RECLAIMING MY STORY AS COUNTERNARRATIVE: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC ACCOUNT OF A QUEER EDUCATOR’S JOURNEY TOWARD HOPE AND POSSIBILITIES DURING TROUBLING TIMES

Abstract

The increased demand for compliance and conformity through standardization over the last decade has made it increasingly challenging to be an educator. Moreover, recent efforts to legislate curriculum and to censor and erase historically marginalized groups have retraumatized schools and communities. And yet, the current system of education remains vulnerable and continues to crack, exposing opportunities for subversion through teaching and learning, advocacy and activism. This autoethnographic research represents my testimony of the challenges and celebrations of such possibilities. Framed by vignettes and personal journal entries from critical moments in my teaching, I weave multiple forms of storytelling and analysis, including my recollection of events and the writing and rewriting of those events, as a way to analyze my experiences as a queer, White educator teaching for social justice. These data guided the development of my story and foreground the tensions of sacrificing parts of my personal and professional identities and how such limitations impacted the evolution of my beliefs as an educator. This research offers a kaleidoscopic view of the larger intersecting narratives, addressing areas of literacy scholarship that have informed my practice as a secondary English teacher, including sociocultural and critical literacies. Similarly, this autoethnography situates my commitments to queer theories in education and the experiences of queer educators enacting critical practices in the literacy classroom. These strands allowed me to reframe the local and national conversation on education through a complex package of counternarratives that compelled me to question what it means to teach for social justice during troubling times. In response to these contextual layers, I detail recent pedagogical opportunities in my teaching that invited possibilities for critical and creative practices in the classroom, in addition to my recent efforts of establishing a local space for queer educator collaboration and community.