Literacy (Dis)Orientations in a Secondary Classroom: Possibilities and Limits of an Intersectional LGBTQ+‐Inclusive Curriculum

Abstract

Drawing from a yearlong literacy ethnography conducted at a high school in a Midwestern U.S. city, this article extends queer literacies and queer pedagogies scholarship by exploring the frictions and resonances between strategies of inclusion and queering. While inclusion strategies emphasize using expanded representations of sexuality and gender, such as of LGBTQ+ life, queering approaches often trouble inclusion through, for instance, questioning normativities and epistemologies and embracing partiality, uncertainty, and crisis in learning. To unpack interconnections between inclusion and queering, I present an ethnographic case of a lesson in a sophomore humanities course, focusing on the teacherly moves of an English language arts educator leading an instructional conversation about a nonfiction article describing intersections among sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class with respect to food insecurity. Engaging Ahmed's ( 2006) queer theorization of orientations, I develop the heuristic of literacy (dis)orientations to describe the layered mixture of classroom literacy performances challenging and reifying oppressive values regarding intersections among sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class. The teacher disoriented students away from (homo)normativities regarding knowledge of LGBTQ+ communities and reoriented them toward and around nuanced, intersectional understandings of queer and trans life. However, these anti-oppressive possibilities were limited by orientations around a banking model of education and binaries. This ethnographic case suggests that educators sanctioning literacy orientations toward intersectional LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum presents possibilities for liberatory social change insofar as they disorient students away from education-as-banking and epistemological binaries and reorient them around alternative ways of knowing, specifically intersectionality as a queering epistemology.

Reifying, Disorienting and Restoring Gender Binaries in Dialogic Literature Discussions

“…In line with previous studies (e.g., Blackburn, 2005;Godley, 2006;Mangin, 2022;Schey, 2022;Schey & Blackburn, 2019), our findings demonstrate the presence of dominant gender orientations in class. Hence, both the teachers and the students tended to rely on gender stereotypes in their interpretations of the text.…”

“…In other words, as Schey (2022) emphasizes, disorientations do not necessarily culminate in radical reorientations. Instead, moments of disorientation may be fleeting and fragile, as the normative binary order is quickly reestablished.…”

“…According to Schey (2022), literacy performances entail literacy orientations, which are the different ways in which we "turn toward words and worlds" (p. 28). Applying Ahmed's (2020) notion of disorientation, defined as "disturb[ing] the order of things" and "'becoming oblique' of the world" (p. 161), Schey (2022) argues that queer literacy education opens up subversive possibilities for disand reorientations. For example, he demonstrates how a teacher's "repeated and persistent questioning" served to disorient and at times even reorient the class away from dominant readings and writings of words and worlds.…”

“…Schey and Blackburn (2019) refer to such disorientations as ruptures in literacy events, defining ruptures as moments when the underlying norms, values, and conventions for using literacy become unsettled, destabilized, and questioned to such a degree that people, through interaction, attend to these dynamics, whether to contain them and shut them down as problems or to explore and learn from them. (p. 63) In other words, as Schey (2022) emphasizes, disorientations do not necessarily culminate in radical reorientations. Instead, moments of disorientation may be fleeting and fragile, as the normative binary order is quickly reestablished.…”

“…According to Schey (2022), literacy performances entail literacy orientations , which are the different ways in which we “turn toward words and worlds” (p. 28). Applying Ahmed's (2020) notion of disorientation , defined as “disturb[ing] the order of things” and “‘becoming oblique’ of the world” (p. 161), Schey (2022) argues that queer literacy education opens up subversive possibilities for dis‐ and reorientations. For example, he demonstrates how a teacher's “repeated and persistent questioning” served to disorient and at times even reorient the class away from dominant readings and writings of words and worlds.…”