Queering the Classroom: Teaching Nurses Against Oppression

Abstract

Background: Teaching about oppression risks replicating harm and reproducing othering. This occurs despite nurse educators' best intentions, with implications for both learners and recipients of nursing care. Teaching against oppression attends to the interlocking matrices of domination that construct otherness and propagate harm. Method: This article presents a norm-critical approach to education that interrogates the power and praxes that structure nursing education through a queer theoretical lens. First, terms, such as norm-criticism, norms, power, othering, and queerness, are defined. Next, the stakes of norm-critical, queer perspectives in nursing education praxis are discussed. Finally, these concepts are applied to brief case scenarios. Results: A queered perspective reveals the co-construction of norms, power, and othering in familiar nursing education praxis scenarios. Conclusion: This article serves as a call to action for nursing educators, inviting them into critical reflexivity by offering a queered lens through which to dismantle oppression within the practice and praxis of nursing education. [ J Nurs Educ . 2023;62(4):193–198.]