Queering School Leadership Preparation Curricula for Gender Justice in Public Schooling

Recent education policies and laws such as a new rule to Title IX by the U.S. Department of Education (2020) and the Parental Rights in Education (HB 1557, 2022) also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida have important implications for how educational leaders are expected to address issues of gender, sexuality, and school-based sexual violence in public schools. The purpose of this article is to examine how education laws, policies, and practices privilege heteronormative values in our public schools and how the lack of educational preparation of school officials are complicit in the maintenance of hegemonic racial, gender and sexuality structures in public schooling. Structural intersectionality grounds this study and maps the corporeal consequences of systems of oppression while political intersectionality describes the strategies used to fight against those systems of oppression (Crenshaw, 2014). The study uses a qualitative narrative inquiry methodology to examine coursework data of doctoral students in an education leadership program to interpret their understanding of gender justice in teaching and leadership in public schools. Critical policy analysis as a discursive analytic is used in this study to reveal the interrelatedness of theory and method. The implications of this study bear important implications for understanding the need for gender justice curriculum in school leadership preparation programs and offers thoughts on how queering curricula can be an act of education activism.