The First Time I Taught A Queer Text

I spent the last semester of my undergrad student teaching. I was assigned to teach two classes of juniors. For most of the semester, we worked on The Great Gatsby. It was a fairly traditional unit in which we talked about themes like the American Dream, the 1920s, and gender roles. While teaching the novel, I could not help but to think back to my own experience as a junior reading The Great Gatsby. As I discuss in another blog post, I became fixated on the idea that Nick has romantic feelings for Gatsby. I kept this in the back of my mind over the course of the unit. On what was meant to be the last day of the unit, I had my students think about motivation. Why is Nick so invested in Gatsby’s story that he feels compelled to write about it? After a discussion of various reasons why Nick might have written the novel, I posed my own answer: because Nick is in love with Gatsby and it is his way of working through his feelings. The class was really interested in the idea. They were so interested, in fact, that they requested an additional lesson just to explore it further.  This was the first time that I taught a queer lesson, and it went better than I could have ever expected.

With the Gatsby unit behind us, it was time to move into a unit on civil rights. The unit was designed to tie in with the students’ US History class and help them review for the state exam at the end of the year. While the unit is typically taught with a focus on the Civil Rights Movement, I wanted to take it further. I wanted to stress the idea that civil rights issues are not just an issue of the past, and that they are still being fought over today. As it was the end of the school year, I also wanted to make the unit interesting for the students and have them do group presentations. The result was a three week long assignment in which small groups of students worked on different contemporary civil rights issues.

I started by selecting four contemporary civil rights issues that I thought were worth exploring: Trans, Muslim, Immigrant, and Disability rights. For each of the four topics, I then selected a short story for students to engage with. For all of the texts, but especially the trans narrative, I made sure to follow certain criteria to ensure that the students could fully engage with them and learn about the group. The project had two parts: 1. In groups the students would read and analyze the narrative that went with their topic. 2. They would research the topic beyond just the short story. Both of these parts would be combined into a presentation that students would give at the end of the unit.

In order to decide who would work on each topic, I gave the students a survey in which they could rank their choices and explain why. I did this because I did not want to make any of the students have to work with something that would make them uncomfortable, especially when they would be teaching the class about their assigned topic. The unit went really well, and I feel that many of the students learned something. Students in the trans-focused group learned together, and when one student was unsure of something, another student was able to jump in and help. Everyone gained exposure to the various issues, but no one had to do any work that made them uncomfortable. While this is certainly not the only way to integrate queer content into a class, it was certainly a successful one.