Jacob (Jenna) McWilliams
Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences Program, University of Colorado Boulder
Research statement
I situate my work within poststructuralist and feminist strands of educational research and within pedagogy-focused strands of queer and transgender studies. My research aims at forging livable educational spaces for learners across the spectrums of gender and sexual identity. My work is about transforming the social world in order to achieve increased support for those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA), but it is equally about dismantling misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia so that all people, regardless of their sexual or gender identity, can be free. Cultural expectations about gender are folded into, for example, the spoken and tacit rules for how women and men, girls and boys, should dress and carry their bodies and engage with others and make decisions about relationships, family, and careers. These expectations are also implicit in larger symptoms of cultural dysfunction, as in ongoing efforts to silence, bully, intimidate, and threaten women who speak up against sexism in video games and other popular media, as well as in cultural messages about masculinity that lead male-identified people to distance themselves from their emotional experiences and to engage, often unreflectively, in aggressive and sometimes violent behavior toward others.
My scholarship focuses on the following strands:
Designing LGBTQIA-inclusive pedagogies and curricula. For my dissertation study, I worked with elementary teachers to design and implement a ten-week curriculum on gender diversity. The curriculum integrated critical, creative, and performance-based activities and invited students to consider how gender norms are constructed and internalized, and to consider what kinds of identities and experiences are marginalized or erased by those norms. Students developed strategies for “talking back”—creating and circulating alternative messages about gender that make space for their own or others’ varied experiences. A key principle that emerged from this study is that gender variance is a common, shared experience—that we all learn from an early age how to read community norms and shift our gender presentation in response to those norms. I am continuing to study gender variance and gender-based community norms in my current role as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I am part of a project studying how Engineering undergraduates are socialized into their profession. My focus within this project is on how gender and sexual norms are transmitted and internalized in classrooms and in engineering workplaces, in order to develop strategies for increasing support for sexual and gender variance.
Investigating and designing queer methodologies.Although queer and transgender studies have been used productively to support cultural critique, less work has demonstrated how queer frameworks can inform methodology—particularly for those working in the social sciences. My work explores this issue from multiple perspectives. First, as a queer and transgender researcher, I have an ongoing interest in exploring how my body mediates activity in my own classroom and in researchcontexts. My dissertation explores, in part, the role my body played in pedagogy as I invited students to consider their own and others’ experiences of my gender presentation and gender identity. Using autoethnographic methods, I have continued to explore how my body interests with learning in my own courses and for attendees in my trans*-inclusive pedagogy workshops. My more recent research in engineering classrooms and workplaces has led me to consider how gender variant bodies are rendered invisible in heteronormative contexts, as well as how the queer body’s position behind a camera interanimates with that invisibility.
Giving voice to trans* experiences and identities. Memoirs and narratives of gender variance are an important feature of cultural conversations about transgender lives. Although the stories of people like Caitlyn Jenner and Janet Mock are important tools for increasing awareness of and support for transgender concerns, these narratives tend to present one perspective on who transgender people are and what transgender people want. My work aims at making visible alternative narratives of gender variance—by amplifying the voices of trans*-identified people and by drawing on my own experiences as a trans* person. I am particularly interested in exploring what the feminist science and technology studies theorist Susan Leigh Star referred to as the “high-tension zone” of gender nonconformity: a site of intense pressure mixed with rich possibility.
Across all of the strands of my research, I aim to contribute to interdisciplinary conversations in the humanities and the social sciences about alternative models for theorizing gender and sexual identities—in schools, in higher education, and in culture writ large. My publication record reflects this interdisciplinary commitment. I have published in education-focused journals and edited volumes such as Cognition and InstructionandPower and Privilege in the Learning Sciences: Critical and Sociocultural Theories, but I have also contributed to ongoing conversations in feminist and queer studies by publishing work in, for example, Gerald Walton’s edited volume offering cultural analyses of efforts to permeate mainstream culture with “the gay agenda” and Daniel Vena’s forthcoming anthology investigating trans* identities, nostalgia, and cultural constructions of transgender lives.
I continue to interweave the strands above and extend my work into new areas. I hope to undertake interdisciplinary study across elementary literacy contexts, and across multiple academic subject areas, to investigate how gender and sexuality are and can be reproduced, resisted, and challenged. My future research plans involve exploring the phenomenon of gender variance across a wider range of contexts, investigating how gendered and sexual performances intersect across childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. I hope to study queer and trans* issues in a range of literacy contexts, including schools, afterschool programs, peer groups, and family and community groups. I expect this qualitative, longitudinal work to be an important contribution to developing knowledge about how to build LGBTQ-supportive learning environments in elementary school and beyond.
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J.McWilliams