“That Wasn’t Very Free Thinker”: Queer Critical Pedagogy in the Early Grades

This chapter takes up the challenges as well as the possibilities associated with using queer critical pedagogy in early elementary classrooms. It centers on an event in a kindergarten classroom where the students and teacher engaged in what I call queer critical pedagogy. Throughout the chapter I grapple with the larger question, to what extent is queer critical pedagogy possible? This question requires that we explore the limitations of critical pedagogy for disrupting heteronormativity. Many of the queer critiques offered in this chapter (Barnard, http://www.exchangesjournal.org/print/print_1166.html, 2004; Bryson and de Castell, Educational Theory 43(3):341–355, 1993a, Bryson and de Castell, Can J Educ 18(3):285–305, 1993b; Gilbert, Sexuality in school: The limits of education, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014; Malinowitz, Textual orientations: Lesbian and gay students and the making of discourse communities, Portsmouth: Boyton/Cook Publishers, 92–107, 1995; Mayo, Gay-straight alliances and associations among youth in schools, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; Wood, Cult Stud 19(4):430–438, 2005) are connected to the critiques of critical pedagogy put forth by poststructuralist feminists (Ellsworth, Harvard Educ Rev 59(3):297–324, 1989; Gore, The critical pedagogy reader, New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 331–348, 2003; Jones, Democratic dialogue in education: Troubling speech, disturbing silence, New York: Peter Lang, 57–68, 2004; Orner, Feminisms and critical pedagogy, New York: Routledge, 74–89, 1992). I draw from this literature in order to discuss some limitations of critical pedagogy for disrupting heteronormativity, paying particular attention to the role of dialogue and student voice in this practice as well as the role of power in the classroom. In so doing, I highlight the ways that heteronormativity still exists in classroom spaces dedicated to disrupting it. I also discuss some pedagogical techniques educators have used to maximize the interruption of heteronormativity and minimize essentializing heteronormative reinscriptions.