Exposed pedagogy: Investigating LGBTQ issues in collaboration with preservice teachers

Preparing teachers to serve the needs of children who have been historically marginalized is difficult work. Although a growing body of scholars and researchers has attempted to describe the complexities, challenges, and promises of such work, we are far from understanding how to do it well. While much of this discussion has addressed issues of race and ethnicity, LGBTQ concerns have been glaringly omitted. By continuing to overlook LGBTQ issues in education, we perpetuate heterosexism and maintain LGBTQ youth's marginalization. Considering previous research that suggests teachers lack knowledge about LGBTQ issues and are ill-equipped to construct pedagogies that are supportive of LGBTQ youth and families, this research aimed to create a joint learning project to foster greater LGBTQ competencies in the context of teacher preparation.; My belief that long-term, collaborative inquiry might better support pre-service teachers in understanding issues related to LGBTQ concerns guided this research. This action-oriented, qualitative research project emerged from a critical, feminist paradigm and relied on narrative methods. During the 2002--2003 academic year, the activities of nine student-participants were recorded. Data was primarily in the form of written responses to experiences at the university and reflections related to the larger community-based experiences our collaboration provided. Participants' responses to inquiry experiences related to LGBTQ issues were collected in the form of written papers and taped transcription of classroom conversations. In addition to the "texts" that students produced, the data corpus for this study consisted of my own reflective journal writing and field notes. Analysis and interpretation was conducted to develop understandings of the ways student-participants made sense of the experiences our LGBTQ-focused collaboration had provided.; This report offers a description of our year of inquiry. Our collaboration was influenced by the relationships that emerged among participants. Community development was essential to our collaborative work. In community, we were able to seek out experiences that assisted us in moving beyond the university in order to reflect on our own unexplored biases related LGBTQ issues. Following an emergent curriculum, striving for greater teacher/student parity, and collectively scaffolding experiences for one another were the kinds of practices that allowed us to expose these biases and take small steps toward activism. These practices resulted in what we came to call an exposed pedagogy. This research, then, offers pedagogical implications for engaging pre-service teachers with LGBTQ issues. It describes, in essence, how a group of unlikely collaborators came to implement an exposed pedagogy to explore lives beyond their own.