Students as Co-Producers of Queer Pedagogy

Responding to concerns about a textbook reading that students perceived as heteronormative, cisnormative, and antifeminist, we formed a partnership between students and faculty to reflect on the situation and to workshop ways to move forward. Our discussions were informed by our situation: a public HBCU in North Carolina, a state that had been in the headlines for anti-LGBT legislation. Many students reported that prior to our work they had not felt they had power to challenge the authoritative nature of texts in a classroom, even when they found those texts to be incorrect or inappropriate. This project empowered students to work with faculty and the publisher to change the textbook itself as well as the way certain rhetorical content was taught in our institution.