A self-study into developing queer and critical pedagogies on youth and community work courses

This is a self- study (S-STEP) into interrupting and re-constructing heteronormativity via an integration of queer and critical pedagogies on youth and community work courses. It was conducted over three years and involved interactions with three student cohorts (over 200 people) and reflective conversations with ten colleagues. It was situated within a critical realist paradigm, making specific use of Archer’s morphogenetic approach and her typology of reflexives as a heuristic tool. I make an ontological contribution to knowledge by illustrating how critical realism is a useful bridge between queer and critical pedagogy. It found that ‘coming out’ is a legitimate method of interrupting heteronormativity, but needs to be a pedagogical act carried out co-currently with interrupting other social constructions and binary oppositions. It suggests that interrupting heteronormativity is most effective within the context of a whole course and wider team approach. There is a legitimacy and necessity of developing transgressive sexualities, especially heterosexualities. I add to the literature by suggesting that interrupting and reconstructing heteronormativity also necessitates the development of pedagogical practitioners as dedicated meta-reflexives with intersubjective consciousness’s. This combines elements of Orne‘s and Black’s reconceptualisting of Du Bois’s original vision of double consciousness, as a negative de-centring concept, to being a useful, and necessary, device in an increasingly liquid modernity. I also expand Scrambler’s, and Archer’s different visions of a dedicated meta-reflectives. Intersubjective consciousness’s can, by implications, only be held collectively. The group co-holding each other to account for the balance between stigma resistance and challenge. Developing pedagogical practitioners necessitates co-created and co-held metareflexive liminal spaces that emphasise inter-subjectivity, encounter and working in the moment. These spaces need to be founded on principles of the need to de-construct and reconstruct pedagogical power and knowledge, and understandings of the public and private in pedagogical space.