“You Will See Yourself In This Class”: A Case Study of Rendering Absent Narratives Visible
2020-02
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“You Will See Yourself In This Class”: A Case Study of Rendering Absent Narratives Visible
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2020-02
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Gender and sexuality are taught in schools through explicit, implicit, and null curricula (Thornton, 2002). In social studies, this teaching reifies a problematic status quo presenting as a false binary between male-female or masculine-feminine (List, 2018) and sexuality through heteronormative lenses (Thornton, 2002, 2003; Schmidt, 2013). This creates a discourse of invisibility (Ladson-Billings, 2003) whereby students are forced to subtract (Valenzuela, 1999) part of themselves when they enter the school building or interact with the social studies curriculum. In this study, I explore a case study (Merriam, 1998; Stake, 1995) of Mr. Jones, a cis-gender straight white male social studies teacher as he teaches gender, sexuality, and other aspects of identity in two social studies courses, an elective Multicultural Perspectives course and a required U.S. History Course. Through observations, interviews, and exploring student work, I look at how he teaches about identity and contrast the two courses. My analysis is driven through queer theory to expose the problematic assumptions of binary thinking within normative culture. I find Mr. Jones to be more successful in disrupting binary thinking and challenging assumptions and values in the elective course than in the U.S. History course. However, both classes had moments where Mr. Jones challenged student thinking on the topics of gender and sexuality. I specifically explore the themes of positionality, resonance, subject/object, and relationships to unpack Mr. Jones’s teaching. This study shows what happens as one social studies teacher attempts to teach beyond the binaries and create a space where all voices can be heard and absent narratives rendered visible.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. February 2020. Major: Education, Curriculum and Instruction. Advisor: James Mayo. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 138 pages.
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Bordwell, Daniel. (2020). “You Will See Yourself In This Class”: A Case Study of Rendering Absent Narratives Visible. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/213123.
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