16. Starting School

finding a queer pedagogy

Most of this piece was written a month ago, while I was in the woods with my friends. I always think I’ll write more in the summer, but that’s never true: summer is for doing, for me. The processing, the thinking, the writing: those come later.

I went back to school a couple of years ago. I have always been a good student; I have always enjoyed school. Through two years of interdisciplinary graduate classes, through intense and voracious reading, I’ve learned an awful lot. Just as importantly, for the first time in my life, I’ve developed real confidence in my own ideas. This turn has come with new (to me) ideas, but more than that, it has hinged on my ability to recognize larger and larger patterns in the world: threads connecting one concept, one problem, to another. This is the kind of understanding that I am coming to recognize as queer, but it encompasses many marginalizations, many names. 

My queer pedagogy is about developing thinkers in relationship to one another, rather than teaching facts as isolated and discrete objects. I am up at my family’s cabin right now with my Friends Who Plan group. I don’t sleep a lot. I was the last one up at night, and I’m the first one up this morning, nursing my coffee while everyone sleeps, listening to the soft rain on the cabin roof. Once everyone is awake, we have an agenda: we’ll be crafting and cooking and playing and world-building, talking about our next steps in planning for an uncertain future. It’s already fun, and the fun is an essential part of our project. We are not preppers. We are friends who plan, and that planning, that preparedness, comes directly from our relationships to one another and to the world. 

I teach people already, in the formal sense, in my student services job at the university where I work. I lead workshops and trainings on gender diversity and allyship practices, and I like to think that I do a pretty good job of it. I am careful to tell my students - everyone from incoming first-year students to front-line culinary staff to tenured faculty - that while I’ll be showing them definitions and demographic figures, those aren’t the things they need to learn. They need to do the internal work of cross-checking the concepts I’m teaching against their own experiences of the world. Definitions and data will change, and quickly. Relationship to power and oppression will be a map they can rely on their entire lives. Every new iteration of my workshops brings me farther away from the glossary and FAQ I started with. I am not teaching people what an aromantic demiboy is. I’m teaching them about a matrix of relationships, helping them find their place in it, encouraging them to see the greater shape of it, and working with them to envision what those relationships could build or support in a better world.   

I started a program for my gender and sexuality center office last year, based on a project in a queer feminist pedagogy class. I called it The Gay Outdoors. We met once at the very end of the academic year, and the timing was such that almost no one showed up for it, but I’ll be trying again this fall. I’m still trying to understand how to market it: it’s not a hiking club, or a lecture series in queer ecology. It's a guided practice in noticing the world, in learning through relationships with other species, with land itself. The Gay Outdoors was inspired by many people: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Pinar and So Sinopoulos-Lloyd, and other writers of interspecies worlds. And it was also inspired by Friends Who Plan. My friends in this weird little club have changed the way I see and move through the world. 

Someone commented a while ago that this newsletter is mostly love letters. That is not going to stop! My increasing radicalization over the last several years comes from the world at large; from my own thoughts and experiences; from my teachers. But more than anything else it comes from my deepening relationships. To beloved humans, to birds, to insects, to Blanding’s Turtles, to stinging nettle, to rivers, to land itself. 

The wisdom and generosity that live around me have been a revelation, and I’m hoping to amplify them, to give them just enough structure that they can grow and change. This semester I’m digging deeper into liberatory pedadgogies, both in my academic and personal lives. I’m taking a class on teaching writing from a queer feminist theoretical perspective. I’m in the process of founding a local learning collective (much more on that later, I hope). I’m teaching my workshops for work, and taking students into the gay outdoors. I’m hoping to make time in amongst it all to share writings and miscellany as I learn from all of these practices. 

Citations, Recommendations, and Thanks

Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Queer Nature, a project of Pinar and So Sinopoulos-Lloyd

Here’s the little guided journaling zine I created with one of my students for The Gay Outdoors.

My only recommendation today is that you put your body in a body of water, if you can.

Thank you to my friends who plan.