Transformational Pedagogy, or Teaching While Trans

Transformational Pedagogy, Or Teaching While Trans

I came out as transgender and started transitioning at the end of my graduate school career, and I navigated the job market while early in transition. This experience of being highly visible during the emotionally and physically vulnerable time of early transition fundamentally shifted my pedagogy, as well as my orientation as a scholar. I am a trans man who often passes as cisgender. I am also a cartoonist and a communication professor. My critical consciousness and self-awareness of gender identity and sexual orientation have been (and continue to be) fostered through higher education. My teaching philosophy and pedagogy are rooted in the notion of coming to consciousness through education; they are also inseparable from my experiences as a trans person and artist.

As a person who lived as a woman for most of my life thus far, and who now lives as a man, I know in my flesh and bones that deep transformation is possible. I have experienced it, and I am here because of it. What is education if not ongoing transformation? Having embodied lived experiences in radically different gendered bodies offers a unique perspective in the communication classroom, especially when discussing the gendered nature of communication and public discourse. But beyond this, my experience helps me guide students to seek and express their most authentic selves, to see themselves beyond the rigid boxes in which society places them. hooks (1994) reminds us:

In my classrooms, I aim to create an environment where students can discover their complicated identities and positionalities. Therefore, in this chapter, I share how my academic lineage provides the foundation for my teaching philosophy and pedagogical practices. Further, I discuss specific practical recommendations based on my lived experiences teaching in the modern academy as a trans person.

Educational Philosophy And Academic Lineage

My pedagogical influences originate in diverse academic and nonacademic disciplines. I have spent the last few years implementing liberatory pedagogical ideas into my teaching. For example, bell hooks (1994), Paolo Freire (1972), Bettina Love (2019), adrienne marie brown (2017), and others inform my teaching practices. I have made particular efforts to move away from a codependent or independent model of teaching, and into an interdependent one. This means moving away from a teaching style in which students are motivated to perform well in order to receive praise from me and toward a style that helps students locate their own intrinsic motivation and sense of purpose. I am heavily influenced by queer and feminist pedagogy, as well as creative and embodied practices (Barry, 2014; Flowers, 2017b; Haraway, 2013; hooks, 1994; Lorde, 1984; Ludlow, 2015; Sender, 2020; Thomas-Reid, 2018).

As brown (2017) notes, most people in the United States are socialized to be independent rather than interdependent, focused on the individual above the collective. An interdependent movement, society, or classroom is one based on “mutual reliance and shared leadership, vision,” which “means we have to decentralize our idea of where solutions and decisions happen, where ideas come from” (brown, p. 87). This is a substantial shift from the traditional classroom, in which the professor professes and the students absorb and reiterate (Freire, 1972). What does it look like for a classroom to function interdependently—particularly in a system where teachers’ jobs are to evaluate students’ learning and assign letter grades? Overall, these ideas undergird my pedagogical praxis and inquiry methods.

Supportive mentoring is a common antecedent for anyone who claims to be an effective teacher at the university level. Indeed, enacting the academic role of teaching is itself symbolic proof of the impact of our professional networks. We have learned effective and ineffective teaching methods throughout our tenure as students. As a result, we have crafted a teaching ethos unique to our lived experience. I could cite publications from the teachers and mentors in my intellectual lineage, but what is more salient is to name what I learned from them about how to be a teacher.