Conference Overview
Welcome to the 2014 TeachOUT/ NWNWSA Annual Conference hosted by the University of Oregon Department of Education Studies and the ASUO Women’s Center. This is the fifth annual forum on gender and sexual orientation minority issues in education.
The 2014 conference will open on Friday, May 16 with three tracks of presentations/workshops and a keynote by Ivan Coyote. This two-day event offers networking and professional development opportunities for professors, graduate and undergraduate students, women’s center staff, K-12 educators and community members. The second day provides an opportunity for attendees to connect with regional musicians, comics and spoken word artists including comics Sapna Kumar and Belinda Carroll, spoken word artist and Shakespearean actor Claudia Alick, performance artist Nicky Click, and musicians Julia Serano and Whitney Monge.
Keynote: Ivan Coyote
Author and storyteller Ivan Coyote was born and raised in a large Irish Catholic family in Whitehorse, Yukon, and learned the craft of storytelling while gathered around her grandmother’s kitchen table on long northern winter nights. Ivan is the award-winning author of six collections of short stories, one novel, three screenplays and three CD’s, and a renowned live performer. Her work tackles the difficult subjects of family, class, gender identity, and social justice, always with the silver tongue of a master storyteller, an eye for the beauty found in what makes us all human, and an ear for the hilarity of life and love.
About the Theme
NW NWSA’s 2014 conference theme, Gender and Sexual Orientation in the Classroom, endeavors to examine the ways that feminist scholarship is transgressing the bounds of public/private, gender conformity and sexuality. Feminist scholars, educators and activists can provide important insights and refreshing perspectives imagining a feminist future in the classroom.
Through engaged feminist scholarship and queer theory, we will explore the ways in which gender and sexual orientation are discussed and enacted in the classroom and how they are made visible or invisible through instruction, embodiment, and performance. Utilizing an interdisciplinary lens, workshops will interrogate how gender is performed, applied, used a method of transgression, a mode of inquiry and/or how it is used to disrupt heteronormativity. By engaging the arts through intersectional feminist scholarship, we explore comedy, poetry, music and games as places of conformity and resistance.
This year’s conference theme, performance and education will explore how gender is enacted inside and outside the classroom.
Subthemes:
• Engaging creative methodologies
• Gender and performance
• Raising gender and sexuality in K-12
Subtheme: Engaging creative methodologies
Ever-shifting paradigmatic and theoretical models require individuals to employ creative methodologies when working with queer and gender issues in the classroom. Central to the development of methodologies is the ability to identify and implement best practices.
Here are some of the possible approaches to this topic:
- What are strategies we employ to establish legitimacy within the academy and workplace? How do we avoid being perceived as sister, mentor, wife, or mother?
- How do romantic friendships create unique opportunities for feminist and/or queer praxis?
- What teaching methodologies might we employ to challenging cisgender privilege/transphobia?
- To what extent are queer methodologies reshaping our modes of inquiry?
- What is the potential for joining social justice education with games and creative assignments?
- How can feminist leadership be used as a tool for social transformation?
Subtheme: Gender and performance
This theme explores how gender is constructed and normalized through daily routine, as well as how it is policed when both subtle and overt regulations are not adhered to. We invite presenters to interrogate how gender performance has both the ability to be subvert gender categories as well as perpetuate gender stereotypes.
Submissions to this track can approach the topic in the following ways:
- How has queer theory transformed artistic agency and expression? Similarly, how have queer artists (and art) pushed theorists and educators to envision new pedagogies, texts, and theories broadening the scope and depth of queer studies?
- How do women, trans*and genderqueer people establish agency by writing themselves into existence?
- How have current analyses of social media (Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) altered intellectual landscapes and feminism?
- How do we complicate visibility and recognize diverse queer and trans* identities?
- How do the ways we play and create, support, and/or destabilize larger institutions of power?
- How do popular films/ television shows re-enforce transactional relationships and racial stereotypes? How do they subvert hetero-normative relationships?
- How do we trouble the notion of spectatorship in performance?
Subtheme: Raising gender and sexuality in K-12
This theme explores how to address gender and sexual minority issues in K-12 schools and colleges of education. Submissions for this track can approach the topic in the following ways:
- Promote preK-12 dialogue about important issues involving sexual orientation and gender identity in schools
- Provide preK-12 staff, teachers and administrators with opportunities to inform and influence how schools/colleges of education are preparing pre-service teachers and administrators to effectively address these areas of difference
- Identify ways that schools/colleges of education and community-based resources can assist preK-12 practitioners in effectively meeting the needs of their lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, and intersex (LGBTQQI) students, staff, faculty and administrators
NW NWSA/TeachOUT invites all of those interested to submit proposals for workshops that represent the wide range of intersectional scholarship in relation to performance and education. Please note that submitted proposals must address one of the three themes above to be eligible for inclusion in the program. Each workshop will be 90 minutes.
Concurrent sessions and workshops may be facilitated by individuals or teams from one or more organizations. If you would like assistance in coordinating a joint presentation, please send inquiries to the contact person below. All presenters will be assigned a roundtable from 1:00-2:00pm in addition to their individual session or workshop. These roundtables are designed to facilitate information conversations, networking, and opportunities to interact with presenters outside of a structured session.
Nomination Deadline for Call for Proposals: March 21th