Chapter 2: Introduction

Research depicting the lived experience of queer teachers is becoming increasingly the subject of scholarly research (Letts & Sears, 1999). There are, though, very few studies that research the experience of queer people who are in the process of becoming teachers. In 1999 Kate Evans wrote a chapter titled “When Queer and Teacher Meet” that is a research study about this very topic. Building upon the work of Evans and others (Harbeck, 1992; Khayatt, 1992), the purpose of this collection of letters is to help illuminate the experience of being queer while becoming an educator.

Negotiating a new profession with its idiosyncratic culture is always a challenging and stressful experience. It is even more difficult when you are becoming someone without many models to follow. The majority of educators are White (86%) and heterosexual (Newman, 2002). What happens when you are not one of these dominant identities? While some have written about race and ethnicity (Banks, 2003; Boutte, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Richard-Amato & Snow, 1992), few studies look at how queer precredential teachers negotiate the relationship between their new found profession and their sexual orientation.