Presentation by: Ashley Moore
Session: A | Time: 9:00 AM-9:40 AM | Location: Room 204A
Studies have shown that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer people, including students, spend a great deal of mental time and energy assessing their immediate environments and the people they interact with within those spaces. They do so for a variety of reasons, including ensuring they are safe, and gauging the likelihood of a positive or negative reaction if they were to reveal their sexual identity. As part of a larger project, I wanted to know how students “read” their teachers.
I interviewed a diverse group of 16 LGBQ-identifying people who had all taken classes for Japanese as a second language (although the results are applicable to all teaching contexts). I used constructivist grounded theory approach to analyse the data, and this enabled me to identify two distinct types of information about their teachers that LGBQ students use when considering how safe and comfortable they can be in a teacher’s class: makeshift indicators and insider evidence. Makeshift indicators include aspects of who the teacher appears to “be” and are knowingly used as semi-reliable forms of information during the initial stages of a course when other, more reliable types of information are scarce. Insider evidence is related to what the teacher actually “does” during the class. This type of evidence is seen as more reliable, but only becomes available to students through ongoing participation in the class. I identified specific types of makeshift indicators (age, gender, etc.) and insider evidence (inclusive/exclusive teaching practice, facial expressions, etc.) and analysed how they correlate with the teacher’s perceived knowledge and acceptance of LGBQ identities.
The findings have the potential to help us create better learning environments for the LGBQ students in our classes. I will show how, by investigating our current teaching practices in light of the results, we can take some of the guesswork out of our LGBQ students’ learning experiences and, ultimately, free up valuable mental time and energy for the real job at hand: learning.
Abstract: 592