Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (2024)
Authors: Lee Iskander, Harper Keenan, Mollie McQuillan, Mario Suarez, Bishop Owis, Christina Cook, and Daniel Gallardo
Abstract: This article explores how trans school employees redeploy, trouble, challenge, and refuse prevalent discourses about transness and education. Drawing from interviews with 100 school workers in Canada and the United States, we employ Coleman’s (Citation2023) concept of ‘narrative repair’ to consider participants’ responses to an interview question asking what they would like the public to know about their workplace experiences. We show that workers in our study primarily drew from four overarching narratives about the relationship between their transness and their work in schools: 1) trans school workers face increased difficulty; 2) trans school workers have unique strengths; 3) trans school workers are no different from other school workers; and 4) the experiences of trans school workers defy narrativization. Our findings deepen understandings of how broader cultural discourses influence how teachers narrativize their professional experiences.