Author: Mar Pauls (TA), MA SLaLS
As a trans student, it often has surprised me how little effort it seems my educators put into understanding, honouring, and affirming my identity. While I recognize identity affirmation does not fall solely on the educational system, I also note that the classroom spaces where my identity was included and celebrated were also the classrooms where I was able to connect the most with the material, and my learning outcomes were improved as a result.
Student engagement in the classroom requires that students feel safe, welcome, and included (Sapon-Shevin, 2007). To do this, it is essential to consider a student’s full personhood, including their lived experiences, intersecting identities, and subjective knowledges (Crenshaw, 1989; Code, 2014). This paper focuses on the importance of gender identity in the classroom. Identity is defined as an individual’s unique sense of self, based on lived experience and composed of all the social groups (e.g., race, gender, ability) they understand themselves to be a part of (Crenshaw, 1989; Bourdieu, 1991). In this paper I argue that honouring a student’s lived experience of gender is essential to allowing them to be fully present and engaged with the classroom context.
Students construct their identity in the classroom by drawing on a connective network of various experiences (Stanley, 2017). Student identity impacts their interpretation and interactions within the educational environment (Ballantine et al., 2023). One approach to integrating student identity in the classroom highlights the importance of affirming student identity and lived experience as they reconcile their lived experiences and identities within a global context (Stanley, 2017). By affirming student identity, educators can increase the relatedness of the instruction and depth to which students are able to produce and engage with content in the classroom (Stanley, 2017). This, amongst other efforts to increase the accessibility and inclusion of classrooms can serve to create a more effective pedagogical environment (Sapon-Shevin, 2007).
Gender is one aspect of student identity. Gender refers to abstract socially constructed categories that ascribe roles, attributes and behaviors, yet nevertheless hold immense importance to many (Haitembu & Mbongo, 2024). This is because gender influences how people perceive themselves and others as well as how people interact and how power is distributed (Women and Gender Equality Canada, 2023). An individual’s gender identity has a deep impact on their lived experience and their interactions in the world (Prebel, 2014; Butler, 1990), as such, it is to be expected that the same might be true for a student’s interactions in the classroom.
Prebel (2014) explains that by acknowledging a student’s gender identity in the classroom at the university level, educators can create an environment where students feel empowered to question heteronormative ideologies of gender. In some cases, a student’s gender identity might actually serve to reinforce heteronormative ideologies rather than challenging them (Prebel, 2014). One way in which these harmful ideologies can be combatted is by acknowledging the value of subjective knowledges (Narayan, 2004) in the classroom and working with students to understand how their lived experience of gender can influence the way material is understood and interacted with in the classroom. This may help to deepen student conversations regarding materials and allow them to connect the material to their own experience (Prebel, 2014; Stanley, 2017) ultimately increasing the effectiveness of teaching.
I argue that honouring and affirming student experiences and encouraging an accessible and inclusive environment in the classroom is one of many ways in which educators can encourage student success in the classroom. The importance of affirming identity, creating inclusive classrooms, and encouraging open and accessible dialogue to challenge harmful ideologies of gender are essential to increasing the effectiveness of pedagogy.
The question then becomes, how does an educator integrate gender? Prebel (2014) encourages students to think about their own identity and challenges them to consider how their lived experiences may be influenced by harmful ideologies. As this might not be possible in all educational contexts, many feminist scholars encourage the emphasis on lived knowledges and subjectivities (Narayan, 2004). This could include encouraging students to reflect and highlight how their own knowledges provide depth and relevant details about the topic at hand, where appropriate. Another, arguably universally possible implementation strategy is to simply take a moment as an educator to critically engage with the identities of students in the space and ensuring the materials, activities and context is accessible for all students (Sapon-Shevin, 2007). Small adjustments to materials and content can make a world of difference for students who have been historically excluded from particular educational spaces. Little details, like including readings from women in historically male disciplines or ensuring that student materials are free of transphobic language can allow students to feel safer in the educational space, and when students feel safer, and the material feels more connected to them, they learn more.
References
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