Unscripting Curriculum: Toward a Critical Trans Pedagogy

Abstract

In this essay, Harper B. Keenan draws on his own experience as a white queer and trans educator to consider the meaning of a critical trans pedagogy. Amid dissonant narratives of equal rights and subjection, he explores how his classroom teaching is shaped by his own experience of gender conditioning as well as by the contemporary political climate surrounding trans identity. Keenan argues that a critical trans pedagogy requires unscripting and must necessarily support children in constructing new knowledge.

Can policies help schools affirm gender diversity? A policy archaeology of transgender-inclusive policies in California schools

“…Having more sub-headings may provide more clarity on certain topics, but excessive detail can become cumbersome to draft, approve, and enact. It also creates a kind of "script" (Keenan 2017) that further defines and restricts the legibility of gender, creating restrictions and unanticipated barriers for non-binary students, and others whose identities and forms of self-expression do not fit neatly into a dichotomous male/female gender binary. It also makes an implicit assumption that perhaps the only students likely to struggle with gendered institutional mandates related to things like yearbook photos, dress codes, or locker rooms are those who identify themselves as transgender.…”

“…As they are based on law, the limitations of school policy aimed at trans inclusion mirror the limits of law. While these policies may be tactically useful to some trans students to successfully navigate administrative channels, they place the responsibility of change primarily on the individual, and do little to change the power of school systems to categorize children's bodies or break down a system of script-making for what kinds of gender are normal and which are not (Keenan 2017). In other words, these policies largely task children with leading the process for solving a set of problems that they did not create.…”

Grounding Emerging Scholarship on Queer/Trans* Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x Pedagogies

“…Responding to the paucity of trans* pedagogical frameworks and informed by his teaching experience with elementary school students, Keenan (2017) proposed a "critical trans pedagogy framework" that unscripts gender and resists definition, as "there is no universal definition or experience of transness" (p. 551). LeMaster and Johnson (2019) argue that while school leaders are called to be inclusive of trans* students on campus, "pedagogues are confronted with the limits of their/our embodied knowing about gender" (p. 191).…”

Gender Disrupted During Storytime: Critical Literacy in Early Childhood

“…Gendered scripts (Keenan, 2017) are presented to young readers through picture books and children's literature that mirror North American sociocultural norms. Ya-Lun Tsao (2008) argues, "everything that children read contributes to the formation of self-images that help to construct children's self-identity" (p. 109).…”