Going through the impositions of the educational system with “an” outcast identity. Narratives by a student of teachers’ education about his school life

Abstract

This work will seek to answer the following questions. How is an outcast identity concerning gender and sexuality built throughout the educational system? How are teachers contronted, what knowledges and perspectives are required from them, by the presence in the classroom of problems and situations hidden, ignored or denied until then? How are these problems answered by the teachers’ education? How is the teachers’ education confronted by the presence of individuals demanding to be heard and issues requiring increasing visibility? By analysing the school life story of E, a university student who identifies himself as gay, we develop a reflection about his process of identitary construction while he went through school and university in a programme of teachers’ education, in order to reconstitute the experiences in different formal education institutions shaping his subjectivity as a child, an adolescent and a youngster. Methodologically, we adopt a biographic approach based on life stories. Two in-depth interviews were conducted, each one with the duration of about one hour. For the analysis of their contents, different categories were defined and then examined through the lense of theoretical frameworks that enrich the interpretations of the interviewee as well as those of the interviewer. We thereby propose an approximation between cultural studies and educational studies, especially those dealing with the issues of gender and sexuality at school. We also resort to the field of curriculum studies, focusing on the contributions from critical and post-critical scholars.