"Teacher by day. Lesbian by night": Queer(y)ing identities and teaching

This article reports on a study that examined how nine K-12 teachers who self-identified as gay or lesbian connected their classroom practices to their experiences as gays and lesbians. The author found that in doing so, they taught in ways that put queer pedagogy into practice. Using a coconstructive grounded theory approach, the author explored participants' relationships with the term queer and how they enacted queerness as teachers. The author found that even though participants (with one notable exception) rejected the term queer as a means of self-identification, they practiced a range of queer pedagogy. Although all participants queered their teaching practices and saw relationships between their teaching and their experiences as gays and lesbians, the openly gay participants were explicitly able to use their gayness to queer their teaching.