Silencing Efforts: It's Time for the Homophobic Student Evaluations

In the last year, my university switched to online student evaluations. This is bad in the sense that fewer students fill them out, and when they do, tend to spend less time on them. But it's kinda cool in that I get to see them much sooner and, if a student raises a point I want to consider, I have time to implement it before I'm halfway through the next semester.

I don't want to seem like an egomaniac or anything, but I'm a pretty good teacher. I've won the university-wide teaching award, and my evaluations are generally quite positive. This semester, some students wrote some particularly sweet and lovely things in their evaluations, and I find this quite touching, and encouraging. I also find it necessary to my survival in this field, because I also got a handful of students who wrote that they wished I didn't talk about queer stuff so much. They talked about my "gay agenda" and how I'm apparently biased.

They're right, you know. I do have a gay agenda and I'm totes biased. My agenda and bias paid off, though, because I made my classroom safer for some of my kids, the ones who feel uncomfortable and unsafe in other settings. That I didn't uphold heteronormativity, as was expected of me, or pretend to be "neutral" on these issues, is good. It's also fucking scary as hell. I don't want to stop teaching, ever.

Part of the reason I think that the kids felt like we talked about queer history so much is that they never hear about it anywhere else. As Kristen said, any amount of discussion about queer stuff above 0% is a lot to them, because it's novel. But I've written about how it is essential to teach queer history before. And because I like it and I can, I'm going to go ahead and quote Feinberg again here:

I always wanted to leave something important behind. Remember the history book you gave me for Christmas?... I've been going to the library, looking up our history. There's a ton of it in anthropology books, a ton of it, Ruth. We haven't always been hated. Why didn't we grow up knowing that?... It's changed the way I think. I grew up believing the way things are now is the way they've always been, so why even bother trying to change the world? But just finding out that it was ever different, even if it was long ago, made me feel things could change again. Whether or not I live to see it. At work, when everyone else is at lunch, I've been typesetting all the history I've found, trying to make it look as important as it feels to me. That's what I want to leave behind, Ruth - the history of this ancient path we're walking. I want it to help us restore our dignity.

- Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

Remember that? So, so important. My queer kids aren't finding themselves in history in other classes, so it's my fucking responsibility to make sure they find themselves in my class.

A lot of these students are wrestling with the idea that anyone who isn't a cis straight white man has bias. Because I'm out to my students, I take great risk, as do all out people in education everywhere. I can't cave to their expectations that I will be neutral. It's not possible for me. I'm not neutral. Neutral means invisibility, and invisibility means death, in the most literal sense. Queer kids are killing themselves, getting kicked out of their homes, running away from abusive situations. Am I supposed to be quiet when my kids are dying? Fuck that. I'll take making some privileged straight kids annoyed or uncomfortable over letting kids die because they think they're alone.

I wrote about a study awhile back that talked about how openly queer teachers are negatively reviewed thanks to "modern homonegativity" (the "I'm not anti-gay but..." shit), and - more interesting to me - comments on the study that come from people in the field, some of whom are openly queer. I'm going to re-post the comment I liked the most from the Inside Higher Ed piece here, and I want to emphasize that he's talking about doctoral students:

Michael Dumas: Interestingly, I just taught about LGBT issues last night in a doctoral class on diversity in education. The course is taught by two instructors, both African American, one straight-identified female, and one gay male (me). If this year's student evaluations are similar to last year's, I fully expect to see one or two students complain that "too much time" was spent on gay issues, even though the LGBT content is--coincidentally-- only about 1/10 of the subject matter covered. I also can expect similarly critical comments about how much time was spent on race and African Americans, even though both instructors are conscious about including other populations in readings, media and examples. I don't want to comment on methodological rigor of the study without reading it, but I can say that it is consistent with my experience, and that of a whole range of LGBT, women and people of color in the academy. And yes, negative and untruthful course evaluations can hurt one in the tenure and promotion process.

 Now, as for the question raised above about why a professor would reveal her or his sexual orientation, the study states that sexual orientation was indicated in the autobiographical statement given to research participants. It did NOT say that instructors listed their sexual identity on the syllabus itself! And yes, students do talk amongst themselves about who their professors are as people; they see photos on our desks; they know about our involvement in various advocacy groups on campus; and, importantly, they make assumptions based on gender performance (length of hair, style of dress, speaking voice). So it is entirely reasonable that a student would be aware of, or at least presume, specific sexual identities.

Yesssssssss. You can go back to my earlier post on that, linked to above, to see my commentary on it. I'm posting it here for therapeutic reasons. I needed to read that again.

Look, I don't expect that my department is going to let me off the hook for the homophobic evaluations, ever. I have every expectation of having to explain myself. And so I wrote this post in large part to strengthen myself. I need to have all these thoughts at the top of my head when I get called in for the meeting. Maybe I will be surprised, but I expect that someone will tell me to tone it down, or be strategic, or talk about queer stuff less. I'm hoping the folks in my department will be allies, but I'm never sure. And isn't that a problem?

Image via.

The Next Frontier? Queer Teachers in K-12

We have made progress in queer rights over the course of history, but we still have a long way to go. For instance, it's still difficult in many places to be out as a K-12 teacher. There is a lot we can learn from history to help explain why this is such an enormous hurdle. Before we dive into it, I want to note (again) that progress is not inevitable. Queer spaces always have to be contested, and even though 53% of Americans are in support of gay marriage doesn't mean that the 20-40% of homeless youth who identify as LGBTQ are good to go. Right? Anyway.

As we know, teaching became more feminized in the common school movement. (I'd recommend reading that post and this one if you haven't before, because it's helpful background information, I think.) It also became explicitly tied to values, in that education was meant to instill the values in children that would make them good republican citizens. And good republican citizens, apparently, don't rock the boat as far as gender goes.

We don't have a lot of good data on LGBTQ teachers in the 19th century, but there have always been queer people - although queer liberation movements only became even minimally potent in the post-WWII era, and did not become a mass movement until the 1960s.

The sexual psychopath laws of the 1940s-1960s came out of the medicalization of homosexuality, and further limited the freedom of gays and lesbians. A pervasive hostility, expressed through religion, law, and science, kept homosexuality submerged and constrained queer people from openly acknowledging their presence in society. This made it more difficult to come out and find communities, so that when LGBTQ people were harassed, they could not rely on community outcry to provide support or help prevent future occurrences.

The 1950s were especially difficult for LGBTQ people, including teachers. A rising tide of anti-communism turned on gays and lesbians, as the danger posed by "sexual perverts" became a keystone of right-wing partisan rhetoric. Joseph McCarthy latched onto the idea, and other anticommunist crusaders also thought of LGBTQs as just as dangerous as communists.

In Florida, the 1950s and 1960s were especially hard on queer teachers, thanks to the Johns Committee, which I've already quickly explained here. That book whose cover is pictured above is about this, and you should definitely read it if this is of interest to you. Anyway, the Johns Committee was a witch hunt meant to keep queer people out of schools, operating under the old "you can obviously tell who's gay and they are sneaking under the radar ready to recruit your kids" paradox. Anita Bryant used the same thing in 1977 with the Save Our Children campaign, and we're seeing it again now: We're in yer schools, indoctrinatin' yer youth.

But we live in The Future. We can use our phones to find a nearby vegan restaurant and then call it to see if it can deal with gluten-free while in a strange random city. We have Derby Earth! So teachers can totes be out and queer and have no problems, right?

Of course not. Because I always worry that long posts will make Kyrie sad, and because there are dissertations that could be written on this issue and I have to figure out how to tackle it, the deal on the ground now is gonna have to be Part Two. Have something to say that you want included? Holla at me. Everyone else, stay tuned.

Teaching on the Edge

I teach undergraduate history of education at my university, and I really love it. My students are smart, engaged, and interesting. They have a lot to say about just about anything that comes up, and I'm very lucky, every semester, to get to work with the students here.

One thing we do in my class is talk about queer issues. I refuse to participate in my own invisibility by never bringing up queer history out of fear. I don't raise my own queer identity on the first day of class or anything, but if (when) it comes up, it comes up. I believe in being my authentic self, and that this is doing the work of creating space for other queer people in my classroom. Other people have done the work to create that space for me. I hope I tell those people this enough, that I'm not sure I could really exist here without them. The only thing I can really do is pay it forward.

Today, we talked about the Johns Committee. Briefly, this was a committee started by Florida State Senator Charlie Johns in 1956. It rode the coattails of McCarthyism and focused on ridding the state government of queer people. Johns went after K-12 teachers first, as they are meant to be the standard-bearers of morality in US society.* Hundreds lost their jobs, their families, their lives. Before long, Johns came to the University of Florida, and was welcomed by the administration with open arms. Queer professors were fired, students expelled. It only took an accusation of homosexuality to ruin everything.

I think this was challenging for some of my students to think about, that this kind of thing happened in their own back yard. I understand why. I thought it was important to emphasize that persecution and discrimination are real problems for the queer community today. Marriage rights are a fine goal, but when we have something like 50% of homeless youth in some areas identifying as LGBTQ, we need to address matters of life and death. You know? So I'm out to my class, though we don't talk about me. They're here to learn history, and that's what they need to do, I keep the focus steadily on that. Honestly, I think students like that I'm not lying to them, or at least, that's what they tell me. But being out to them means relinquishing some power. They can use that as ammunition if they ever want to.

My beautiful friend Dierdre told me a story a couple of days ago, from When Things Fall Apart, which I have not read, about a little girl who had to fight Fear. She didn't want to fight Fear, but she had to. So she went to Fear, prostrated herself, and said, "How do I beat you?" Fear thanked her for showing that respect, and said, "I will yell and get in your face and do everything I can to be loud, and you can acknowledge me, but if you never do what I tell you to do, you will win."

Fear tells people, I think, to avoid talking about issues of queer identity and queer history in their classes. It's hard to point to your own institution and say, "This is what has gone wrong here, this is what is still going wrong," because it could so easily come back to get you.

This creating-spaces project is not easy to do. I know some of you have dealt with this, too - not necessarily just with queer issues - and I want to know what your strategies are. Can we talk about this?

I really need to write something about queer teachers in K-12 classrooms. It's coming. I think I just had to get this out of my system first, and I want to talk to some people about their experiences before I post. Please do volunteer if you have something to say about that.

* If this interests you, go read Karen Graves's marvelous And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida's Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers. Karen is one of those space-making mentors of mine, and I have so much still to learn from her for as long as she's willing to teach me. Also, check out Jackie Blount's Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century. Jackie, too, is someone I deeply admire as a human being and is quite an inspiration to me.

The Feminization of Teaching, Part 2: Schoolmarms and the 21st Century

The Wisconsin teacher strikes have been on my mind a great deal lately, as they have for many people in this country. It's no secret that teachers are facing enormous disrespect. For starters, they are grossly underpaid, considering they are meant to do one of the most important jobs in America. They also continue to be held to certain "moral" standards by jerkface Republicans. Teachers are being deprofessionalized even as we speak, through [problematic] standardized testing, broken accountability measures, and an increasingly canned curriculum. It's also a fact that teachers tend to be women. There is, in my mind, a clear link between the semi-professional (at best) status of teachers and the fact that teaching is considered a feminine career.

In the last post, I wrote about the nineteenth century issues of teacher professionalization. Fast forward to 2011, when the relative professional status of teachers is at the top of many peoples' minds. No Child Left Behind requires states to apply a statewide standardized test - in Florida, where I live, this is the FCAT - upon which school performance and teacher performance will be graded. Teachers now have to be sure they prepare their students for the tests in order to prevent their schools from losing funding,* and have less and less flexibility to determine what is right for their students at any given time. Is this not what teachers are trained to do?

On top of this, the fact is that most teachers are women, still, especially in elementary schools.** And teachers still get paid considerably less than other professionals do. This is no mistake - as we can see, this was intended from the beginning of public education in the United States. But just because something has historical precedent doesn't make it right. I know lots of teachers, and none of them argue that they do a better job teaching now that they have less control over what they are doing. They are less able to serve their students, because they are so busy trying to serve the state. The fact that teachers tend to be women, and that the men involved in K-12 education are most likely to be administrators (or, to some extent, high school teachers) is not a coincidence. It was deliberately established this way based on several very sexist ideas, as we know. Not only do we need to diversify the teaching force, we also need to start treating teachers like the professionals they are. Not only is this fair and anti-sexist, but it's what is best for their students.

* Because it makes LOADS of sense to take money away from struggling schools and give it to the schools that are already doing well!
** I am well aware that teachers also tend to be white, middle-class, and monolingual. I don't think the whiteness of teachers is a coincidence, either. I'm planning to write about this in the future, but feel free to comment away on this issue should you be so moved.

The Feminization of Teaching, Part 1: Historical Precedent

Teachers’ professional status is a big issue in the country right now. I want to discuss contemporary issues, but I think it’s worth getting into the historical issues first. Stay tuned for Part 2, which will address what is happening now. The low status of teachers and the feminization of teaching are easily seen from the birth of a public school system in this country. The common school movement of the 1830s-1850s is the beginning of the story.

Horace Mann is the person who comes to the minds of education historians when they think of common schools. While I am usually reluctant to narrow a movement down to one person, in this case, it makes a bit more sense: Horace Mann was the state secretary of education for Massachusetts, and he was worried that the new republic would fail without a school system that promoted Protestant, middle class values. He worked tirelessly to spread his ideas throughout the state of Massachusetts, and eventually the rest of the Northeast. He is the face of the common school movement. He wanted a moral education for a moral republic, and he believed this meant teachers had to be models of morality as well. For several reasons, he thought, women were best suited to the job:

1. Women were thought of as the more natural caretakers of children. He thought women were more nurturing and therefore better suited to dealing with kids (schools at the time tended to be of the one-room schoolhouse variety, with kids aged 2-14 falling under a single teacher’s authority. How the hell someone is supposed to deal with that age range is beyond me). This is ridiculous, of course. And there is evidence to show that people did not wholeheartedly accept this view even then. A “manual mania” trend started up mid-century that was meant to explain how women should best care for their homes and families. If this is the gender naturally suited to children, why did they need instruction manuals? From our 21st century perspective, it is even easier to see that women are not biologically destined to be nurturers, and that some men are. That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with the non-nurturing women or the nurturing men. Rather, it’s an issue of social expectations. Apparently they weren't foisted on me: I’m a woman, and if someone told me I’d have to deal with a group of young kids and teenagers all by my lonesome, you’d see a Jess-shaped hole in the wall.

2. Horace Mann also openly acknowledged that women could be paid 2/3 less than men, because they had no other career options. So right from the beginning, these teachers were supposed to be paid less than men for work that Mann acknowledged was difficult. But women could not be expected to become lawyers or doctors or do any sort of trade, like blacksmithing. Teaching was it. Women are still paid less than men no matter what the job: we are still making only $.77 to the male dollar. I’ve known many teachers who needed a second income, either from a spouse or from doing some other job like bartending to make ends meet. It’s pathetic and depressing, and why I get so enraged when assholes like Scott Walker, with his $100,000+ salary and pension, talk about how teachers need to be willing to make sacrifices. Teachers are already sacrificing by going into the field: they are not earning the pay they deserve, they have to deal with people taking them less seriously than they would doctors or lawyers, and, as we will discuss, they often lose certain individual freedoms.

3. In addition to women being natural caretakers and unable to bargain for a higher salary, they were considered more moral than men. In fact, the common school reformers believed that men were 20:1 more likely to engage in vice. Therefore, women were the only appropriate teachers for a moral republic. This puts a great deal of pressure on teachers not only to turn their class of 2-14 year old kids into angelic moral beings, but also to be perfectly moral themselves. I always have students in my history class who start off thinking that this is somehow complimentary to women. But the fact is, women are people, just like men are people. Some women do things Horace Mann would think are bad (drinking, for example, or spending too much money, or being promiscuous). Men do too, though. There is no “better” gender. Any variation between genders is far outweighed by variation within genders. So women are not better suited to modeling moral behavior. Aside from being factually incorrect, this morality premise presents another issue: the policing of women’s behavior. If the entire point of this common school experiment was to make the nation more moral, then the behavior of teachers – women, remember – outside of school becomes just as important as their behavior in school. Women were meant to model morality for the entire community, not just their classrooms. So what happens to women who are not falling into line? They not only get fired, they become an example of society’s decline. “Immoral” teachers are considered especially pernicious. Stay tuned for a future post discussing the problems faced by LGBTQ teachers in the past and the present thanks to these oppressive ideas about gendered morality. Here’s a spoiler, though: if a teacher’s morality and what she does in her personal life is the point on which society’s health is balanced, can you imagine what a bunch of homophobic jackasses will do when they find out she is sleeping with another lady? And this is not to ignore gay men – they are not, after all, excluded from the homophobic jackassery rampant in society, and gay male teachers have come under just as much scrutiny as lesbian teachers.

Interestingly, Horace Mann wanted to make teaching more professional. He was very concerned that teachers get appropriately educated for teaching, and that teaching be standardized across the state. He got into hot water pretty early on with a group of Boston teachers who did not want this guy, who had never been a teacher, telling them what to do. They did not want administrators dictating how classrooms should be run. From the beginning, teachers worried that what he was actually doing was taking away what status and autonomy they had.

Tomorrow, I will post some ruminations on the current issues in education and teacher deprofessionalization. Thanks for sticking through a history post - you're a champ.