Teaching and Learning through Desire, Crisis, and Difference: Perverted Reflections on Anti-Oppressive Education.

Abstract

that actively and intentionally works against oppression (i.e., education that changes racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc.), what I call educa tion. In fact, my own teaching experi ences suggest to me that these questions, with their commonsense or normalized notions of and crisis, make possible only certain ways of thinking about and engaging in anti-oppressive education, and make impossible or unimaginable other, and perhaps more effective, approaches to teaching and learning against oppression. In what follows, I reflect on my expe riences teaching high school students and student teachers, and argue that teaching was made meaningful, and learning against oppression was made possible, only when we?consciously or unconsciously ? made use of non-nor malized or forms of desire and crisis. My language, here, is intentional: reflections on the perverted involve not only a deviation from what is com monly considered good, right, or true in education, but also an incorporation of the queer into practices that often cling to the norm, as I will explain later on. Throughout the article, I include statements that some of my students have expressed orally and in writing to each other and to me as I attempt to re present some of the troubling conversa tions I hear in education.