Navigating the relationship between policy and practice: competing discourses of fear and care in teachers’ sense-making about the FAIR Education Act

Abstract

In this article, I examine the relationship between large-scale social discourses and local, school discourses as it plays out in conversations about gender and sexuality with and among teachers, specifically in the context of the passage of the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act in California. Grounded in feminist poststructural theories of discourse, I discuss qualitative data from a year-long study at one public middle school in Southern California where I provided professional development. I examine what happens when teachers are given opportunities to make sense of their roles in attending to topics of gender and sexual diversity, through conversations and dialogue. The following research questions guided my analyses: What themes arise in teachers’ conversations about their roles and responsibilities in the implementation of the FAIR Education Act? (How) are these themes produced in relationship with large-scale social discourses about gender and sexual diversity in schools? I argue that examining this relationship provides key insights into the ways teachers make sense of equity-focused policies that are meant to shift sociopolitical paradigms, and their roles and responsibilities in the implementation of such policies.

Keywords:

• LGBTQ
• gender
• sexuality
• policy
• teacher professional development
• discourse

Notes

1. Throughout this paper, various forms of acronyms are used, depending on the sources to which I refer. LGBTQ refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer. ‘Queer’ includes people who are questioning, gender expansive, and/or who do not identify in any specific category related to gender and sexuality and is meant to capture the complexities of gender and sexual diversity.

2. Unique to topics of gender and sexual diversity, it is the case that ‘no promo homo’ laws, ‘right to discriminate laws,’ and other laws that stigmatize LGBTQ people are still in place, both on state and local levels; these laws forbid teachers from discussing LGBTQ people, topics, and issues, including sexual health and HIV/AIDS awareness, in a ‘positive light – if at all’ – and ‘some laws require that teachers actively portray LGBT people in a negative or inaccurate way.’ Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina continue to have laws that ban educators from including LGBTQ people and/ or history or that allow them to talk about queer identities in a positive light (http://glsen.org/learn/policy/issues/nopromohomo).

2. Unique to topics of gender and sexual diversity, it is the case that ‘no promo homo’ laws, ‘right to discriminate laws,’ and other laws that stigmatize LGBTQ people are still in place, both on state and local levels; these laws forbid teachers from discussing LGBTQ people, topics, and issues, including sexual health and HIV/AIDS awareness, in a ‘positive light – if at all’ – and ‘some laws require that teachers actively portray LGBT people in a negative or inaccurate way.’ Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina continue to have laws that ban educators from including LGBTQ people and/ or history or that allow them to talk about queer identities in a positive light (http://glsen.org/learn/policy/issues/nopromohomo).

3. All names, including the name of the school, are pseudonyms.

4. Student demographics for independent charter schools in this district for the year 2014–15 included 71% students who were Latino, 12% students who were African American, 10% students who were white, and 3% students who were Asian (http://www.ccsa.org/2015LAUSD_Charters_FactSheet_Fall_2015_.pdf).

5. To protect the privacy of participants, I did not include these data; given the small number of participants, and other identity markers reported, confidentiality might have been sacrificed.

6. Since its passage, some parent organizations and groups are trying to overturn FAIR. They have argued that this is a matter of parents’ rights. The letter that I crafted was based on real ‘concerns’ and parent feedback that I found in online articles.

7. I use the idea of ‘healing’ alongside of terms more commonly used in queer theory related to challenging heteronormativity (e.g. disrupting). Healing signifies an attentive and intentional process of both challenging the language and assumptions of heteronormativity and addressing the harm caused by heteronormativity. In schools, when taken for granted norms, practices, and systems are disrupted without attention to their healing, students are often put into ‘crisis’ (Kumashiro 2000). When it comes to issues of identity that have caused the need for healing, we can’t afford this. Therefore, in my view, the concept of healing is central to the larger project of challenging heteronormativity.