Self, Silence and Invisibility as a Beginning Teacher: a life history of lesbian experience

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Abstract
This paper draws upon data from an ongoing series of life history interviews with a young lesbian PE teacher, called Jessica (a pseudonym), who has recently started her career in a secondary school. Various moments from her life as told and written are provided in order to present a view of schooling from a particular standpoint that, for the most part, has been repressed. Therefore, how Jessica experiences homophobia and heterosexism in educational institutions, how she relates these experiences to other moments in her life, and the identity management strategies she adopts to cope with specific situations, provide important insights into a reality that is oppositional to the taken‐for‐granted reality of the dominant and privileged sexual class in schools, that is, heterosexuals. These insights illustrate how Jessica is systematically denied an essential freedom that is systematically granted to heterosexual teachers in a way that legitimises a distinction between her private and public lives that is partial, distorting and perverse. It is concluded that taking action against homophobia and heterosexism is the responsibility of all educators regardless of their sexual identity.

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