snyder and Broadway (2004) and reading and rereading Bazzul and Sykes (2011), I wanted so much to read texts that queer what the respective authors had written, to queer their conclusions, and to be queer—to move beyond fashioning of bodies into stable identities whose knowledge is thought to spring from identity (Britzman 1995, p. 224). One might say that what actually happened in queering biology textbooks was that the more there is (was) a Forum response to Bazzul and Sykes (2011). The secret identity of a biology textbook: straight and naturally sexed. F. S. Broadway (&) Department of Curricular and Instructional Studies, The University of Akron, Akron, OH, USA e-mail:
[email protected]
123
294
F. S. Broadway
proclamation for change, the more that things remain the same—a rebellion that reformed a space into a well-defined place, ‘‘the embodiment of a purposefully created space that is a creation and enactment of the cultural and social conditions of participants’’ (CallejoPerez, Fain and Slater 2004, p. 1). Like Snyder and Broadway (2004), Bazzul and Sykes (2011) seemingly were privileging of queer (v.) if not positioning queer (n.) to become hegemonic: Science educators need to create a demand for textbooks that provide science in an equitable, socially relevant context and reflect the diverse nature of science that will, in turn, encourage developers and publishers to respond to and meet the needs of ALL students. Until then, teachers must give queer theory a home where its principles can be used to validate all students’ identities (Snyder and Broadway 2004, p. 632, caps in the original) and ‘‘any approach will require the science education community to actively engage with a large segment of society who has yet to see their humanity recognized in an objectified, categorized world’’ (Bazzul and Sykes 2011) through ‘‘a plea to add marginalized voices to an overpopulated site… to make room for those it must exclude’’ (Britzman 1995, p. 219 (1998). In other words, Snyder and Broadway (2004) and Bazzul and Sykes (2011), do not seek to dismantle hegemony, to subvert ‘‘suffusing, blanketing and colonizing a society with ideology that sustains the ruling classes and groups; power by representing their privilege and power as natural’’ (Brosio 1994, pp. 241–242), but to include the ‘‘queer’’ in hegemony. In the sense that Snyder and Broadway (2004) and Bazzul and Sykes (2011) are substituting queer or queer (n.) for the Negro in Carter Woodson’s (1933/1990) assertion: they hope to make the Negro conform quickly to the standard of the whites and thus remove pretext for the barriers between the races. They do not realize, however, that even if the Negroes do successfully imitate the whites, nothing new has thereby been accomplished (p. 19). Thus, ‘‘[W]here are the sources of questioning, of restlessness? How are we to move the young to break with the given, the taken-for granted—to move towards what might be, what is not yet?’’ (Greene 1986, p. 427). Thus, this forum is in search of a queer (v.) queer (v). Note: Queer can be a verb (v.), a noun (n.), and an adjective (adj.); most often within this essay, queer appears in one form—queer—without denotation of its part of speech. Situated within: [t]he form or shape of an object or system is frequently related to use, operation, or function[; f]unction frequently relies on form[; … and s]tudents should be able to explain function by referring to form and explain form by referring to function (National Research Council 1996, p. 119) and Bill Pinar’s (2001) pronouncement that ‘‘[he] borrow[ed] from Ida B. Wells the practice of using quotation marks around apparently self-evident terms in order to problematize them’’ (p. 27), ‘‘Queer’’ when it appears without denotation of part of speech remains authorially equivocal. In these cases, the reader must ascertain if queer is a verb, most often writ as ‘‘to queer’’ or ‘‘queering’’; a noun, writ a person, a queer, a faggot; or an adjective, i.e., (queer) theory; however, when the author wants to elucidate the function of the form, the part of speech is indicated, for example the
123
Queer (v.) queer (v.)
295
title: Queer (v.) queer (v.). Additionally, the form of the part of speech is not indicated and this supports queer (v.) needs of the author’s voice. For example, queer (v.) can be the ‘‘to queer’’, the infinitive, or the participle, ‘‘queering’’. These forms, the infinitive and the participial, of queer is what necessitates the indication of the part of speech as the author does not want to resolve the connotation of the form, but rather to explicate its function that queer (v.) is an action and/or a state rather than queer (n.) as a people, place, thing, or idea or queer (adj.) as a descriptor albeit that the participial queer (v.) can serve as an adjective, queering or queered as well as a gerund (noun), queering. In order to engage in queer (v.) queer (v.), three conceptual elements are important: explicating science education as a queer curriculum; elucidating science education as a form of pedagogy, specifically a queer pedagogy; and exposing science as being. A queer curriculum ‘‘threaten[s] to dismantle the dominant educational narrative in which one passes from ignorance to knowledge about both the ‘self’ and other’’ (Miller 1998, p. 372) to make ‘‘the self unfamiliar’’ (p. 370, italic in the original); a queer pedagogy is an impertinent performance: an interest in thinking against the thought of one’s conceptual foundations; an interest in studying the skeletons of learning and teaching that haunt one’s responses, anxieties, and categorical imperatives; and a persistent concern with whether pedagogical relations can allow more room to maneuver in thinking the unthought of education (Britzman 1995, p. 215–216); and a being that is strangers [who]… are determined much more by the fact that they undermine and crack open from the inside all polar categories of social order. Strangers are neither enemies nor friends, neither natives or foreigners; they are near and not near, far, yet here; they are neighbors, who would be closed off by neighbors as non-neighbors (Phelan 2001, p. 30).
Something about, maybe, perhaps, a queer curriculum In their most simple reduction, Snyder and Broadway (2004) and Bazzul and Sykes (2011) call for the inclusion of queer (n.) in or as the content of biology specifically and science education in general. Although challenging the need to have biology textbooks that are ‘‘power-infused cultural texts’’ (Bazzul and Sykes 2011, p. 26) that must posit a literacy beyond memorization, understanding biology as a way of knowing about the natural world, addressing biological problems in the future, and connecting biology to students’ everyday lives (Snyder and Broadway 2004, p. 632), queering biology textbooks seemingly mean adding queer (n.) biology ideas, concepts and terms to the myriad of vocabulary, terminology, and jargon that creates the discipline called biology which is ‘‘strongly wedded to conceptions/structures typified by linear relationships among fragmented and isolated concepts’’ (Gess-Newsome and Lederman 1993, p. 42). In other words Bazzul and Sykes (2011) in queering biology textbooks seem to follow Snyder and Broadway (2004) wanting to add, ‘‘sexuality different from the norm’’ (p. 632) and ‘‘mention or discussion of sexuality or identity beyond the set heterosexual norm or the male/female sex binary’’ to ‘‘expository texts that are written in an encyclopedic manner’’ (Chiappetta, Sethna and Fillman 1993, p. 798). Therefore in queering biology textbooks,
123
296
F. S. Broadway
the content of biology becomes behemothian in textbooks that are ‘‘much less likely to make connections between key ideas [i.e., sexuality] and other ideas [i.e. way of knowing about the natural world, addressing biological problems in the future, and connecting biology to students’ everyday lives’’ (Snyder and Broadway 2004, p. 632) and ‘‘a large segment of society who has yet to see their humanity recognized in an objectified, categorized world’’ (Roseman, Stern and Koppal 2010, p. 62)]. From another perspective no matter how much the plea is to be more inclusive, Bazzul and Sykes (2011) engage as ‘‘the oppressed, instead of strivings for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or ‘sub-oppressors’’’ (Freire 1970/2000, p. 45) rather than queer (v.). In other words, if there is only queer in biology textbooks, then all things will be better if not all right, but queer cannot be perceived as queer (adv.) normalized inclusive biological natural. Thus, not being about (biology) content, queering biology textbooks must be about curriculum albeit a queer curriculum.
‘‘Curriculum is an extraordinarily complicated conversation’’ (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery and Taubman 1995) Firstly, like Snyder and Broadway (2004), Bazzul and Sykes’ (2011) fixation on sexuality in queering biology textbooks conjures Dennis Sumara and Brent Davis’ (1999) position ‘‘that studies of sexuality must become intertwined with all questions of curricular relations [whereby] curriculum has an obligation to interrupt heteronormative thinking—not only to promote social justice, but to broaden possibilities for perceiving, interpreting, and representing experience’’ (p. 191); however, Bazzul and Sykes’ (2011) do not extend their queering into curriculum. Curriculum is queer in the sense that ‘‘‘queer’…organizes sexual practice and bodily pleasure in ways that are quite different from, and hence contest, dominant approaches to sexuality with their attending normative notions about sexual identities, pleasures and power [and] also as a way of signaling resistance to a whole range of social conventions of sexual normality’’ (Stone 2001, pp. 27–28). Secondly, like Snyder and Broadway (2004), Bazzul and Sykes’s argument (2011) does not extend biology beyond the school walls or into the public in which the private resides. In other words, one transactional reading (Rosenblatt 1995) of Bazzul and Sykes’ (2011) implies that the purpose of queering is to prepare ‘‘students to become disciplinary specialists in the academic disciplines’’ (Pinar 2004, p. 194) rather than ‘‘a conception of curriculum [as a complicated conversation] that directs school knowledge to individual’s lived experience, experience understood as subjective and social, that is, sexed, gendered, racialized, classed participants in understanding and living through the historical moment’’ (p. 194). This is to say that by fronting biology as curriculum, Bazzul and Sykes’ (2011) need to explicate sexuality as curriculum, as skin (Sumara 1996) that which allows the private and the public to exist or that that simply separates the private from the public. In other words, a queer curriculum, sorely needed to be elucidated by Bazzul and Sykes’ (2011), is the ‘‘living storied lives on storied landscapes’’ (Clandinin and Connelly 2000, p. 145) between the ‘‘to run the course of the inner coursing’’ (Doll 2000, p. 217) which is the private and the ‘‘producer and product of culture. If we understand culture to be a system of meaning available to actors situated in shared space, time, history, and possibility, then it is reasonable to thing about curriculum … as acts if interpretation (Grumet 1989, p. 7)’’, which is the public. A queer curriculum necessitates a community that ‘‘would become spaces for experimentation and visioning of a new possibilities for selfcreation’’ (Phelan 2001, p. 135).
123
Queer (v.) queer (v.)
297
Something about, maybe, perhaps, a queer pedagogy Although the limited focus on curriculum by Bazzul and Sykes (2011) is explainable, to comment that a queer curriculum necessitates a queer pedagogy would have broadened what queer means. Bazzul and Sykes (2011) talks about delivery of ‘‘an unbiased, valueneutral rendering of natural/material phenomenon’’ and Snyder and Broadway (2004) explicate ‘‘[i]nquiry [is] a queering pedagogy [that] places the students into the real world of science-in-the-making and teaches them to broaden their approach on analyzing controversial topics that require a scientifically literate populace to influence policy’’ (p. 632); however, pedagogy is a relationship between teacher and learner (Freire 1970/2000) or master and disciple (Steiner 2003). The companion of a queer curriculum explicates pedagogy as ‘‘the ‘perversity of pederasty’—pederasty, commonly found across cultures and historical epoch, is defined here as an intimate adult-adolescent relationship that includes a sexual element’’ (Sears 1998, p. 73); however Snyder and Broadway (2004) exclaim ‘‘[t]he term ‘queer’ creates dissonance and concern in some educators who may believe it advances the ‘gay agenda’’’ (p. 621). Indeed, ‘‘[q]ueer is not a neutral term … [and] has become the chosen term for many who have come to be dissatisfied with what they perceive to be the assimilationist politics associated with the term gay and lesbian’’ (Pinar 1998, p. 3), but queer pedagogy is missing from Snyder and Broadway (2004) and Bazzul and Sykes (2011) implying that curriculum and pedagogy may be separated. If sexuality connotes curriculum, then, pedagogy embodies sexuality. ‘‘Teaching and learning are informed by an otherwise inexpressible sexuality of the human soul’’ (Steiner 2003, p. 27), if teaching and learning is synonymous with curriculum and pedagogy. Hence, the infatuation with sexuality has less to do with queer (n.), but more to do with ‘‘[i]t is not possible to be a teacher without loving one’s students’’ (Freire 1998, p. 15). Thus, if Bazzul and Sykes (2011) are queer (v.), then queering biology textbooks must be a queer pedagogy, which unfortunately resides safely in Butterfield’s (1974) public mask rather than the private face of ‘‘a monster…some horrendous presence or apparition that explodes all of your standards for harmony, order, and ethical conduct’’ (Campbell 1988, p. 278) or as Bazzul and Sykes (2011) utters, the ‘‘grotesque’’.
‘‘Eros and teaching are inextricable’’ (Steiner 2003, p. 140) Pedagogy, through ‘‘bodies, language, culture, and myriad public spheres to contest dominant cultural practices, as well as dominant representations and ideologies’’ (Rodriguez 1998, p. 175), is the ‘‘relationship of identity and knowledge, of being and knowing, of becoming and learning’’ (Fifield 2004, p. 1). However, Susanne Luhmann (1998) states: The pedagogy at work is one where the desire for knowledge interferes with the repetition of both heterosexual and lesbian/gay normalization … [and] exceeds the incorporation of queer content into curricula and the worry over finding teaching strategies that make this content more palatable to students (p. 141). In other words, desire—sexualized [and raced, which is conflated with sex (Pinar 2006)]— is pedagogy and exists not in the presentation (by the Teacher) and reception (by the Student) of (biological) content knowledge, but as in George Steiner’s (2003) model of the Master—not the Master whose disciples would, in turn, disseminate and perfect his doctrines (p. 138) or the one who
123
298
F. S. Broadway
ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man (Campbell 1949/1968, p. 30, italic in the original) as ‘‘a hero ain’t nothin but a sandwich’’ (Childress 1973/2003, p. 74)—and disciple—‘‘the other disciple, whom Jesus loved,’’ John 20:2 (KJV) and ‘‘Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of His disciples, whom Jesus loved’’ John 13:23 (KJV). Thus queer pedagogy makes public love, if only as desire. However it is pedagogy as sexuality that escaped Bazzul and Sykes (2011). If sexuality is described by Snyder and Broadway (2004) as ‘‘[i]n the United States… strongly linked to … [the] reproductive in nature, and thus any behavior not linked to this becomes ‘unnatural’ [and] defines sexuality in terms of morality, in terms of right and wrong behaviors’’ (p. 618), then pedagogy must queer (v.) in order to rescue, to exploit and to construct a relationship that destroys the hierarchy of teacher/student very much as ‘‘‘you are the only lover I’ve ever had who’s been really worthy of me,’ boast Alcibiades, if only because Socrates, like any authentic Master, ‘is the only man in the world who can make me feel ashamed’’’ (Steiner 2003, p. 27) albeit ‘‘Socrates himself professes ignorance; the wisdom attributed to him by the oracle at Delphi consists only in the clear perception of his own unknowing’’ (p. 28). Thus, a queer pedagogy, as sexual, gendered, raced, and political, complicates and disrupts the narrative of who teaches and who is taught and what is taught and what is teaching—‘‘atque inter silvas academi quaerere verum’’ (Horace 2001, p. 136). Finally, for the queer (biology) content described by Bazzul and Sykes’ (2011), there must exist pedagogy, ‘‘passing on that which does not yet exist’’ (Schubert 2010, p. 59), for curriculum, ‘‘what we choose to remember about our past, what we believe about the present, what is hope for the future’’ (Pinar 2004, p. 20) that are both queer (v.).
Being (a Queer (v.)) Because there is the authorial voice, ‘‘the imprint of [the author] on [the author’s] writing’’ (Graves 1994, p. 81), in biology textbooks that is expressed through informal, passive voice, polysyllabic, sesquipedalian, stogy and dull writing (Dutch 2005), a transactional reading (Rosenblatt 1995) of a biology textbook must include a reader who ‘‘carries on a give-andtake with the signs of the page’’ (Rosenblatt 1935/1985, p. 26–27). The reading is both efferent, a ‘‘stance [that] pays more attention to the cognitive, the referential, the factual, the analytic, the logical, the quantitative aspects of meaning’’ (Rosenblatt 1994/2005, p. 12) and aesthetic, a ‘‘stance [that] pays more attention to the sensuous, the affective, the emotive, the qualitative’’ (p. 12). Furthermore, if biology texts are transactionally read, then there is (queer) curriculum—a complicated conversation (if only between the reader and the text) and a (queer) pedagogy—‘‘the question of how we come to know and how knowledge is produced in the interaction between teacher/text and student’’ (Luhmann 1998, p. 148). In other words, the biology textbooks obligate a ‘‘being (for instance the self) [who] does not exist prior to knowledge and meaning, but [the] being comes into existence through the act of creating meaning and knowledge’’ (Springgay and Freedman 2010, p. 233). However the existence of this being, who reads as a means of ascertaining the curricular questions: what knowledge is of most worth? (Harding 1998) and pedagogy, ‘‘the infinite proliferation of new identification … rather than finding the self in knowledge and representations, learning is about the process of risking the self’’ (Luhmann 1998, p. 153) is, at best, implicitly
123
Queer (v.) queer (v.)
299
assumed by Snyder and Broadway (2004) and Bazzul and Sykes (2011) rather than made explicit. Thus, a queer curriculum and queer pedagogy shifts ‘‘from what (and how) the author writes or the teacher teaches, to what the student understands, or what the reader reads’’ (Luhmann 1998, p. 148) and creates a queer (v.) who is.
‘‘The self does not lock itself into rigid oppositional identity politics and never mistakes its identity for itself’’ (Carlson 1998, p. 118) In the simplest of terms, there is a conflict between identity (often expressed as the politics of identity) and difference; this conflict suggests that difference is an identity. Sumara and Davis (1998) posit, ‘‘The form of curriculum and the relations of pedagogy [may] be appropriated as spaces to interpret the minutiae of differences among persons, not merely among categories of persons’’ (p. 216). The identity/difference paradox pits identity as ‘‘to name yourself rather than accept the ‘master’s’ name for you’’ (Carlson 1998, p. 109) and difference which ‘‘involves making unfamiliar any one version of theory, practice, research, knowledge, selves, the ‘field,’ or creative solidarity’’ (Miller 2010, p. 97). In other words, the identity of identity (politics)/difference is queer (v.)—to meld difference. Nicholas Bogg’s (1999) commentary on James Baldwin’s (1976) young adult storybook, Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood, illuminates the quagmire that is the politics of identity versus difference In this sense, Blinky is a paradigmatically queer reader. Gazing through her eyeglasses, her deadlocked double consciousness is actually tripled—she is black, American, and emphatically queer, a hybridization of man and woman through her gender performance and, through her glasses, an interfusion of black and white subjectivity. Blinky is … a limited trickster at the crossroads of gender, sexuality, and race who manipulates hegemonic, white systems of domination (p. 137). Shane Phelan (2001) offers the (sexual) stranger as the identity of identity and the identity of difference, by asking the ‘‘normal’’ stranger to look at the stranger’s stranger. ‘‘This happens both within groups, as when ‘good homosexuals’ make their bid for entry by condemning ‘bad queers’ and among groups that many see as closely allied’’ (p. 115). According to Phelan, strangers are not just ‘not like us,’ as enemies are, but may ‘pretend’ to be like us. In fact, the more the strangers attempt to become ‘like us’ the more threatening s/he becomes, and the greater the potentials for betrayal as relevant boundaries are seemingly crossed. At the same time, the stranger’s attempts to become ‘like us’ reaffirm the superiority of the dominant group (p. 31). Thus, the (re)action or sense making of the stranger’s stranger enlightens the gaze of the stranger to what it is to be ‘‘in-between’’—phenomenologically meaning in neither the subject nor the object but in between the two in a somatized or embodied gestalt (Pinar et al. 1995, p. 455, italic in the original). The stranger’s stranger, for Phelan (2001), is bisexuality and transgender because ‘‘bisexuality consistently falls outside of both the medical model and the homoerotic one, this confounding analyses that implicitly rely on either’’ (p. 126), ‘‘manifests its full threat, not to lesbian or gay communities, politics, or sex, but to identity itself’’ (p. 129), and ‘‘operat[es] most strongly today to challenge and transform ideas about gender and sexuality’’ (p. 127). The beings complicit in queer curriculum and queer pedagogy are not consumed and subsumed into queer curriculum and
123
300
F. S. Broadway
queer pedagogy, but rather ‘‘challenge traditional ideas’’ (p. 131). Phelan posits for bi and trans individuals that (1) ‘‘to recognize that sex and gender are not isomorphic, and that neither sex nor gender is itself self-identical and clearly bounded, affords the possibility of creating new identities that are valorized, not by ‘naturalness,’ but by their expression of agency and creativity’’ (p. 131); and (2) ‘‘to continue to question boundaries, to open ourselves to the change we say we seek’’ (p. 132). Phelan would create ‘‘a community, … a home: not a hall of mirrors, reflecting oneself back consistently, but a place where one could be recognized as a person with both a history and a future that has not yet been written’’ (p. 137) and ‘‘citizenship will not be bought by drawing new boundaries’’ (p. 138). In other words, if both Snyder and Broadway (2004) and Bazzul and Sykes (2011) were rewritten to suggest as their research purpose to embody an individual with a queer curriculum and queer pedagogy then both would explicate an individual of difference as well as a science education in general, and biology education specifically, much like a queer (v.) identity that is ‘‘open-ended, unpredictable, resistant to rationalizing accountability schemes, more about divergence than convergence, and more about production than transmission’’ (Fifield and Swain 2002, p. 189).
Conclusion Queer theory comprises a set of ‘master’s tools’ as it straps on the master’s theories, whether or not (or to what extent) queer theory opposes ‘the master’s house’—and at what point queer theory itself becomes the house that screams for dismantling (Garber 2001, p. 4) This forum concerning Bazzul and Sykes (2011) presents a summary of ideas to open communication, to craft a supportive critique, with respectful suggestions, and to demonstrate openness to difference. After presenting the notion that queer is queer (v.) queer (v.), curriculum, pedagogy and being were three constructs advanced. A queer (v.) curriculum, pedagogy and being, was sketched through examination of literature outside the discipline of science education with the hope of encouraging science educators and researchers to look outside science education for ways of knowing or theories and conceptual frameworks by and through, which to look at science education. In other words, science education needs to come out, ‘‘an act of self-acknowledgement, self-acceptance, self-affirmation, and self-revelation intimately linked to how he views himself and how he interacts with the world’’ (Merla 1996, p. xvi), ‘‘to come out of their disciplinary closets and listen to what others in other fields have to say’’ (Luhmann 1998, p. 152). What is missing from this discussion is how queer (theory) helps (science) classroom teachers do what they do, or is expected of them by the hegemonic capitalist school often called education (Brosio 1994) and, more importantly, how a teacher could use queer (theory) tomorrow in front of a classroom of 25–30 plus ‘‘learners’’. Queer (theory) is not prescriptive. To say that queer (theory) is a way of knowing also makes little difference to the classroom teacher, where schooling is about (capitalistic or, if elephants could fly, Marxist) production, if not about enabling the capitalist state to function by championing capital and the accumulation of capital at the same time that the capitalist state apparently ingratiates the masses and their interest (Brosio 1994) through the production of a obedient, complacent and compliant citizenry often time communicated through a grade of ‘‘A’’ on evaluations. These ‘‘evaluations’’ frequently denote a highly probable degree of obedient, complacency and compliance, rather than ‘‘mastery’’ especially as measured by ethically
123
Queer (v.) queer (v.)
301
questionable test administered by Richard Brosio (1994) Janus-faced State with its capitalist economic imperative confounded with the democratic-egalitarian imperative: The capitalist economic imperative requests that the schools produce competent, willing workers; whereas, the democratic-egalitarian imperative requests that public education develop critical, well-rounded, citizen-workers who are committed to complex roles beyond work—and who may use their critical skills to analyze capitalist work relations and command of the economy (p. 1). Although just saying to teachers queer (v.), does not help teachers who profess to install intellectualism in their learners and who themselves are anti-intellectual (Pinar 2004) as demonstrated by the number of teachers who profess to be non-readers but whose paramount teaching assignment is reading. Queer necessitates insisting that queer (v.) is what the purpose of school is or in other words how to make schools educative. In short, to collapse back to the positivist notion of measurability, teachers, ‘‘awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future’’ (Steiner 2003, p. 183–184). If ‘‘awaken’’ another human being with the expectation that the human being, who is loved and loves is the ‘‘multiple, contested, even seemingly contradictory subject positions’’ (Letts 2002, p. 122), then education is queer (v.). This journey invites space for transformation and revolution rather than creates queer as a rebellious place for reform (Broadway 2010). The maintenance of space and active participation in revolutions and transformations is itself queer, if only because one can be revolutionary only when one takes part in revolution, transformative only when one is actively transforming or creating space by shattering boundaries; thus space, transformation and revolution are queer (v.). Queer has been defined by presenting a narrow and often bigoted definition of queer but always with the intention of marching home the notion that queer (v.) queers; however, ‘‘queer’’ seeks to become hegemonic normal natural. Again, sexuality was the means of proving the need for space, revolution and transformation. For example, the definition of stranger through expounding Phelan’s play with the annihilation of place, reform and rebellion and the ‘‘b’’ and ‘‘t’’ of lgbt(q) or just where Phelan shows that queers are seeking identity or queers (n.), in seeking a queer (n.) identity, denotes exclusion. Therefore, what is queer (v.) should/must be a question asked after reading this work since ‘‘you do not need an identity to become yourself; you need an identity to become like someone else’’ (Delany 1996, p. 19), Building on the focus of sexuality explored queerly by Snyder and Broadway (2004) and Bazzul and Sykes (2011) and [t]he question of sexuality is central to the question of becoming a citizen, to crafting a self who a invent over and over again, the courage to stand up for the self, to feel passionately for the conditions of others, to create a life from the experiments of learning to love and making from this learning to love, a love of learning (Britzman 2000, p. 39), sexuality cannot be separated from gender and as important, sexuality and gender cannot be separated from race and class. In other words, in speaking of sexuality, the reader speaks of gender, race, and class. (I exclude naming sexual orientation, gender assignment, etc. as these make sense only through mucking through sex, gender, race and class.) Maybe, if there is an explicit and open conversation around sexuality, there can be an open conversation about race and class if and only if class and race are socially designed constructs and sex is ‘‘natural’’. With an understanding that a definition of sex or sexuality
123
302
F. S. Broadway
and, for that matter gender, race, and class is missing, silent and withheld; sex (and its arguable social construct gender) is conflated with race and class. Rather than thinking about (biology) content, (science) teaching, and schooling (Wolcott 2002), the complicated conversation that is (science) curriculum and pedagogy and (science) education is difference or the conflation of sex, gender, race, and class.
References Baldwin, J. (1976). Little man little man: A story of childhood. New York, NY: Dial Press. Bazzul, J., & Sykes, H. (2011). The secret identity of a biology textbook: Straight and naturally sexed. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 6(2). doi:10.1007/s11422-010-9297-z. Boggs, N. (1999). Of mimicry and (Little Man Little) man: James Baldwin and the identity politics of race and sexuality. In D. A. McBride (Ed.), James Baldwin now (pp. 122–160). New York, NY: New York University Press. Britzman, D. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight. Educational Theory, 45(2), 151–165. Broadway, F. S. (2010). Praxis, space and revolution or I just can’t be (queer). In J. Henderson (Ed.), The path less taken: Immanent critique in curriculum and pedagogy. Troy NY: Educator’s International Press. Brosio, R. A. (1994). A radical democratic critique of capitalist education. New York: Peter Lang. Brtizman, D. (2000). Precocious education. In S. Talburt & S. Steinberg (Eds.), Thinking queer (pp. 33–59). New York: Peter Lang. Butterfield, S. (1974). Black autobiography in America. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Callejo-Perez, D. M., Slater, J. J., & Fain, S. M. (2004). Pedagogy of place: Seeing space as cultural education. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Campbell, J. (1949/1968). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Campbell, J. (1988). The power of myth. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Carlson, D. (1998). Who am I? Gay identity and a democratic politics of self. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 107–120). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Chiappetta, E. L., Sethna, G. H., & Fillman, D. A. (1993). Do middle school life science textbooks provide a balance of scientific literacy themes? Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 30, 787–797. Childress, A. (1973/2003). A hero ain’t nothin’ but a sandwich. New York: Speak. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research (1st ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Council, National. Research. (1996). National science education standards. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Delany, S. R. (1996). Coming/Out. In P. Merla (Ed.), Boys like us: Gay writers tell their coming out stories (pp. 1–26). New York: Avon Books. Doll, M. W. (2000). Like letters in running water: A mythopoetics of curriculum. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Dutch, S. I. (2005). Why textbooks are the way they are. Academic Question, 18(4), 34–48. Fifield, S. (2004, October). Getting to know you? LGBT teachers and the epistemological prospects of coming out versus being a sexual stranger. Presented at the Centre for Research into Professional Practice, Learning, and Education, Charles Stuart University. Fifield, S., & Swain, H. L. (2002). Heteronormativity and common sense in science (teacher) education. In R. M. Kisson (Ed.), Getting ready for Benjamin: Preparing teachers for sexual diversity in the classroom (pp. 177–190). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P. (1970/2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th Anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Continuum. Freire, P. (1998). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Garber, L. (2001). Identity poetics: Race, class, and the lesbian-feminist roots of queer theory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Gess-Newsome, J., & Lederman, N. G. (1993). Preservice biology teachers’ knowledge structures as a function of professional teacher education: A year-long assessment. Science Education, 77, 25–45. Graves, D. H. (1994). A fresh look at writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Greene, M. (1986). In search of a critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 56, 427–441.
123
Queer (v.) queer (v.)
303
Grumet, M. R. (1989). Word worlds: The literary reference for curriculum criticism. The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 9(1), 7–22. Harding, S. (1998). Is science multicultural? postcolonialisms, feminisms, and epistemologies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Horace. (2001). Book two, epistle 2. In: (Ferry, D, Trans.), The epistles of Horace. New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux. Lorde, A. (1984). The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. In: Lorde, A. (Aut.), Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press. Luhmann, S. (1998). Queering/querying pedagogy? Or, pedagogy is a pretty queer thing. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 141–155). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Merla, P. (1996). Introduction. In P. Merla (Ed.), Boys like us: Gay writers tell their coming out stories (pp. xv–xviii). New York: Avon Books. Miller, J. L. (1998). Autobiography as a queer curriculum practice. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 365–373). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Miller, J. L. (2010). Response to Ruben A. Gaztambide-Fernandez: Communities without consensus. In E. Malewski (Ed.), Curriculum studies handbook: The next moment (pp. 95–100). New York, NY: Routledge. Phelan, S. (2001). Sexual strangers: Gays, lesbians, and dilemmas of citizenship. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Pinar, W. F. (1998). Introduction. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 1–48). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Pinar, W. F. (2001). The gender of racial politics and violence in America: Lynching prison rape, and the crisis of masculinity. New York: Peter Lang. Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pinar, W. F. (2006). Race, religion, and a curriculum of reparation: Teacher education for a multicultural society. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. (1995). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourse. New York: Peter Lang. Rodriguez, N. (1998). (Queer) youth as political and pedagogical. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 173–186). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Roseman, J. E., Stern, L., & Koppal, M. (2010). A method for analyzing the coherence of high school biology text books. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47, 47–70. Rosenblatt, L. (1935/1985). Literature as exploration. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. Rosenblatt, L. M. (1994/2005). The transactional theory of reading and writing, In: Making meaning with texts: Selected Essays (pp. 1–37). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Rosenblatt, L. M. (1995). Literature as exploration (5th ed.). New York, NY: The Modern Language Association of America. Schubert, W. H. (2010). Journeys of expansion and aynopsis: Tensions in books that shaped curriculum inquiry, 1968–Present. Curriculum Inquiry, 40, 17–94. Sears, J. (1998). A generational and theoretical analysis of culture and male (homo)sexuality. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Queer theory in education (pp. 73–105). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Snyder, V. L., & Broadway, F. S. (2004). Queering high school biology textbooks. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41, 617–636. Springgay, S., & Freedman, D. (2010). Sleeping with cake and other touchable encounters: Performing a bodied curriculum. In E. Malewski (Ed.), Curriculum studies handbook: The next moment (pp. 228–239). New York: Routledge. Steiner, G. (2003). Lessons of the masters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stone, K. (2001). Queer commentary and the Hebrew Bible. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press. Sumara, D. (1996). Private readings in public: Schooling the literary imagination. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Sumara, D., & Davis, B. (1999). Interrupting heteronormativity: Toward a queer curriculum theory. Curriculum Inquiry, 29, 191–208. Wolcott, H. F. (2002). Sneaky kid and its aftermath: Ethics and intimacy in fieldwork. New York, NY: AltaMira Press. Woodson, C. G. (1933/1990). The mis-education of the Negro. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc.
123
304
F. S. Broadway
Author Biography Francis Broadway is a professor of education at the University of Akron with a research focus on science education and curriculum studies. After 19 years of being a high school and middle school science and mathematics teacher, Francis received his Ph.D. in Elementary Education from the University of South Carolina. Although most of his teaching within the Department of Curricular and Instructional Studies at the undergraduate level involves content methods and literacy courses for kindergarten through grade three teacher candidates, he teaches graduate courses in concepts of curriculum, curriculum and critical pedagogy, and curriculum and religion. His research is the application of queer theory and (reconceptualized) curriculum to issues in science education from a practitioner’s perspective and masculinity in the early childhood/elementary school; however, most of his energy is spent facilitating graduate students in finding, shaping, and articulating their voice as teachers and researchers and his personal examination of and practical problem solving concerning himself as the one-caring.
123
