Many schools are taking action to become inclusive of gender and sexual diversity, however, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer teachers (LGBTQ) continue to exist at the margins of both schools and research. This study reports on interviews with a group of self-identifying LGB teachers in England. Subsequent thematic analysis examined the subject positions that are available, particularly around being 'out' (or not) in school. Findings suggest that LGB teachers take on complex identity work to maintain their status both as LGB and as exemplary teachers. For many, their desire was to become 'authentic' LGB teachers, which for them involved being out in school. However, this is arduous work for people who can be too easily positioned as 'failing'. There are ways to navigate this, which principally involve becoming the agent of dominant discourses rather than their subject. Overall, there is pressure on the LGB teacher to exist, not because it is a discrete identity, but because of its marked absence from dominant discourses in schools. This is particularly relevant to the neoliberal context in which teachers are caught between performances of heteronormativity and diversity, and where sexuality is intimately related to authenticity.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Volcanoes may erupt explosively. Meteoroids may explode on entering the atmosphere. A microwaved grape may explode (Conover, 2019). However, a growing body of research suggests that biodiversity at the dawn of the Cambrian Period did not explode. Data, amassed in the century and a half since Charles Darwin (1859) agonized that the apparent absence of Precambrian lifeforms was the weakest link in his theory of evolution by natural selection, support the view that biological diversity at the beginning of the Cambrian Period did not burst violently, detonate, shatter, or blow up. In this contribution, we trace the origin of the phrase "Cambrian explosion," give reasons for moving away from using it, and offer an alternative for describing intervals of significant increase in the diversity of life. The bibliographic pedigree of the phrase "Cambrian explosion" is uncertain; its origin is not clearly established in peer-reviewed literature. By the early twentieth century, the abrupt appearance of abundant (macro-) fossils in the Cambrian was canon in historical geology textbooks (Schuchert and Dunbar, 1933). The earliest use of the adjective "explosive," with reference to an evolutionary rate, was likely George Gaylord Simpson's "explosive evolution" to describe a general pattern of rapid diversification early in the history of a lineage (Simpson, 1944). Mid-twentiethcentury contemporaries echoed use of this phrase in characterizing a general evolutionary pattern (Henbest, 1952; Colbert, 1953). Use of the phrase "explosive evolution" to describe rapid diversification during the early Cambrian morphed into "The Cambrian Explosion" under obscure circumstances. The earliest published occurrence known to us is a section heading in an early version of an experimental high school biology curriculum
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.