Pedagogies and Life Histories of Non-Heterosexual Physical Educators.
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (Seattle, WA, April 10-14, 2001). This research was supported by the Virginia Horne Henry Fund for Issues in Women's Physical Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This paper draws on recent poststructural, psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theorizing to analyze progressive pedagogies described by homosexual physical educators and professors. It is based on two life history projects conducted with physical educators. The overall purpose of the research was to examine the social construction of female sexualities within the physical education profession. The teachers' personal narratives described how their identities (whether they were racial, gendered, or sexual) shaped their pedagogies. One teacher came out as a lesbian to her students each year in a planned manner, then formally used her lesbian identity to illustrate the classroom management principle of pride as an element of respect. Another teacher made explicit the link between her lesbian desire and her ethical response as a teacher, though that link was only articulated in non-teaching conversations and was not part of a formal anti-homophobic pedagogy. Two other teachers' narratives made overt ties between racial identity and pedagogy. They outlined direct links between their teaching and different forms of racism. The links between lesbian identity and anti-racist responses were less explicit. (Contains 46 references.)
interesting read on non-hetero physical educators and their teachings on gender and healthy relationships