Breaking through? Obstacles & opportunities for GLBTIQ educators.

Marshall, Daniel ; Windle, Joel

featuring MICHAEL CROWHURST, 'JANE', DANIEL MARSHALL, BRONWYN MCMAHON, RAY MISSON & JOEL WINDLE

INTRODUCTION

In the last twenty-five years or so there has been an increasing acknowledgment of the importance of gay--and lesbian-affirmative material in both teacher-training and school curricula in Australia. However, the issues produced by those developments are still hotly contested and in this paper GLBTIQ educators reflect in their own words on the current obstacles and opportunities they face. In their discussions they explore their own personal experiences of 'breaking through' the hostility and anxiety that cordon off schools from queer sexualities and provide a snapshot of the day-to-day work of the GLBTIQ educator. The participants are, or have been, involved in teacher education at the University of Melbourne in a variety of roles.

Teacher education joins together, uncomfortably sometimes, knowledge produced by critical reflection and practical experience. It thus provides a privileged site for calling into question the reproduction of dominant sexualities in schooling. Education students are confronted early in their studies with teaching rounds in unfamiliar school settings, and required to fulfil unfamiliar roles. They enter institutional contexts that are regulated by complex expectations, constraints and freedoms. These are particularly difficult to negotiate for newcomers who are developing a new professional identity which is also under evaluation. Schools, in their daily operation, exclude certain sexualities and incorporate others, promoting sexual norms for the actors involved in education and a normative model of society. The foundation and consequences of these exclusions are not uncontested. Teacher education also invites critical reflection on teaching as a profession and a social identity. This reflection calls into question the relationship between pedagogical practices, the values which underlie them, and the social relations within which they are situated. However, the work of learning at the core of this exercise is itself responsive to dynamic and often conflicting social logics which can produce and reproduce effects of domination.

The controversial intersection of sexuality and education at the site of the teacher means that the queer (student-) teacher can often be confronted with added responsibilities, including representative role-bearing and increased surveillance. The unequal power relations at this intersection place the burden of adaptation and responsibility on queer teachers, while disassociating 'straight' teachers and educational institutions from their implication in the production of these relations. (1) Because the question of queer sexuality in education is construed as a minority issue, it is confined to the pedagogical scene of the GLBTIQ student or teacher. This constrains educational approaches by narrowing the 'responsibility' of teaching sexuality, rather than acknowledging that all learning and teaching is implicated in the repetition and privileging of certain sexual and gender categories, and hence relations of oppression.

The isolation of GLBTIQ concerns is reflected in the image of the queer teacher who is often confronted with the daunting task of being the sole source of queer-friendly information in an educational setting which generally fails to provide additional support for this additional work, and sometimes openly resents the teacher's role. These realities mean that the experience of being a GLBTIQ teacher often requires the development of different skills and, indeed, the negotiation of a different 'public' (or 'professional') relationship to one's sexuality. The discussion below throws some light onto the extra distance the queer teacher regularly has to travel, the obstacles (s)he confronts and the opportunities for change.

The main part of this paper presents a range of perspectives from educators positioned 'outside' normative sexualities and is based on the transcript of a roundtable discussion held at Melbourne University. The discussion focuses on this setting as well as on school experiences. Clearly, sexuality and education is a broad field and this discussion is limited. We acknowledge that it does not represent the full range of non-normative sexualities, experiences and perspectives. The issues also play out differently in other educational settings--such as TAFE colleges or universities which are poorer or more isolated, as well as informal and community contexts. However, the issues touched on here remain relevant to them, and in particular to other professional training contexts, such as nursing, medicine and social work, which involve placements in the field. We hope that this publication encourages further discussions about queer education. Our intention is not only to share ideas amongst ourselves as part of building intellectual community and support but also to open up future interdisciplinary dialogues and directions.

We want this transcript to be read by education students, high school students, university and TAFE lecturers and tutors, and those teachers and principals that queer educators might call on as allies or, more importantly, who might regard the notion of a queer teacher with suspicion. It is our hope that it presents some of the complex human and political dramas that animate the lives of queer teachers and enrich their vocational contribution.

PARTICIPANTS

JOEL WINDLE (moderator) studied Education at the University of Melbourne and is a tutor and PhD student in the Faculty of Education and at the Institut de Recherche sur l'Education (Universite de Bourgogne).

BRONWYN MCMAHON completed a Diploma of Education at Melbourne in 2003 and is currently teaching secondary Mathematics and French.

MICHAEL CROWHURST teaches at the University of Melbourne in a subject called 'Education, Policy, Schools and Society' (EPSS), and also teaches in Education at RMIT.

JANE (not her real name) recently completed a Diploma of Education at the University of Melbourne. Her teaching internship was recently terminated when she was outed and the school decided they didn't want a gay intern.

RAY MISSON is head of the Department of Language Literacy and Arts Education.

DANIEL MARSHALL co-wrote the roundtable questions and organised the discussion with Joel Windle. He recently finished a PhD looking, in part, at the relationship between discourses of male adolescence, male homosexuality and pedagogy. He acted as note-taker for the discussion. This publication is based on those notes and a transcript of the discussion recorded at the University of Melbourne on 16 September 2004.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SEXUALITY & EDUCATION

JOEL: I would like to start by asking you all how you think about the relationship between 'sexuality' and 'education' in what you do.

RAY: I guess sexuality and education are in a kind of indeterminate relationship: sexuality is so much a part of what you are and in education what you are is often very much on the line. So while it's often easy for sexuality to seem irrelevant to education, I don't think it ever is. In education, I would always hope that I was on the look-out for those moments where I could assert, not necessarily my own gayness, but assert a concern for the acceptance of all sexuality. I think that every teacher has those experiences, of thinking: 'Okay, we are coming up to it now: do I swerve away, or do I go in for it?' Increasingly, I tend to go in for it, but I think that's to do with my own position. I am in a fairly authoritative position in this institution and I can get away with a lot. I certainly would never expect any teacher in a school to actually always go in for it.

MICHAEL: I agree with a lot of what Ray said. I think the important thing is that you can't take the sexuality out of the teacher. It's similar to asking teachers to divorce themselves from their own ethnicity, gender, or class. Whether you do it consciously, in terms of making statements, or whether you try and keep your values out of the classroom, it's always part of you. Sexuality is always embedded in what you do as a teacher. You can't 'empty' yourself, if you like, of your sexuality because it is always there, but it's there in different ways. The other thing that is really important to my own perspective on sexuality and education is that it has been--and remains--an incredibly interesting focus of study for me. I think it is crucial to remember that it is a legitimate area of academic pursuit in education. Education approaches to sexuality have been helpfully influenced by queer theory and how it theorises sexuality as fluid. I see that as really relevant to educative pursuits in the sense that we are much more interested in generating questions--in promoting a critical literacy--about sexuality in society than just providing straightforward answers.

JANE: We want to generate questions rather than shut down discussion, but we are asked to shut down discussion a lot of the time, as I have recently experienced. For me at the moment the relationship between sexuality and education is very much a case of what you were saying about class, gender, race, ethnicity and everything: these days, they are very much welcomed in the classroom, and you don't have to 'check those at the door'. But the one thing we are still expected to check at the door is our sexuality, which is like really checking yourself at the door, because it's who you are. I found out at great expense recently that if you don't do that, you pay a price. And like Ray, I agree that there are many times when you do swerve away, and I have generally tended to do that, but in this particular instance I kept swerving away and swerving away and finally I had to speak, and when I did speak I was unceremoniously gagged and dismissed. The relationship [between our sexuality and our role as a teacher] is ever-present, we know it's there and it should be there and it shouldn't be an issue. People in schools keep saying 'oh, it's really not an issue', and yet they continue to make this huge issue of it, but we are expected to be quiet and not talk about it. It's really weird.

RAY: They are saying 'it's not an issue', so that you will be quiet about it.

BRONWYN: Yes, but that in itself is clearly an issue.

JANE: And it's not an issue if you don't talk about it, but if you do, you are going to face the consequences. So long as we can all bury our heads in the sand, from their point of view, everything will be fine. But I don't know if that's a good way of existing.

BRONWYN: I find the question itself really quite broad and hard to pin down, because there are so many ways you can approach thinking about sexuality and education. There are the debates about sexuality as part of the curriculum, as well as the considerations about what the content of that curriculum will be. Then there are ways of thinking about sexuality education more broadly as part of everyday education, like cross-curriculum learning (the development of skills applicable across curricula). Then there are the issues of the sexuality of teachers and students, as well as the aspect of what people are saying.

JOEL: I think that education sets itself up as a non-sexualised or sexually neutral space, so the relationship is a broadly tacit one. One goal of education is to develop social competencies and identities, and this involves assumptions about social categories of gender and sexuality that are usually unacknowledged. Because students are seen to be vulnerable and innocent, and sexuality as being beyond the social roles for which teachers prepare students, there is a general taboo on teachers commenting on sexuality as a social category. In learning and teaching, the sexualised categories embedded in materials, methods, role allocation and goals cannot be discussed. The teacher and (the development of) student sexuality are assumed to be heterosexual, distinguished by gender, monogamous and with the ultimate goal of reproduction within marriage. This model of sexuality is implicit in pedagogical practices and enforced more explicitly in peer relations. Schools tend to be both formal and informal places of normative socialisation, including sexual socialisation. The exclusion of the realities of certain students and teachers lays the ground for their continuing exclusion, not least through assumptions learned in class.

QUEER CONTENT IN TEACHER TRAINING

BRONWYN: I remember having a lecture and reading an article, and that was the full content.

RAY: That's better than it used to be.

BRONWYN: We decided to write an article of our own accord. (2) Also, I clearly remember some comments from other students after the lecture on queer content in schools. I remember someone saying: 'Why do we have to sit through this?'

JANE: I remember too--the student said: 'Why do I need to learn about queer issues or questions? I won't be teaching any queers.' That was the comment.

RAY: A couple of years back there was a student who was not so much angry about the fact that there wasn't a lecture on queer education, rather that there was an assumption of heterosexuality throughout the program, and the lecturers just continually occluded homosexuality. Her argument was that the only way you can actually get sexuality on the agenda is to out yourself, and she wasn't sure that she was willing to do that. That was one of the reasons why I started the Lesbian/Gay Education Students Group. (3) Do students here think that was a feeling that you had? That, okay, there was a lecture on it, but for the rest of the program it was kind of pushed to one side?

BRONWYN: I don't see a great interest in discussing sexuality for heterosexual people. I think that if you are not gay yourself, or if you do not identify as non-heterosexual, then you don't really want to think or talk about it.

JOEL: The idea of critical literacy around constructed identities is emerging as an educational goal in some curriculum frameworks, such as New Basics. (4) These potentially provide space for more queer content, for example in literacy education. The difficulty is to provide a basis for more constant and more consistent interrogation of how sexuality is constructed as subordinated or privileged. But I guess the question is: who will do that? Those from the marginalised groups?

RAY: It's worth saying that now you couldn't get away without acknowledging multiculturalism, for example, even if it's only lip service. Sometimes when I talk about mainstream English teachers, I feel embarrassed that I am sort of talking about mainstream English speakers and not multicultural people. I think it is possible to change things and to put particular issues on the agenda and I hope that we are working towards that.

MICHAEL: I suppose there are more frameworks now that support work in this area. There has been an increase in queer coverage. EPSS and the Student Welfare course include queer perspectives and they are taught in a way that shows that they want diversity generally to be considered. And we have got the [Queer Education] Masters subject in the handbook. I do think that these things represent gains, and it seems to me that there is more awareness around queer issues.

My feeling is that a couple of years ago people were sort of nervous. They would never say 'don't, be careful what you say', but I detected there was a bit of nervousness around what the reaction might be to the inclusion of queer issues. For instance, I once structured an activity for EPSS tutorials that was designed to be delivered across all tute groups, and it touched on young people having sex and I detected a bit of anxiety there, but that went through without a hitch really: everyone was prepared to give it a go. My feeling is that after a few years people are less anxious about the inclusion of queer issues. Because they have included those perspectives they can see that the sky hasn't fallen in. I don't know how you would prove that, but my feeling would be that there is a bit less anxiety now.

OUTNESS AT SCHOOL

JOEL: What postures can queer educators adopt in relation to their own sexuality to be most effective in their work as educators? Can alternatively 'out' and 'apologetic' postures both have unexpected effects?

MICHAEL: Difficult question. I think that different teachers will feel comfortable around different strategies and that the different contexts that they find themselves in will play into the decisions that are made. The effects that are generated will differ from context to context and person to person. I agree with others at the discussion table that the decision to 'come out' or 'stay in' lies with the person (obviously) and that there shouldn't be an expectation that to be a good queer that you need to 'come out' and vice versa. Similarly I think we need to be careful that we don't overestimate the effects that one person's decision to 'come out' can have. The effects that are generated (or not) will be an effect of context.

Having said that, though, I think we have to admit that enormous gains have been made because people have had the courage to 'come out'. Now, Judith Butler would ask 'as what' and point to the constraint and the political limits involved in all of that, but I think being 'out' is a very powerful stance. I'm just re-reading Butler's Gender Trouble (5) and I always feel inspired after I read her to work towards ambiguity as a radical strategy. It's a very powerful place to occupy. It's a powerful thing to consciously complicate the ability of others to read your body (or bodies generally) easily. And, of course, we may be simultaneously 'in' and 'out' in different places as queer teachers. I think it's complex.

RAY: I certainly think that when you are dealing with anything as dynamic and potentially disruptive as sexuality, there are no guarantees, and the outcome is uncertain whatever you do. All you can do is be pragmatic and strategic and hope for the best.

JANE: I am not sure that I think that anyone needs to be more apologetic for being gay. I don't think that is going to make things any easier. I can only speak as a student in this context, but I have had two experiences here that fly in the face of the 'apologetic' strategy somewhat. One was very early in my course, at a workshop in my 'Teaching and Learning' class last year, when we were asked to come the following week with a burning question. And I thought hard about it for a whole week and came along and decided that my burning question was: 'What do I do when I get out there into schools if I am asked the 'are you married' sorts of questions, because I am gay?' That question, in a group of something like thirty or forty people, generated a really interesting discussion, which continued at the Deep Dish Cafe afterwards. There were no negative responses about my sexuality from anyone, and no apparent anxiety discussing queer stuff. People came up to me afterwards and said things like, 'That was fantastic that you came out in that session.' It was an entirely positive experience. And the other experience was when we did our presentation in the EPSS workshop and we presented a preliminary report on the sexualities article we were writing. We got really positive feedback from people. I got beautiful emails from other people in the class that were so affirming of us and our courage in speaking up rather than being apologetic or being silent.

JOEL: Do you think that queer teachers have to follow a certain normative model of 'the good gay' to be accepted as legitimate? Can conditional acceptance be problematic for unconventional approaches and lifestyles?

MICHAEL: Yes, I'd agree with that. Teaching and education is generally a conservative space. Similar notions probably (would) apply to many other 'categories' of person as well. Muslim people are probably usually positioned also as 'okay' as long as they don't go on about being Muslim too much or think that the middle group might shift somewhat by their challenging it. The experience would be similar for Aboriginal people, women and so on. Generally, I think that acceptance can be about the subtle assumption that you are a 'good gay'--the gay that wants what everyone else wants; the gay that doesn't hassle or ask for equal rights around superannuation; or the gay that happily goes along to your wedding and doesn't even mention that there may be some discomfort attached to that for them. Most people don't like moving too far out of their comfort zones.

RAY: I think that queer teachers have to follow a model of the 'harmless gay', but that can be a fair range of different types. A person might be very camp (the Carson Kressley type) and still seem perfectly harmless (loveable even) to the straight population. Unconventionality in itself is not a problem. The gays who seem most dangerous are probably the ones who are least detectable (because they can trick you into thinking they're heterosexual) and those who are openly political.

JANE: I guess what we are all saying is that the gay population is not a homogenous thing. And I think that's a good thing. It makes things a lot more complicated, but I don't see that as a problem really, just a case of there being difference within difference. And that's something that I see as a positive. I'm a bit wary of the categories 'good' gay and 'bad' gay--for myself, I'm sure that in different contexts, at different times, different people might slot me into either one of them. I'm not sure whether that's an argument for or against their validity.

MICHAEL: I've had an ambiguous experience with this one (as to whether you come out or not and what the impact of that decision is). I remember using various strategies with coming out, some unconsciously involving ambiguity, by leading people to a space, hinting gently about my sexuality and taking people to some sort of place where I planned to eventually just 'come out' and it wouldn't be an issue (because of the groundwork that I'd done). But what I found by doing that was that you were occupying a place that was ambiguous and that generated more tension for people (students). Whilst I was trying to be gentle about 'coming out', and I'm talking here about 'coming out' as a teacher, it had the opposite effect. That then led me to conclude that maybe it is better to just get it out and over with, because that can provoke less tension than the opposite.

Student assessments can also reveal some interesting effects of being out as a teacher. I find in the classes in which I am 'out' that I don't really get any negative reaction from students at all. But in terms of being a 'good gay' and a 'bad gay', I think I am pretty conservative really, though some people might disagree with me. I am conservative in the sense that if I am talking about sexuality in the class I try to make sure that I always talk about ethnicity, gender, Aboriginality and so on as well as queer issues, or at least as much as I talk about queer issues. I do this primarily because I am interested in those issues too, but also because I am always aware that people may start to accuse me of being on my 'soapbox'. Which isn't to say that there is something wrong with being on my soapbox anyway, but I am careful about the perception that I might spend too much time on queer issues so I overcompensate in the other direction sometimes.

And I find that one dimension of being 'out' is talking about queer issues, and that students will ask about these issues because I am 'out'. I would guess that because I am 'out' and because I do the sexual diversity lecture in the EPSS subject, and because that is my area of expertise, that issues around sexuality probably surface more frequently in my classes than they may in others (although there are a lot of queer friendly and queer aware teachers who work in the EPSS subject so I'm probably wrong there). While I generally get good comments from students about my teaching, if I do get bad ones the critique is usually a version of 'oh, he went on about sexuality too much'. So that would be an effect of coming out as a teacher I think: that students who are troubled by sexual diversity and queer rights will find what you have to say and the stance that you take around such issues challenging, and this may mean that they disengage from the subject. The teaching relationship can be strained because of a clash of values, although this usually doesn't surface in class in an overt fashion. So being out may mean that some students are more reserved and distant in class, I think, but that effect does not mean that I shouldn't pursue the goal of actively promoting sexual and gender diversity in my classroom. Then again, I don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable to the extent that they disengage, so there are lots of considerations to juggle.

JOEL: I think that in discussions around diversity the material is often framed so that students know how to behave in order to satisfy the values of the subject without necessarily engaging their own positions and values. In this case, students who disagree are likely to be silent because that is the path of least conflict, and they can go away with all their positions intact. This problem might be an argument for a strategic 'gently, gently' approach at the start. I think a useful approach to queer content is not to think about queer entities or specialised content, but to ask all students to think of themselves situated in social relations tied to sexuality, and to consider these as being hierarchically ordered. The objective is to present queer issues as questions for everyone: we are all implicated in this power relationship in everything that we do, and work on questions of sexuality does need to not just come from those people who are marginalised.

QUEER RESPONSIBILITIES?

DANIEL: Something that has arisen in this discussion is the idea of different responsibilities for people who are seen as queer educators. And if there are different responsibilities, that may mean that queer educators need different skills. Moreover, you may have a different relationship to teaching than people who don't see the role of sexuality, or a sexuality educator, as being integral to their project as an educator in general. Can people reflect on that in terms of their experience as educators?

BRONWYN: I think if you are 'out' in a school environment, then perhaps there would be the responsibility to be a role model. If you are not 'out' but many other teachers know that you are queer, there might be the moral responsibility of 'yeah, that's great but keep it to yourself'; you know, handling interpersonal issues in a certain way in relation to students--that kind of thing. That would really depend on the school being very explicit about what they feel is an appropriate way for queer teachers to act and that's a responsibility that would be placed upon a queer educator. So there is the responsibility for your actions, a responsibility to yourself, and a responsibility to not let certain frameworks be placed upon you.

JANE: From my own experience working in a primary school setting, one of the big factors in the whole equation is parents. In my recent experience I felt like the meat in the sandwich between students--who were genuinely curious about sexuality and had questions and did want to know stuff--and the parents and the hierarchy of the school who insisted these students were too young and naive to be told anything, despite the fact that they obviously already knew lots and had plenty of questions. The attitude of parents and teachers is so variable from one school to another, and I just happened to land in a school where the parents were more conservative than they are in some others. As an educator, I think I owe it to my students to respect their right to ask questions. As an educator who is also a lesbian, I think I have a responsibility to try to answer students' questions about sexuality, in age-appropriate ways. I can't help thinking that it's a good thing for kids to be getting some informed answers, to offset all the misinformation that gets around about queers and queerness--but that of course runs completely counter to the views of many parents and straight educators, especially in a primary school setting.

MICHAEL: I often reflect on how I feel a sense of responsibility to work in sexuality and education after having completed a PhD in this area. After having done all that work I feel like I have a responsibility to do something with it, and I feel that I am doing that. Lately I have been reflecting on why I am in this area. What is my prime motivation and why? It comes back to questions of wellbeing and my sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of young people. I guess I feel a sense of responsibility from personal experiences and from experience with the literature in the field. An important issue for me, or an issue that arises out of that work, is a need to learn to manage anger and frustration. You are constantly dealing with barriers. So how do you keep going, how do you not ignore that, but how do you move beyond constraint? And I think if you have done edgy sort of work for a while, you do develop some skills. I feel a sense of responsibility about that too actually: the skills you develop have a broader application than just being involved in [sexuality education]. You've got a few tricks up your sleeves. You mightn't have been successful at everything but you get to know how to do things.

RAY: I am actually much more pragmatic, and I haven't got the immediate experience of working in schools recently. It seems to me that your basic responsibility is to survive and you do whatever it takes to survive and you will survive in different ways in different contexts, depending on the principal or the parents or whatever. I was thinking before when you were talking about being 'out' that often the most flamboyantly 'out' teachers do extraordinarily well and can do extraordinary things in schools, and the parents love them as much as everyone else. Maybe it is because they are the stereotyped ordinary image, whereas there are others that just seem to be natural victims, and they walk a very narrow path in the school. So I think that your responsibility is to stay in there and then when you feel comfortable and the opportunity offers, perhaps you do something, but I don't think you go in trying to change the world.

JANE: There is real tension there between survival and responsibility for me. I don't think I can do it single-handedly and I am not trying to change the world, but I have the desire to correct misinformation and ignorance. Yet in so doing, I put myself at huge risk. So I don't know--there has got to be some way we can work out how to do both, or how to do one without the risk of being fired?

RAY: My favourite word is 'strategic': you just have to be strategic.

JANE: I suppose. Learn how to have some of those 'tricks up your sleeve' that Michael spoke of. I confess to being pretty naive in that department. It really pisses me off actually, that there is any need for me to be strategic at all. I know I have to be, but it just makes me angry that it's even necessary. I just want to teach. I'm nearly fifty years old, I've put up with mountains of bullshit in my life, and finally I've found what I love and am good at, and there's more bullshit to deal with just to be able to do it.

SUPPORT NETWORKS & COMMUNITIES

RAY: Obviously they are important, but again, they happen in unexpected ways. It would be terrific if it was more systematic, but I think people develop their communities around themselves in need. The important thing is to know that there are support mechanisms there for you when there are problems.

JANE: I would have to back that: I found a support network here at University that was there like [click fingers] that when I needed it, which was just fantastic. Obviously there wasn't one in the school where I was teaching, but it was nice to come here and be able to get that sort of support. I am really happy to report that at the school where I am now, there is a support network: there are three other lesbians there. I'm having a wonderful time.

MICHAEL: I think about support networks in relation to some of the issues of frustration Jane referred to. I am a team player, and I think you can ease your frustration with your support networks, and that they are really important because they sustain you in the work. You meet people and hear about their success and that fuels you to do more things. I have met some fantastic people in queer educative networks: really interesting people who are out there, energetic, and engaged. I think that there are increasing issues around resourcing and time because as queer educative and youth-focused work becomes more successful the work that's involved in managing their support networks also intensifies. The job just becomes bigger and bigger. Of course, support networks are crucial as far as sustainability goes, in terms of how individuals sustain themselves in doing queer educative and youth-focused work, in terms of how you support the work generally, and in terms of supporting new people and building capacity in those new people who come through.

BRONWYN: I am actually pretty unaware of any formal support networks that there might be for queer educators. Being a first year teacher has been a struggle in itself, struggling through regular teaching issues, and the real support network I found has been among a large group of first year teachers. We have been getting together through the year, and luckily for me they have been quite happy for me to discuss my own issues. For example, what happens when all the girls are obsessed with questions like 'are you married?' etc. They are happy for me to talk about things like that.

JOEL: What is the place of 'outness' in the development of support networks, for both teachers and students?

RAY: Obviously being 'out' to other gay and lesbian people is important in establishing such networks, but those networks must respect the decisions people make about how far 'out' its members are in the school community, or the wider community.

MICHAEL: Here I think that 'outness' is fairly central. While not all people involved in running queer supports are queer and while there are many straight (and I know queer can apply to straight as well) people who have very successfully run queer support groups, I think that when you are involved and you identify as queer then there are certain issues that surface. One issue is that you become a 'professional' queer. The impact of this is that your skills are seen to be tightly focused and queer-specific in ways that other types of skills are not. Similarly, people tend to underestimate 'what you know': there is an assumption that queer people just know what to do for other queer people because we share a 'common identity'.

Having said that, I think it is very important that services that target queers consult with a variety of queers. In terms of support, I think that there has been a history of support for queer issues in the Education Faculty at Melbourne. Johanna Wyn and Peter Dwyer at the Youth Research Centre have supervised many queer-related postgraduate student projects and they have really supported some fairly 'out there' projects to boot. Similarly, Ray Misson has always made time for such issues and offered personal support to many people. Through the work of Deb Tyler, the EPSS subject has also been very supportive of this issue. Space has been made in the lecture series for queer content and this has often ruffled more than a few student feathers--but they have stuck with it and done the right thing and not caved in to pressure (although my experience in EPSS has been that the overwhelming bulk of students really support the inclusion of queer perspectives and find the issue interesting and a bit radical). The faculty has also supported the introduction of a new subject: a master's subject called 'Working with Queer Issues in Education'. It is a subject that will ask students to design projects and to evaluate existing queer-youth-focused projects in educative and other youth sector contexts. That level of current support owes a lot to the work of people like Val Webster and Sue Wright who taught trailblazing sexuality courses with queer components in the faculty way back, and did the hard yards and made it all a bit easier or more possible for others to try to work around similar terrain. (6) However, having said that, there is always room for more work. My guess would be that queer issues are not as central as issues of ethnicity or gender across the faculty. But this is a 'new' area and it all takes time.

AIMS FOR THE FUTURE

JOEL: Can everyone comment on their personal or professional vision as queer educators?

RAY: My aim would be that sexuality did get onto the agenda. I have given a somewhat rosy view in some of the things I have said but there is no doubt that in the view of most people in the faculty, sexuality is not a significant issue, and I would like people to acknowledge that sexuality is a significant issue and is, in its own way, as important as ethnicity or class, or any of those other things. The University seems to be doing a lot of good work in its cultural diversity policy, but interestingly its cultural diversity policy is actually reduced at most times to international students, and class is reduced to Melbourne access so that we do not seem to be elitist. I think that we need to have a much more developed sense of genuine diversity, and sexuality needs to be a very significant part of that.

MICHAEL: I would like to see more of it. But specifically, I would like to see partnerships between schools and the University and the University working with the schools on programs, in the way that the Medical Faculty operates. University-school partnerships working on the teaching of sexual diversity certainly, but cultural diversity more broadly would be very exciting. Opportunities like this for people to share knowledge would be productive and offer a stimulating model to work within.

BRONWYN: I would like to see within-schools education about sexuality changing from something that you talk about for a week or two to something that is actually lived. In schools now, sexuality is briefly mentioned if at all, and then it is returned to being a discrete issue. And for some reason it's very discrete from the actual lives of teachers and students, and it's okay to talk about it in private, but please don't be 'out' in front of our students. I guess, also, that since schools handle this issue differently it's also always very context-specific. My own personal aim, now that I have got teaching itself under control (I say, optimistically!) is to get myself in a position where I can be more 'out'. That is, 'out' to other people rather than just teachers in the school, 'out' in my everyday life, because I am not 'out' at all to students. Just to take that personal burden off myself, because it is a burden.

JANE: Yeah, it's a huge burden, doing what Kate Evans calls emotional work, which we do constantly. (7) I guess my personal ideal long-term goal is to be allowed to put my wedding photos on the website of the school that I work in, and have no one bat an eye about it. I have seen lots of heterosexual teachers put their wedding photos on school websites, but I don't think it's likely to happen for me. I'm being a bit facetious here, talking about wedding photos in this way. But it is true that a straight teacher can display wedding photos and photos of partners and kids on web sites or in their classrooms and nobody stops and thinks about it as strange, unusual or abnormal. But if I were to have a photo of my partner on my desk in my classroom that would definitely create a stir. 'Students don't need to know about your private life' is a phrase you hear often, but it's okay for them to know about it if you're straight. I would like there to come a time when my sexuality--anyone's sexuality--is absolutely not an issue. I mean, really not an issue, not just called a non-issue as a means of silencing people. But I don't expect that day to come in my lifetime.

JOEL: My vision for part of the way for achieving that would be to try and make sure that questions of sexuality are implicated in broader questions about inclusion and exclusion and as relational questions of the exercise and effects of power. Many of the issues which are taken more seriously and generate more empathy--such as ethnicity and class--are frequently thought of as neutral categories that affect some people but are unrelated to most of us. But there are power relations there, and sexuality is implicated in that. I think that would go part of the way to getting broader support. That would be one of my strategies, to try and push queer in the work to permeate across the board. Sustainability remains an obstacle as long as only a few people at the margins carry the burden.

JANE: There is an awful lot to be done, isn't there?

ENDNOTES

(1) Kevin K Kumashiro, Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Antioppressive Education, Routledge Falmer, New York, 2002.

(2) An abridged version of the article, titled 'Sticks and stones: Queer sexualities in schools', appeared in Teacher Learning Network, vol. 11, no.1, 2004. The full text of the article can be found online at http://www.tln.org.au/resources/.

(3) People interested in more information about this group should contact Ray Misson: r.misson@unimelb.edu.au.

(4) Education Queensland, New Basics, 2001, http://education.qld.gov.au/corporate/newbasics/.

(5) Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1990.

(6) MICHAEL: Val Webster and Sue Wright taught in the 'Human Sexuality' subject that ran in the Education Faculty (under its different names) for many years going right back to the early 1980s. When I was at Melbourne State College from 1980 to 1983 you could study a two-point elective subject at the time (one third of a subject) on human sexuality. Val has told me that many people who identified as gay or lesbian or bisexual (no queers in the 1980s, unless you were being positioned pejoratively as one) took the class and that it had a big impact on their lives. I know people who did the subject and 'came out' afterwards. I would have loved to have done it but couldn't get up the nerve to enrol at the time. I was well and truly 'in' at that stage ... and it was a very different time. From what I know of it, the class was very queer in that while it did cover large same-sex components it also worked with and around straight issues as well--I think it really took on the middle ground in quite radical ways. In the early 1990s I remember being asked to come in with Phillipa Bonwick from GLAD (Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders) and we did a presentation. Essentially we did a panel. Val and Sue had been doing this type of work for years at that stage. I think they and the subject that they taught were pioneers. I think Val Webster and Sue Wright did some amazing work in that subject and I don't know that they ever really bang the tambourine about that.

(7) Kate Evans, Negotiating the Self: Identity, Sexuality, and Emotion in Learning to Teach, Routledge Falmer, New York, 2002, 34. She writes: 'Because dominant identities are read as natural or neutral, those in dominant groups are less likely to be put in situations in which they must engage in the emotional work of positioning themselves in relationship to norms, or others' expectations.'