This week Tara has been reading Mary and Donald Collins’ collaborative memoir At the Broken Places: A Mother and Trans Son Pick up the Pieces. In their memoir, Mary and Donald describe their conflicting points of view about Donald’s medical decisions to align his body with his gender identity. While Mary supported Donald’s desire and his right to realize himself as a person, she didn’t agree with the ways he chose to physically alter his body. The memoir allows both Mary and Donald to explain how they felt during the conflict and how they have tried to reconnect and establish a relationship with each other. Kate Bornstein, author of A Queer and Pleasant Danger and Gender Outlaw describes the memoir as the best, most thorough narrative of trans experience he’s read.
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The research team is excited to be participating in two panels at the Canadian Society for Studies in Education (CSSE) and the Canadian Association of Canadian Research (CATR) conferences at Congress at the end of May.
The Experiences of LGBTQ Families in Ontario Schools We will be presenting findings from our first set of interviews undertaken in the Greater Toronto Area. CSSE: Canadian Critical Pedagogy Association Sunday May 28, 2017: 8:15-9:30 am Ryerson University Out at School: A Verbatim Theatre Project We will be discussing our process of devising a verbatim theatre performance from the interviews we are gathering. CSSE: ARTS Tuesday May 30, 2017: 9:45-11:00 am Ryerson University Creating Verbatim Theatre: A Praxis Discussion We will be discussing our process of moving from an interview transcript to a verbatim play script using one of the interviews from our project as a case-study. CATR Tuesday May 30, 2017: 2:45-4:00 pm 1087 Queen Street West We are excited to announce that excerpts from Out at School will be presented at the Canadian Centre for Gender & Sexual Diversity's Ontario Educators' Conference on April 28, 2017.
For more information and to register for the conference, please visit the conference website. We hope to see you there! On Sunday, January 22, the research team was proud to present a performance of excerpts from our project Out at School, a verbatim play about the experiences of LGBTQ families at school, written by Pam Baer, Tara Goldstein, and Jenny Salisbury. The play features monologues written from some of the interviews on the LGBTQ Families Speak Out website. The monologues were layered with a display of original artwork created by visual artist and research team member benjamin lee hicks. Songwriter and musician Kate Reid performed an original song based on the interviews. Out at School will be performed again in April at the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity's Ontario Educators' Conference. We're excited to share our performance with educators from all across Ontario!  Rebekah Houpt, performer  Kate Reid, musician/songwriter Exciting news! The first set of video interviews is up on the website. You can click on "Videos" in the navigation bar to watch them all, click on the categories in the sidebar to see videos on a particular theme, or click on a participant's name to see all of their videos.
We hope you enjoy watching them. The research team will be visiting Ottawa from November 4 to November 7, 2016. If you are interested or know anyone who would be interested in participating, please email us at info@lgbtqfamiliesspeakout.ca or by clicking here.
Looking forward to seeing you in Ottawa! This summer, members of the LGBTQ Families Speak Out team conducted a five-day workshop to begin disseminating some of the interview data in the form of a verbatim theatre play. Verbatim theatre has been described "as stories from real life"; "a piece of theatre made by interviewing people"; "work that draws in some way from real life of a community"; "a commitment to put... the voice of that community on stage"; "and work which... has some ethical obligation back to that community" (Brown & Wake, 2010, p. 2).
The workshop allowed us to arrive at a first draft, and we will be sharing that first draft with a group of student actors in October. We hope to be able to share a snippet with you soon. By Tarra Joshi
At our most recent meeting, we discussed Jordan B. Downing's article on Trans-Gender Parent Families. After almost no discussion, the whole team had agreed that the article was providing us with minimal depth that we could apply to our own research project. The article was lacking an intersectional analysis, which to us is very important. In addition, there was some trivializing and generalizing that took place with regards to the experiences of Trans parents and their families. We noticed that a lot of the observations and claims that Downing was making could have also been said for non-Trans parents and families. The exercise of doing a literature review of this article as a team was helpful, in the sense that we were able to think about what our publications. We also read benjamin's article on Challenging the Limits of Binary Language in Elementary Schools through Poetry, Word Art, and Creative Book Making which was a very thought provoking and for lack of a better word, beautiful article to read. As a team, we talked about how they had managed to effectively capture and relay the importance of doing work with school aged children around queer literacy, and using methods such as book making to tell these stories. The article also contains lesson plans for teachers to use to do this work with their students. I, along with the rest of the team found these lesson plans inspiring for our own work, and started to envision how lesson plans could be one product of our research. I was truly blown away by benjamin's article, and I look forward to what else they will bring to the research team and to the project as a whole. Just a quick update on the video interviews, we have one interview divided up into 1-3 minute clips, and we are now beginning the process of tagging and coding them before they are put up on the website! Stay tuned for more! By Tarra Joshi  Sexualities, Gender and Schooling: Approaches to Anti-Homophobia and Anti-Transphobia Education8/6/2015 By Tara Goldstein
For the last six weeks I've been teaching a summer course at OISE for Master and Doctorate students entitled Sexualities, Gender and Schooling: Approaches to Anti-Homophobia and Anti-Transphobia Education. This course is designed for Masters of Education (MEd) and Master of Teaching (MT) students and focuses on matters of equity, inclusion, and school reform as these pertain to differences of sexual orientation and gender expression among students in elementary and secondary schools. We have been focusing on understanding and addressing those educational and schooling issues confronting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) students. We have also examined the ways issues of homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism intersect with other forms of oppression and discuss a range of teaching and research activist projects that attempt to respond to these issues. COURSE OBJECTIVES Our work together has been centred on
COURSE OVERVIEW Week 1 and 2: Foundation building/Sexualities, Schooling and Anti-homophobia education The language of sexuality and gender studies Key policy documents for teachers and schools Key conceptual frameworks for anti-homophobia, anti-genderism, and anti-transphobia education Week 3 and 4: Gender, Schooling and Anti-Genderism and Anti-Transphobia Education Week 5 and 6: LGBTQ Families in Schools This is our last week of the course and based on the weekly take-aways we share at the end of every class we have all learned a great deal together. For a list of the texts we used in the course please click on Resources. |
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