How to Queer Your (English) Class

Abstract

Teacher education programs have a big role to play in preparing (future) teachers on gender inclusive education. Especially in urban settings, where many cultures are represented within the same classroom, teachers need to have sufficient competency and sociocultural awareness to ensure gender inclusion does not become a taboo subject. In this chapter, a qualitative study will function as a pilot study by investigating to what extent a series of workshops on gender inclusive education affects material development of pre-service teachers, how they experienced the series of workshops, and how they would implement it into the core curriculum. Results show that students mainly opt for the usualisation approach and that they feel that the workshops have confronted them with their own biases. However, the question of feasibility of implementing topics like this in the initial training is posed, as it is one of the many subtopics of diversity. The authors suggest further research to see what the balance between initial teacher training and further professionalization should be.