Professor in residence model for queering the edges of school: a project in humanizing methodology and love

Abstract

Through my work with Black youth, in the form of writing and literacy research, I have engaged with them on the edges of school. I joined students in hallways, offices, libraries, and lunch rooms to engage in dialogue with them about being and becoming. At the intersection of my conducting literacy research and being (queer, Black, female, mother, teacher, and scholar) on the edge of school is that literacy is crucial in subverting oppressive racial, body, beauty, and gender politics as well as in restoring spaces for individual and communal change, growth, and love. Using Black Feminist Thought and an Endarkened Feminist Epistemology, this study examined my teaching, researching, and being (queer) on the edge of West High School and illuminated my experiences with three youths, Ava, Nilah, and Jabir, in order to provide insight into how a Professor in Residence model might be used to queer educational spaces, beginning with those of the edges of school.

Keywords:

• Queer educator
• edge of school space
• humanizing research

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The introduction to this paper is derived from a speech I made during the National Conference of Teachers of English National conference in 2018 after receiving the Alan C. Purves Award for an article I published in Research in the Teaching of English.

2 I intentionally use unlove to mean the absence of love as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Latrise P. Johnson

Latrise P. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Secondary English Language Arts and Literacy at the University of Alabama. She is an equity-oriented scholar whose research examines the literacy practices of historically marginalized youth in and outside of school.