Chicana feminists such as Maylei Blackwell, Cherrie Moraga, and Anna Nieto-Gómez of the 1960s Chicano Movement called for a gendered critique of racial activism mired in the stultification of Chicana leadership, ultimately galvanizing epistemology and theory grounded in a Chicana way of knowing. In particular, the introduction of a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in the 1990s to the field of education centered the reconciliation and healing of education, knowledge, and knowledge holders dehumanized by the exclusionary logics of colonialism pervasive in educational spaces. Consequently, crafting research methodologies of a Chicana hybrid nature, both locating and healing the fractured embodiment of knowledge educational actors draw upon, is critical to the groundwork of a more socially just educational system. Focused on the hybridity or the duality of knowing and the damage created by the colonial separation of such knowledge from knowledge holders, methodologies must be curated to locate and fuse back together what was torn apart. Mestiza Methodology was developed to locate the liminal space in which Chicanas collectively recount experiences leading to the separation of who they are and what they know in the academic arena as a means to recover, reclaim, and reconcile oneself to the pursuit of an education decolonized.
Article
Mestiza Methodology as a Hybrid Research Design
Amanda Jo Cordova
Article
Navigating Change: Pacific Islanders, Race, Sport, and Pipelines to Higher Education
Keali'I Kukahiko
Tagata Pasifika (Pacific People) is a transnational affiliation whose collective colonial experiences provide island nations of Oceania a means for contestation over local discourses of power and race. Employing the principle of Tagata Pasifika within higher education necessitates recognition of how postsecondary institutions are significant sites of conflict that engender the collective resistance among Pasifika communities for the following reasons: (a) to close the educational opportunity gap between Pasifika communities and spheres of influence—positions of power that dictate policies, social circumstances, and human living conditions; (b) to affirm Pasifika participation in the knowledge production process by developing ontological self-efficacy and decolonizing spaces in higher education that erase and marginalize Pasifika ontologies; and (c) to engage action research as opportunities that enact various forms of sovereignty, such as the ability to participate in cultural practices as authentic and legitimate ways of knowing and being or recognizing Pasifika intellectual participation as a process of action, or inaction, informed by cultural and experiential values. A salient college access point for Pasifika communities is the phenomena of college athletics because Pasifika college football players are 56 times more likely to matriculate to the National Football League. However, low graduation rates—only 11% of Pasifika college football players graduated from the Football Championship Series college division in 2015—have made this “untraditional” pathway an extractive pipeline that provides the National Collegiate Athletic Association membership institutions with athletic labor. Although college athletes continue to have the conditions of their admissions leveraged against them to prevent student resistance/activism, student-athletes have an unprecedented potential for influence in the “post-COVID” landscape of college athletics.
Article
Negotiating Transnational Mobility and Gender Definitions in the Context of Migration
Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot
The rise of mobility and transnationalism perspectives in the social sciences has contributed to a burgeoning literature on the cross-border movements of people. Gender as a conceptual lens has increasingly taken a central stage in the analyses, unveiling unequal power relations as well as unmasking the often-hidden macro-social processes and structures that shape them. As a category of difference, gender influences individuals’ attitudes and behavior, including their decision to migrate or not across borders of nation-states. This raises the question of how transnational mobility and gender intersect in the lives of individuals. To shed light on this issue, this article takes stock of the literature on transnational migrations associated with social reproduction: labor, marriage, and reproductive migrations. Such research reveals individuals’ tactics to negotiate their transnational mobility and gender definitions: using the dominant gender scripts in the country of origin, reconciling the gender ideologies in their countries of origin and destination, or aligning their narratives to specific moral values. Transnational mobility acquires different social meanings at certain points in time and in varying contexts, whereas gender remains at large anchored to its heteronormative foundation. Finally, based on the analysis of existing studies, a more holistic approach to transnational mobility through a sexuality-inclusive, process-oriented, subjectivity- and agency-focused, and time-sensitive framework is called for.
Article
“Night Wives” and the Education of Girls With Disabilities in Sierra Leone
Ibrahim Richard Bangura, Janet Njelesani, and Donald Njelesani
Girls with disabilities should receive the same opportunities to remain in school and complete education as their non-disabled peers. Education leads to more prosperous futures and is a way of overcoming poverty, particularly in contexts where the intersectionality of being a girl and having a disability increases vulnerability. In Sierra Leone, the risk of leaving school because of being a “night wife” is a concern for girls with disabilities. The concept of night wives is based on the experiences of girls and women with disabilities who are being used as sex partners by men who would not be seen openly with women with disabilities and who have no intention of long-term commitment. Men are abandoning girls and women with disabilities, often after the women become pregnant and have dropped out of school. This practice leaves girls and women with disabilities without support, education, or the means to raise a child, and further intensifies the vulnerability of girls and women with disabilities.
Article
Parental Involvement
Barbara Otto and Julia Karbach
In the recent years, parental involvement in a child’s academic development has been of great scientific interest. As parental involvement is a broad term it encompasses many parental activities that need to be further specified. In line with this, no widely accepted theoretical framework of parental involvement exists so far. Moreover, in terms of assessment of parental involvement a large variety of instruments have been applied: Parental involvement has been assessed by behavioral observations, self-reports, or reports by others.
In spite of a missing definition and widely accepted theoretical framework, a myriad of research has been conducted to identify determinants and correlates of parental involvement. In this context, several empirical studies have revealed that the way parents get involved in their children’s schooling depends on a diverse set of variables, which refer not only to the parents themselves, but also to the family setting and the school context. However, the main body of research has focused on the effects of parental involvement. Although it has been found to be a significant predictor for children’s academic success parental involvement also seems to show changes related to the child’s age and grade level. Moreover, the different dimensions of parental involvement seem to have differential predictive value for students’ academic outcomes. Less empirical studies have been done referring to the associations of parental involvement with academic outcomes other than performance. Moreover, the very few intercultural studies conducted in this field suggest there might be similarities but also differences between Western and Eastern parents in the way how they get involved with their children’s education. Based on the presented aspects, future research should aim at developing a consistent definition and widely accepted theoretical framework of parental involvement as well as further investigate underlying determinants and mechanisms.
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Physical Education, Sports, and Gender
Beccy Watson, Jayne Caudwell, Belinda Wheaton, and Louise Mansfield
Researching gender across physical education (PE), sport, and physical activity (PA) has firm associations with feminism. As a political movement for gender justice, feminist research examines the ways in which active bodies are dynamic and evolving. This feminist scrutiny is underpinned by scholarship that explores both formal educational and sporting contexts as well as informal activities. The term sport incorporates a range of physical practices, and a review of extant literature demonstrates the persistence of gendered power relations and the consequences this has for PE, sport, and PA. While the disengagement of girls in formal PE has been recognized as a longstanding and ongoing challenge, PE remains narrowly conceived and defined, often with negative consequences for the young people involved. Attempts to be inclusive in research practice expose a persistent dominance of the Global North in knowledge production in sport, PE, and PA scholarship and highlight prevailing discourses that impact negatively on engaging with complex issues in different contexts. Empirical research studies inform praxis whereby feminist researchers analyze barriers to participation across a wide range of contexts that are not limited to young people and that extend to policy matters far beyond PE, such as public health and numerous sites of negotiation for access at community level and to a vast array of informal activity. Key themes for researching active bodies include space and alternative contexts, shifting gender boundaries and disrupting binaries, intersections and difference, exclusion and inequalities, healthism and wellbeing agendas.
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Policy and Practice in South African Schools
Eric M. Richardson
South Africa’s constitution, wider legal context, and educational policies should enable its teachers to help create environments in which the safety and welfare of all their learners are protected and in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, or intersex (LGBTQI) learners, and other vulnerable leaners, can develop integrated identities. Life Orientation (LO) is the main learning area in which comprehensive sexuality education and human rights are addressed. But despite the supportive policy framework, research shows that the school curriculum only makes oblique references to gender and sexual diversity, and that for the most part schools are not ensuring that educators or schoolgoing youth learn how to respect the diversity of human sexuality and genders. Instead, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, homophobia, and transphobia remain prevalent in South African schools and textbooks, with very little intervention from teachers to challenge discrimination. How it is possible to make sense of the disparity between what the country’s laws and policies stipulate and what is actually happening in schools? Why is it that policies are not resulting in improved experiences for the vast majority of learners who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT), are same-sex attracted or nonbinary, or assumed to be LGBT? Why have South African school governing bodies, principals, and teachers not been able to respond to the fundamental changes in the country’s democracy in ways which disrupt, or even challenge, hetero- and cisnormativity, making schools safer for all learners? There are a number of known challenges to the implementation of LGBT-inclusive practices and curricula in South Africa. More research is required to understand how best to ensure that teachers are willing and able to integrate topics around gender and sexual diversity into their curriculum without perpetuating heteronormativity, cisnormativity, homophobia, and other forms of oppression.
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The Politics of Anti-Immigration Discourse and Opportunities for Educational Leadership
Randall Clemens and Autumn Tooms Cyprès
Words have power: power to unite, to inspire, to divide, to harm. Politicians have long used persuasive language and rhetoric to mobilize constituents and to influence policy discussions. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican Party nominee Donald Trump, capitalizing on his reputation for blunt and brash comments, created a political brand based on unedited statements and sweeping promises. He vowed to “Make America Great Again.” It stirred, galvanized, and emboldened supporters. For many, however, the candidate’s divisive discourse invoked legacies of marginalization and exclusion. Across educational settings, Trump’s language reverberated. Campaign promises left many unsure about the future of immigrants in the United States. After the election, anti-immigrant discourse continued and hate crimes spiked. The events required educational leaders to respond to support and empower immigrant students. They highlighted the need for leaders to create communities that maintain democratic ideals and ensure inclusivity and belonging for all stakeholders.
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Popular Media and Youth Resistances
Amber Moore and Elizabeth Marshall
“Popular media” and “youth resistance” are significant areas of inquiry in studies and theorizations of gender and sexuality in education. Yet, the terms popular media, youth, and resistance are highly contentious, sometimes overlapping and consistently posing definitional challenges. Popular media is at first exactly what it sounds like: broadly accessible and commercially produced texts like the Harry Potter franchise; however, popular media is also deeply complex and contextually determined, shifting over time in accordance with audiences as well as popular discourses to produce plural meanings. Likewise, youth resistance encompasses ever-changing, and often reductively problematic conceptualizations. Young people are frequently misrepresented in popular media as rebellious which in turn informs popular understanding(s) of resistance as calcified, domesticated, fetishized, masculinized, and romanticized. Youth resistance then, is complex, discursive, and a nuanced material reality. The complexity of popular culture and youth’s resistance within and against it demonstrates and demands creativity and criticality.
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Provocations, Perspectives, and Possibilities of Chicana/Latina Feminist Pedagogies
Tanya Diaz-Kozlowski
Chicana/Latina feminist thought and pedagogies offer interdisciplinary contributions that reimagine family, community, liberation, teaching, and learning rooted in de-colonial praxis. Chicana/Latina feminist thought and pedagogies have cultivated theoretical, methodological, and epistemological cartographies that map questions such as: what are the evolving conditions that shape the oppression Chicanas face in their daily lives?; how do Chicanas cultivate multiple subjectivities that strive for embodied wholeness rather than partiality?; in what ways can intersectionality as a theory of oppression not difference dismantle systems of privilege and inequality that are pervasive within institutions such as education, healthcare, the prison industrial complex, the military, religion, families, and mass media?; and how can theories of the flesh which emerge through the lived experiences of Chicanas’ lives offer new pathways to coalition building, activism, scholarship, and teaching and learning that remain bridged to equity, and to justice as praxis not place? Chicana feminist thought includes themes of the history and material conditions of Chicanas as the basis for feminist consciousness, reclaiming malinchismo and marianismo, sexuality (Chicanas as sexual subjects), a commitment to political action, coalition building and recognition of difference among Chicanas, and challenging the vendida logic within Chicano culture.
Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogies are insistent that everyday experiences of Chicanas are worth studying because they serve as key sources of knowledge that are necessary to theorize new de-colonial visions of life, family, labor, community, and education. Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogies are multidisciplinary in their approach and are culturally specific ways of organizing teaching and learning in informal sites such as the home and community, ways that embrace Chicana ways of knowing and creating knowledge that point to schooling spaces as full of creativity, agency, movement, and coalition building.
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Public and Private Dimensions of Food Education in Early-20th-Century Argentina
Angela Aisenstein and María Liliana Gómez Bidondo
Eating is a conscious activity, not just a biological necessity, and as such, eating habits and tastes can be guided. When individual issues, such as those around food, coincide with the economic, demographic, and health problems of society, they become public issues, then state concerns, and ultimately part of public policy. In Argentina, the education system was founded simultaneously with the nation-state and became a crucial tool in the process of modernization. Feeding and food education were part of that process. This issue was of essential importance in a country structured from the beginning as a dependent agricultural-export economy. Food education is defined as a set of means, methods, and social relationships related to the production, transmission, distribution, and acquisition of knowledge and expertise. The purpose of food education is to influence the kind of food the population eats, to shape their nutritional habits and tastes; to produce enough food and set the conditions, techniques, and technologies to achieve it; to convey people’s rights and obligations to access food; and to establish the roles the state, community, family, and the market must play in order to reproduce the biological, economic, and cultural order of society.
Article
Qualitative Methods for Gender and Education Research in Brazil
Marília Carvalho
Qualitative research predominate in Brazilian studies on gender and education. This article points that these methodologies contribute to this field as powerful tools that break the naturalization of gender relations, uncovering the subtle forms of gender inequality in everyday life and highlighting the social construction of gender. The common effort in ethnographies to make strange what is familiar are useful in overcoming these pitfalls. Qualitative methodologies are also important in the construction of contextual analyses that avoid essentialist statements about men and women as fixed universal notions, a frequent bias in gender studies. Latin American research on gender in education has used these principles with good results and this article offers some examples, developed mainly in Brazil. It also suggests researchers use qualitative methodologies to link gender to other social determinations such as class and race, in an intersectional perspective. The challenge of constructing intersectionality finds in qualitative research methods a powerful ally because it allows investigators to understand how each form of inequality combines with the other, creating new meanings. The article also stresses that analysis based on qualitative data may help break the dichotomies between social structures and individual action, fostering the understanding of the simultaneity between actions of the subjects and social determination, between change and permanence, between individuals and society. Finally, the conclusion draws attention to the need for greater dialogue between quantitative and qualitative research in the area of gender and education studies, opening space for issues highlighted in statistical analysis to be explored in qualitative research, which in turn might generate new questions to be investigated in macro-social databases.
Article
Queer-Identifying Boys, the School Toilet, and Queerphobia
Ndumiso Daluxolo Ngidi, Nkonzo Mkhize, and Brian Bongani Sibeko
School geographies have received little attention from scholarship on queerphobic bullying in South Africa. This is worrying because overwhelming evidence shows how schools are unsafe spaces for queer students. Indeed, schools are key to understanding the geographies of young people. They also play a central role in shaping their social identities. Within the South African context, school toilets are among the most dangerous areas for students in schools. In these spaces, students experience bullying, gendered violence, and crime. Yet the subjective experiences of queer students when accessing school toilets are not well understood. To shed some light on how the school toilet is a space that allows the re-enactment of violent hegemonic masculinities by heteronormative male students, this article reflects on queer experiences of schooling by paying particular attention to the space of the school toilet. Through our experiences, we show how the toilet space is a site for queerphobic bullying. We argue that school toilets are areas for the (re)construction of hegemonic, dominating, and violent heterosexual masculinity, and the further legitimization of hetero-patriarchal systems. While there is evidence of agency in our experiences, it is at the cost of violence. We conclude that schools should abandon the notion of gender binary not just in their toilet spaces but in all spheres of school life, from the curriculum to school culture and infrastructure. Drawing on these experiences, the article submit that this will, in part, reframe South African schools as possible sites for constructing a gender-equal society.
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Queer and Trans* of Color Critique, Decolonization, and Education
Omi Salas-SantaCruz
The increase of transgender visibility and politics correlates with a renowned interest in gender equity in schools. The diversity of trans* and gender-expansive social identities, along with divergent conceptualizations of the meaning transing/trans*ing, ontology, identity, and embodiment, produces a wide range of ideal and pragmatic approaches to gender equity and justice in education. Fields and analytical frameworks that emerge from Decolonial Feminism, Queer Indigenous Studies, Queer of Color Critique in education, Jotería studies, and transgender studies in the United States have unique definitions, political commitments, and epistemological articulations to the meaning and purpose of transing/trans*ing. These divergent articulations of trans*ing often make projects of transgender equity and justice incommensurable to each other, or they converge at the various scalar aspects of equity design and implementation. By historicizing, or re-membering the rich body of decolonial modes of trans*ing bodies, knowledge, and selves, trans* of color critique in education research makes trans* justice possible by disrupting white-centric approaches to transgender inclusion that may fall short in the conceptualization of trans* justice and what makes a trans* livable life for queer and trans people of color.
Article
Queer and Trans Youth Organizing
Julia Sinclair-Palm
Youth organizing is a form of civic engagement and activism. It offers a way for young people to identify and address social inequalities impacting their local and global communities. Youth are provided opportunities to learn about power structures and pathways to create meaningful change to support their communities. In formal institutional approaches, youth organizing is understood as part of positive youth development and a strategy to train young people about civic society and democracy. Youth organizing is also seen as a way for young people to seek support, empowerment, and resources and to develop their leadership capacity. Central to the field of youth organizing are questions on the role of youth within youth organizing. Researchers examine the leadership structure within youth organizations, the acquisition of resources for the organization, the process for identifying issues that the organization will address, and how youth experience their involvement.
Youth organizing has been especially important for young marginalized people who may feel isolated and face harassment and discrimination. Researchers have extensively documented how youth organizing by people of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer and questioning (LGBTQ) young people in North America have played a large role in fights for social justice. However, it was not until the mid-20th century that queer and trans youth started organizing in groups connected by their shared experiences and identities related to their sexuality and gender. The development of Gay–Straight Alliances (GSAs) in schools and debates about sexuality education in schools provide examples for exploring LGTBQ youth organizing in the 21st century.
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Queer Pedagogical Theory
Matthew Thomas-Reid
Queer pedagogical theory might be best thought of as a mindset to approaching the classroom derived from the lived experience of queerness. Starting with a consideration of what is to be queer, one can begin to develop an understanding of how queerness as an identity might inform a decentering of classroom spaces that allows for marginalized positionalities to disrupt normative assumptions about how we approach myriad aspects of classroom experiences.
After tracing the theoretical lineage of queer pedagogy and the theory that informs it, specific pedagogical aspects such as method, texts, and assessment can be cast in a queer context. With openness, fluidity, and the embracing of the unknown, the queer pedagogue holds space for new sites of epistemological inquiry which moves toward not inclusion, rather a disruption of the colonized lineage of the classroom.
Article
Queer Pedagogy
Matthew Thomas-Reid
Queer pedagogy is an approach to educational praxis and curricula emerging in the late 20th century, drawing from the theoretical traditions of poststructuralism, queer theory, and critical pedagogy. The ideas put forth by key figures in queer theory, including principally Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, were adopted in the early 1990s by to posit an approach to education that seeks to challenge heteronormative structures and assumptions in K–12 and higher education curricula, pedagogy, and policy.
Queer pedagogy, much like the queer theory that informs it, draws on the lived experience of the queer, wonky, or non-normative as a lens through which to consider educational phenomena. Queer pedagogy seeks to both uncover and disrupt hidden curricula of heteronormativity as well as to develop classroom landscapes and experiences that create safety for queer participants.
In unpacking queer pedagogy, three forms of the word “queer” emerge: queer-as-a-noun, queer-as-an-adjective, and queer-as-a-verb. Queer pedagogy involves exploring the noun form, or “being” queer, and how queer identities intersect and impact educational spaces. The word “queer” can also become an adjective that describes moments when heteronormative perceptions become blurred by the presence of these queer identities. In praxis, queer pedagogy embraces a proactive use of queer as a verb; a teacher might use queer pedagogy to trouble traditional heteronormative notions about curricula and pedagogy. This queer praxis, or queer as a verb, involves three primary foci: safety for queer students and teachers; engagement by queer students; and finally, understanding of queer issues, culture, and history.
Article
Queer Pedagogy as an Impossible Profession
Renée DePalma
Queer pedagogy can be considered a kind of critical pedagogy, which questions the neutrality of knowledge and renders teaching a political act. Drawing upon queer studies, it remains strategically poised on a series of important contradictions between constructing and deconstructing, defining and undoing. In the very impossibility of resolving such issues it challenges the basic premise of the institution of schooling—instead of providing clear and definitive answers to questions, it keeps them open. Its productivity lies in unsettling oppressive certainties. Can we both understand that bodies, by their very nature, exceed their discursive construction, and at the same time recognize people’s own identifications and the very real social and historical repressions they have experienced and continue to experience as a result of these? Discourse analysis in the field of education provides the potential for questioning the limits of discourse and the knowledge it creates, while creating spaces for recognition and the production of alternative understandings. Instead of simply replacing older knowledge regimes with newer (and supposedly better) ones—a traditional didactic approach—we might critically analyze how knowledge has been constructed and how people’s lived experiences challenge these constructions, and then begin to imagine a queer pedagogy based on this analysis.
Article
Queer Resilience
Adam Greteman
Queer resilience represents the skills and abilities that are learned and developed because of adversarial experiences or stressors due to prejudice, discrimination, and violence rooted in homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia. These skills and abilities are historically and contextually dependent, as well as intimately connected to related forms of prejudice, discrimination, and violence based on other forms of difference.
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Queer Students in the Carceral State
Erica Meiners and Jessica Fuentes
Despite the gains some components of the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) community achieved during the 2010s in the United States and across the globe, young queer students in K–12 educational environments are still vulnerable to criminalization. Dismantling the movement of young queer youth into the U.S. carceral state also requires challenging systems that may be perceived to be unconnected. School privatization and the deprofessionalization and removal of employment protections for school personnel shapes cultures in schools for LGBTQ young people. Punitive school discipline policies—which often purport to protect queer students—deepen criminalization and do not produce safer schools. While policy shifts may be necessary, they are never sufficient, and building support for all young people, including LGBTQ communities, requires ideological and paradigm shifts, not simply quick fixes. The tools of the carceral state—including increased punishment—will not produce the kind of safety that schools and communities need.
