Promising Pedagogy: Advancing the Educational Experience of Queer Students Through Transformative Leadership

ABSTRACT

The school experience for queer youth is often quite different from that of their heterosexual and gender-conforming peers; yet it is often the c ase that little attention is given to the disparate and inequitable educational and social conditions under which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth must learn. In fact, the entirety of pedagogical structures in many schools creates milieus where queer youth, those who have loved ones who are queer, and those who are merely perceived to be queer are systematically marginalized and deprived of their right to a safe, supportive, and equitable educational experience. Transformative leadership theory (TLT) inspires educational leaders to create inclusive and excellent schools for all youth. Neither a prescriptive model nor a process-oriented theory, TLT offers eight tenets that operate in concert to form an authentic way of being informing and guiding leaders’ decisions and actions toward the goal of individual, organizational, and societal change.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender identity
• hetero/cisnormativity
• homo/transphobia
• inclusive pedagogy
• LGBTQ
• marginalization
• oppression
• sexual orientation
• social justice
• transformative leadership

Notes

1. I have chosen to use the term queer in addition to the more common acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) to embody the totality of complex identities represented by sexual and gender minorities for two reasons. First, as Mayo (2014) explained, “Queer is a concept and identity that works against problematic forms of normalization, troubling the exclusions that any category of identity may enact” (p. 21). Second, as Tooms (2007) asserted, the word queer has been used for so much of the last century as an insult; by recontextualizing it in a positive light, we can diminish its power to inflict harm.