The Laramie Project as a Homophobic Disruption: How the Play Impacts Pre-Service Teachers' Preparation to Create Anti-Homophobic Schools

ABSTRACT

The Laramie Project is a play based on a collection of interviews with the community members of Laramie, Wyoming, where Mathew Shepard, a 21-year-old university student, was murdered. The idea for the play originated with a theatre group, The Tectonic Theater Project, which devoted 2 years to this project, conducting over 200 interviews. This article reports research findings using the play in teacher education courses as a homophobic disruption: A pedagogical interruptive strategy to shake up, shift, or destabilize heteronormativity and prepare pre-service teachers to create anti-homophobic schools. This study uses pre- and post-questionnaires with 89 pre-service teachers in four teacher education classes in Northern California.

KEYWORDS:

• Disruption
• heteronormativity
• higher education
• homophobia
• pre-service teachers
• queer pedagogy
• teacher education
• theatre performance