Recorded on Tuesday, October 14, 2025
TRANSCRIPT
Twan Claiborne ’07 All right, friends, good evening, good evening. Again, I know still people are trickling in and getting comfortable, so we welcome you at any point that you come this evening or morning or afternoon, depending on what part of the world you're in. Welcome to this evening's SwatTalk “Beyond Bullying, Book Bans and Bathrooms: Toward Utopian Visions of Schools for Queer and Trans Youth”. I am Twan LeGrett class of 2007 and I will be your moderator this evening. Today we have our lovely speaker who's been very involved and entrenched in this work for the last 15 years as after founding a school in New York City and now he is up in Albany as a researcher and professor of literacy, Scott Storm, the class of 2008. Before we get started, there's a couple of housekeeping things I want to go over. First off, thank you to the Alumni Council in partnership with the Swarthmore LGBTQ Plus Alumni Network for hosting this event as part of LGBTQ Plus History Month. If you have any questions, the question box will be open. We just ask that you add your name, your class year if you were a student, or your affiliation if you're connected to alumni, current students, faculty, friends of the community.
Just a little bit of background about the topic and then we'll go right into it. Schools and classrooms in the United States and across the world, there have been various groups that have been under attack. And unfortunately, our LGBTQ plus youth have been one of those groups. There have been attempts to belittle and exclude them based on their identities. And in the last ten years there have been many educators and activists that have focused on the important work against bullying and other practices, denying their identity; book bans, restrictive bathroom policies and practices that have excluded students, particularly our trans female identified students from sports. At the same time, there have been broader conversations also taking place among leaders and activists about how a utopian vision for schools for queer and trans youth might look like, not just schools that are protecting them and ensuring their rights, but affirming them and all. So again, Scott, thank you for participating in this and giving us a little bit of background about yourself before you start and then the floor is yours. How did you get involved in this work?
Scott Storm ’08 Thank you so much, Twan. Yeah, so hello, everyone. I am Scott Storm, class of 08. And I'm so excited to be here with you all tonight. And I have a little PowerPoint, so I'll go ahead and start that. And that will be part of my introduction of myself in that. So thank you, as Twan said, my talk tonight is “Beyond Bullying, Book Bans and Bathrooms: Toward Utopian Visions of Schools for Queer and Trans Youth”. I'm going to talk for about a half hour or so and then we're going to go to some rousing question and answer, but you don't have to wait until then. Please feel free to put your Q&A into the Q&A feature at any point. And thank you, Twan, for your incredible moderation, which you will not do in moderation [laughs]
Twan Claiborne ’07 Never [laughs]
Scott Storm ’08 Never exactly. Yes, so let's see if I can get this going here. Here we go. All right, so José Esteban Muñoz is a fairly famous queer cultural scholar who talks about queerness as a potentiality. That queerness is something that we have not achieved yet and will never really fully achieve and so it's always becoming. And so, in the spirit of that, I like to think about what striving toward queerness and also toward social justice education means. I got involved in this work very pretty young, when I was in high school. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania in a working class farming town and was one of the people who had a bunch of bullying happen to me. And I would go home and sort of, like, try and escape some of those worlds by writing my own speculative fantasy novels and that those places were places of queer utopia, places where homophobia didn't exist. But I never shared those in school. And so part of my work has been thinking about what would it take to make school more like those kind of utopian fantasy realms.
In the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I did a program called the Pennsylvania Governor's School for teaching, which was funded by the taxpayers and allowed me to go to a college campus for five weeks and learn about educational theory and practice. It's there that I fell in love with educational theorists like Paula Ferrara, Lisa Delpit, John Dewey, Ledwig Godske, Gloria, Ladson-Billings. And also you got to teach literacy to students who were in migrant education classes during the summer. And also, the students who were in elementary school, kind of enrichment and summer school programs. And I fell in love with the praxis of teaching both the theory and the practice. The praxis is the uniting force there. And I said, oh, man, from the governor's school, it was such a tight knit community, people that really cared about each other and cared about scholarship. And I wanted to find that in a college. And I wanted a college that had an ed studies program. So Swarthmore College was the perfect place for that. I was a special honors major in English literature and educational studies. I got certified to teach high school English. Right after Swarthmore I taught in Chester Upland School District, at the high school for four years. I started with my students as ninth graders and I actually got to loop up with them every single year until they graduated, which was really an awesome experience and helped me become not just a great teacher of content, but a great teacher of students.
And so it was with that that I then found a group of people, through a teacher leadership network that was actually run by Swarthmore, and a bunch of other smaller schools across that region. And that network, well, a bunch of us came together and said, oh, man, it would be so great if we could found our own school. And so we did, we hooked up with a principal who was starting a school in New York City. That school, Harvest Collegiate High School, I was a founding teacher at and worked there as an English teacher for 11 years. While I did, I really focused on a lot of teacher leadership roles. I was the professional learning community organizer in charge of professional development for the school. I hosted queer literary salons, where we thought about literature together. And I ran our writing center and a bunch of other things. While doing that, I also finished my master's at Bank Street College of Education in Educational Leadership. And then got a PhD from NYU in English education. I study the ways that literacies and social justice are intertwined, particularly with the focus on queer youth, youth of color and working class youth and their literacy practices. So I think about what youth do with words and what words to the youth. After getting my PhD, I was a visiting assistant professor at Bowdoin College for a year in Maine. And now, at the University at Albany State University in New York, so the SUNY system, where I'm an assistant professor of literacy in the School of Education. And so that's a little bit about my journey. You'll see some pictures throughout our presentation today. In order to really, really make sure that we protect the students that are in the pictures, we have releases and everything for them. But in order to really protect our identities, I always put a filter onto the pictures, so you'll see here, this is me with my saxophone and some of my students in an activity we called Gatsby Fest, where we turned the classroom into a 1920s jazz club. After reading The Great Gatsby and doing some interesting literary queries on the novel, we'll talk a little bit more about that as we dig in.
Twan did an excellent job of talking about how right now, in our country in particular, schools are under attack, in particular, the LGBTQIA+ youth are under attack. Bullying continues, book bans of many LGBTQ texts, regressive bathroom policies, anti LGBTQIA+legislation, and of course, threats to democracy. We all know these things. This talk does not focus on those things, but I really wanted to put them here and acknowledge them as José Esteban Muñoz calls it ‘acknowledge the quagmire of the present’. And it's with, you know, these ideas of the current quagmire that we can push forward and really dream together and really speculate what could schools look like? And then at the end, we'll think about what are some practical steps toward that, but we're going to go on a little bit of a speculative journey.
So in doing that speculative journey, in a lot of my research, I draw inspiration from queer spaces and communities in both my teaching and my research. And so what I think about is how do we explore the social structures of queer spaces? And for this talk today, I think we have three terms that we need to know. We're going to talk a lot about curriculum, which we're going to define as the content and topics that happen in schools, or in other spaces. So this is the what and much of the, kind of attacks on queer youth are at this level of the what, what books can we read, what words can we teach those kinds of things? But there are two other things that we also need to think about. One is pedagogy. Pedagogy is teaching methods. We're going to think about it today as the social actions or the practices, the things that teachers and students actually do in classrooms, the ‘how’ of teaching. We're also going to think about ideology today. And by ideology here, I'm talking about the deep seated assumptions and norms, particularly about schools, about gender in schools. And these are sort of the things that guide a lot of the actions in schools, even though we might not be consciously aware of them at all times. So in some ways, this is the ‘why’, this is, kind of, the things that guide people, whether they're aware of it or not.
We're going to start by thinking about some queer communities of the past, and then move into contemporary queer communities. So when we think about queer communities, we often think about queer literary communities. Gertrude Stein's literary and esthetic salons of the 1920s, in her Parisian apartment. Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, hosting these salons with great luminaries, talking about all kinds of social issues of the day, issues of esthetics and what did those queer communities look like? They looked like people exchanging intellectual ideas. They looked at people thinking about what it means to be beautiful. And they thought about how to create knowledge together. Similarly, radical queer bookstores, in the United States, there's a rich history of queer bookstores as a home of activism, a home of tight knit queer communities. And these are both spaces where queer people can really thrive. Some of my research takes these ideas and creates similarly socially constructed spaces for students. Today in addition to still having radical queer bookstores, we have a bunch of social media literary groups, particularly that are queer led or that are queer focused. For example, one that I've been doing some research on recently is the Tumblr Dracula Daily community. Now, Dracula Daily, is an email listserv that you can sign up for, and they will send you part of Bram Stoker's Dracula on the days that correspond to the dates in which the chapters in the novel are named. As it's an epistolary novel, it's written in letters, so you get May 3rd, you get the May 3rd letter. And this has been going on for about five years. And the community on Tumblr who talk about this have a lot of really interesting, queer and LGBTQIA+ analyzes of the text. We're always thinking about Jonathan Harker, who was one of the protagonists as a potentially queer character as well as Dracula himself. And one of the things I did is, you know, we've learned about some of these queer literary communities from the past, but we don't have a lot of information about what holds these queer communities together today. And so a colleague of mine and I downloaded a whole bunch, literally thousands of posts and replies and notes from this particular literary community. And I use some quantitative methods and statistical analyzes using machine learning to figure out how do the words in these posts cluster across thousands of different posts. And so this is, one little tiny output that shows the statistic clusters and the words that we're going to look at just briefly here are the ones that I've highlighted in yellow. We were really struck when we did this research, noticing that words like people, synchronous, feel, love and joy, talk were some of the words that appeared sort of like most prevalently in this corpus, in conjunction with each other. We also have words like talking, talk, good, experience, fun, nice, love, experiencing, community, sense thoughts, fandom, friends, friends, fun, talk games, real, social, love, reading, books. Right? And so we were like, oh wow, this is in fact an incredibly social place. Even though it's happening asynchronously online. People are talking about their affects, talking about like, loving and talking about queer interpretations of literature, they're loving this kind of community feel to it. And so we said, wow, if this is sort of like some of the ideologies that are undergirding this space, what could we create today that would be sort of a next step. How can we take the Gertrude Stein stuff and the radical queer bookstores and these kinds of contemporary spaces and put it together.
So in my dissertation research, I did a queer salon project called Literary Scholars for Justice. I had a group of youth, 25 youths from across New York City, who worked together over two summers to really think about what does it look like to talk about aesthetics or literary form and social justice together? We have 235 hours of video and the participants wrote over 1000 pages of writing. They wrote their own compositions, they wrote their own novels, they wrote their own poetry, all kinds of different things, really exploring what it means to think about queerness, to think about social justice, and to do it in artistic and creative ways. One of the big findings of that particular work is that when you give students the agency to decide what kinds of writing they want to do, they can really, really flourish. And they dig into identities that they want to explore, and they talk to each other and they analyze text together. And the textual analysis actually deepens the writing and vice versa. So in doing this, we were thinking, okay, how can we bring some of this to school? The participants were all my former high school English students and it was the summer between their last year of high school and the first year of college, often. And so we were sort of in school, sort of out of school, we like to say that we were on the queer edge of school. And so how can we push those kinds of things in a school based on what we learned?
I'm going to talk about two other kinds of queer communities quickly before we then move into thinking about what this looks like in schools. So tabletop role playing gaming communities are very popular right now. You may have heard of things like Dungeons and Dragons, or Thirsty Sword Lesbians or other kinds of tabletop role playing games. These are games where people make up stories and you roll dice to see what happens in your story. You can say, like, I want X to happen and you roll the dice, and if the dice is good, then that happens and if the dice is not so good, then maybe something else happens. This is a space that queer people have been really taking up as of late, particularly queer teens. I worked with a group of queer youth of color and some allies who were playing dungeons and Dragons and trying to queer D&D. They wanted to make it so that they could have multiple different kinds of genders that aren't typically represented in D&D. They wanted to make sure that some of the tropes that typically come to D&D got disrupted. Often the orcs and the tea flings are treated as sort of lesser beings or the orcs are seen as barbaric. And so what would happen if we made the orcs in charge of the libraries and in charge of seats, of learning? What happens if we kind of put on its head a lot of the tropes that are baked into D&D, in order to make it more inclusive in myriad ways, not just related to queerness, but across all intersectional oppressions.
So we did a youth participatory action research project where over the course of a year, we recorded our D&D sessions, trying to push the role playing game to create our own queer utopias. We had focus group interviews in between there, where we talked about what happened, and we had some semi-structured interviews as well, and we did a whole bunch of audio data analysis sessions together where we actually listened back to our gameplay and said, ‘oh, wait, that was like pretty hegemonic masculine. Why did you say that?’ and then think about what we could say instead. And this would all be well and good, but what was really exciting is we then did an activism project where everyone in the original role playing group went and started their own role playing group with different groups in the school using what we had learned in our first go round and really spreading the knowledge to have more and more and more students in the school think about, you know, how can we be like, really thoughtful about our language? How can we celebrate all people's identities? How can we do this while telling these really interesting stories? And it was this kind of exciting rippling effect where throughout the school you could see people playing D&D, and you could have this moment where you heard them changing their minds or changing their ideologies about queerness, about this, the people that they went to school with. And this was really exciting because it wasn't a teacher lecturing about how to, you know, make sure you follow the rules. Instead, it was this student up, kind of more grassroots extravaganza.
The last piece of queer kind of culture that I want to touch on here is, of course, drag and ballroom cultures. There's a lot of really phenomenal research about thinking about what is it in the social milieu of these kinds of cultures that really allow queerness to flourish and for people to be their own selves? And shout out to some of the drag pedagogy research that Harper Keenan is doing with Little Miss Hot Mess, a phenomenal Swarthmore alum as well. And so, that is some really great research, if you haven't seen it, I recommend going and checking it out. One of the key things is that in drag culture, it's about storytelling and narrative and pushing against some of our culturally held assumptions. And it comes with embodied play, everything is playful, everything is larger than life. And so thinking about those things, it's now time to think about how we queer school, you know, drawing from all those different kinds of queer communities. So we're pushing now toward developing what’s called ‘The Queer Aesthetic Imagination’. From a curriculum perspective what we've learned about these queer communities tells us that the curriculum needs to include inclusive representations of all kinds of people across the LGBTQIA+ experience. You really need to have lots of queer experiences and identities represented in the curriculum and then we want to also focus on justice oriented concepts; queer theory, critical race theory, ideas about marginalization and tokenization are all going to be key. We don't have to necessarily use those exact words, but we need to make sure that we have the tools to do that kind of critical analytic thought in order to push forward. That's what we think about curriculum. From what we learned here we know that for pedagogy, we want to move away from the teacher talking in a long lecture format. Oh, no, like I'm doing now, and instead move to co constructing knowledge and narrative together. We want people to be engaged in ongoing conversation together so that classrooms are places where people can learn from one another and the strengths that they bring. And that these communities have been driven by playful talk, and playful writing. And so making opportunities for that on an ideological level and these communities disrupt what's taken for granted. They have us think about pronoun use, they have us think about the ways the gender roles function, they have us think about what might be unexamined in the ways that we talk and then the ways that we are with people. And they're also really tight knit and loving communities.
And so in thinking about queering school, these are the three kinds of things that we want to focus on; curriculum, pedagogy and ideology based on what we just learned from the Queer Aesthetic Imagination. And what I think is so interesting is that so many of the policies that are hitting schools today, so many of the ways that people talk about schools. is really about curriculum and it's really focused on the ‘what’. And often pedagogy is this place that teachers actually have a lot of freedom sometimes, and it's a place where we can be disruptive and sort of like, go under the radar. So even if you are a teacher, who is in a place for context where you can't do everything that we're going to talk about here tonight, maybe you can do some of the pedagogical things, if not the curricular ones. And maybe also you can kind of push against some of the ideologies.
And so when we reimagine curriculum, in the school that I helped to found, as a whole English department, we really thought about how can we reimagine our curriculum so that it's inclusive of all queer and trans people. These are some of the books that we put into the curriculum - Angels in America, the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Tony Kushner. A whole lot of Audre Lorde's work, work from young adult literature, such as Aristotle and Dante Discovering the Secrets of the Universe, Juliet Takes a Breath. Classics like The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Dean Atta’s the Black Flamingo, which is a verse first novel. This is just a very small sampling and in the scope of this talk, I'm just talking about what we did in the English department. But the history department, the science department and the math department all had really, really similar discussions and did kinds of similar things, which is really interesting. And in addition to having texts in the curriculum we also needed theories or ways that we were going to think about these issues in schools. And so, the lenses of analysis in the middle here, include queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, feminism. And we would read literary theory about these kinds of things, such as the work of Lorenzo Dua, in Borderlands La Frontera. And then students would literally don these particular lenses as they talked and analyzed literature together.
We also want to think about reimagining pedagogy, though, and so one of the things we did was, move to a lot of the kinesthetic work by changing space. And so on the left hand side, you see students taking a whole bunch of those critical concepts and putting them on the floor and, and talking about them and moving them around and having this, like, really active discussion about what these look like and how it works together. We also tried to really think about how to Queer Time and so on the right hand side, you see one of our read ins where after school, the whole community would just stay and read for an hour or two. And then, we would have a big reading banquet where we celebrated the kinds of characters that we were reading about, including many, many, queer and trans characters.
Also, reimagining pedagogy. We want to think about embodiment and intellectualism, really intellectual play, really pulling in, from the drag pedagogy work. If you've ever seen RuPaul's Drag Race, a key, kind of social part, there is a game called the Snatch Game where people dress up as different celebrities. One of the things that we did across our English department was a famous literary theorist conference, where students dressed up as famous literary theorists in the grand tradition of the Snatch Game and others. And it's really important to have really explicit conversations about what it means to embody a real person and how not to choose identities that you don't subscribe to. That was always a really big, important part of our work. In this picture, you can see, a student on the far left is Eve Sedgwick, who wrote a book called The Epistemology of the Closet. Another interesting one is in the center right here, the guy with the bow tie, actually has a cotton ball cap on, and he's playing Derrida. So that was really fun.
And if I'm going to ask students to dress up, I have to model myself and so all the teachers came as different versions of Lady Gaga. Here I am in Bad Romance Lady Gaga on the right with, yes, those are stilts that I made with chicken wire and two by fours. On the left hand side is us acting out Angels in America. So the angel is standing on the tables, he has these giant wings, that two other students are using puppet sticks in order to maneuver, as the students read aloud from Angels in America. And so these are some of the kinds of ways that we're changing pedagogy.
We also reimagine pedagogy in thinking about epistemology. By epistemology, I mean, how is knowledge constructed and what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts? And so it's not a lecture based classroom, instead, it's a discussion based classroom. That doesn't mean that I just sit in this circle on the right and say something and then call on one student, and then I ping pong back to me, that's not what it means. Instead, students are really leading conversations about the literature that we're reading, and they're bringing in literature and media and film that they really care about. And we're looking at clips of those and using queer lenses on those as well. And that's the way that we're creating knowledge together. On the left hand side this is a self-portrait that one of my students did. And she said that, when she was in our class in our school, she felt like all of her identities could really thrive. And she wanted to capture all of her different kinds of nerddom here. And what was really exciting is that she did sketches like this earlier, for this particular one a colleague and I commissioned her to make this final draft here for the cover of her book. And so, that book is about fandoms in the classroom, and you can check that out as well if you want more information.
And now, finally, reimagining ideology, we want to move away in all the research we find, we want to move away from discourses of compliance. So much about school is about complying, like, you need to do this, you need to do that. We want to move away from deficit approaches to students. We want to move away from approaches that frame just doing school as the thing you have to do, because that's like what we do. And move away from deadening learning spaces and what we need to and want to put instead and what we want to strive toward is discourses of community. Making schools actually spaces that our community is not just holding pens, not just places where 34 students are sitting in a room, but instead have a strength space approach to all students' assets and passions. Give people agency and power in those classes, approach frame, approaches that are framed as authentic inquiry, and joyous learning spaces.
But you might want more concrete information. What exactly does this look like? One example towards thriving, are some of the classes that we created at Harvest. We created a course called Literary Queries, another called Writing the Great American Novel. And all of these and many, many others. And these courses all explored diverse American literature. They exceeded the state learning standards. Students still took the state test in English language arts, and they all passed in order to graduate, which was very, very exciting. But also just like is testament to if you do actual critical thinking work, then you can really, get into it and get some real results. The pedagogy that we use is that every student in that class wrote their own novel, and pursued their own literary inquiries by writing 5 to 10 page literary analyzes, which they then presented to a group of external examiners in a one hour oral defense. All right. So this is some really high level stuff that they're doing, and it meant that I, as a teacher, let go of prompts. I didn't give people specific prompts that they had to follow for these kinds of things. But instead embraced platforms like, you're going to do a literary inquiry, you can figure out, like, what is the thing that you're interested in, in pursuing. Lots of spaces for lots of different kinds of ideas and inquiries around gender and sexuality. We had student centered discussions. We also held literary balls, the famous theorist conference, all kinds of different, really hands-on things, pushing the ideologies to be creating joy, play, tight knit communities, places where you can follow any of your intellectual passions, supporting these justice space inquiries and creating communities of scholars instead of communities where we're just doing school.
Here are some examples of the kinds of inquiries that students created. I'll just read a couple - Deconstructing Sisterhood and Linguistic Change in the color Purple. As Celia becomes more empowered, her language changes. One of my other favorites, Deconstructing the Reification of Feminine Stereotypes across LGBTQ+ literatures, from Virginia Woolf's Orlando to Gabby Ramirez’s Juliet Takes a Breath, really looking at that. And so people looked at diction, they looked at metaphor, they thought about what it means to analyze masculine tropes across this literature. And so they’re taking ideas of literary form and criticality, particularly around gender and sexuality, and really putting them together in authentic inquiries.
And so when we are all advocating for a queer esthetic imagination in our schools, we want to continue to fight against book bans, against bullying, against restrictive bathroom policies. We want to continue to hit at the curriculum. We also want to not forget pedagogy and ideology, that these are also places that we can have a change and that we can be a change, either at a local level, if you are a teacher, or if you're a parent and you're someone who wants to ask their schools, what are you doing? These are some ways that you might be able to push forward, even if schools can't change curriculum, maybe they can change pedagogy and work to change ideology. And so those are lots of things that we've been thinking about, and ways that we can really push the conversation forward.
Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported me in this work. And in particular, these are the organizations that have given me either mentoring support and or financial support. So huge shout out to all of these wonderful organizations who are supporting work by queer scholars. And also, just like a special shout out to Swarthmore, for having this wonderful AwatTalk. And Swarthmore is the place where I met my husband during Screw Your Roommate. So shout out to my awesome husband, Patrick Hart ’06. And I am so excited to have questions now and I'll turn it back to Twan.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Thank you. I feel so enriched and full of excitement and hope and optimism and also that overwhelming sense of being an educator. Like, how are we going to get this all done? How can we all fit this in? How are we going to teach the students to do this? Finding myself, unfortunately, as you've seen in this work we oftentimes center ourselves in it unintentionally even trying, even while trying to center the students because we're like, again, like you mentioned, the deficit, operating from a deficit system where they don't know how to generate their own questions, they don't know how to do this. And so this is actually kind of that line of thinking is tied to our first question from Lisa, the great Lisa Smolin. Hi, so glad you could come and join us. Coming out of retirement just to, you know, drop some, some knowledge and some great queries for us to think about. So her question is, are there structural affordances or limitations that impact the success of reimagining curriculum, pedagogy and ideology in schools? And what do teachers need to make this happen?
Scott Storm ’08 Yes. Thank you for the question Lisa, it is an excellent one. Of course, there are structural forensics and limitations that impact the success of this kind of reimagining. And those affordances and limitations happen on a lot of different levels. So we often jump to thinking about, like what the state is doing or what the federal level is doing. And that's important because those can be really limiting factors. They can also be affordances. For example, in the state I'm currently in, New York State, one of the major things that they've rolled out in the last few years is a culturally sustaining framework that kind of goes over top of all of the standards. So that when you get questioned, maybe by a parent, by a stakeholder, by an administrator about some of the ways that you might want to queer school, you can immediately point to that culturally sustaining framework which has these kinds of ideas in it and say, like, this is the justice based work that the state is doing. That's something that in my teacher education classes we talk about is anchoring up. So you can anchor up to, sort of higher authority when it, like really helps you, to do so, in order to gain some power, right. We also think of these affordances, and limitations at the school level. Sometimes you'll have an administrator who's just kind of against you in particular ways. And one way that you can work against that is to really think about what is the group of colleagues who are amenable to what you're doing? We know that groups of teachers together can either reify the kinds of ways that school has always been done, or they can push and they can reimagine together. And so sometimes we're a lot stronger when we work together. And sometimes you won’t have those people in your building. And so we think about all the organizations that I put up, like the National Council of Teachers of English, which has been for me a great place to really like to reach out. There's lots of teacher action groups and things like that and activism groups across the country. Find your local ones, too, because those are the places where you're going to find like minded teachers that have similar kinds of constraints. And so you can strategize and be coconspirators together, would say.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Thank you for that answer. If you're in New York City, there is a group that I've been part of my entire curriculum, NYCoRE New York Coalition of Radical Educators, that is just a plethora of wonderful information and asking these questions about how to make an all encompassing, inclusive community for our students and also providing the necessary balance of training teachers to let go of some of their perceptions about their own abilities and their abilities of their students. Which actually is a question coming up, somebody it's like this group is like on the ball and it's beautiful the way that we're all sort of thinking about the same things and in our own little bubbles. There was something that you said, Scott, it's going to come back to me that I was thinking about in terms of the building of the coalition of teachers and their, It's coming to me. So we schools the way it was about the way that we envision schools and we think about these schools as factories. How much? Trying to think of how to frame the question because something that my school I have, my private schools or private schools definitely operate on a different, we have a little bit more freedom than public schools do because of the lack of state restrictions, however, because our parents have to be more affluent, there is that so restriction. So I imagine and I know from my public school experience, there's always the families, right? We create these wonderful worlds within our institutions. Yet the disconnect is when they leave. So how can schools balance that line of presenting this ideal for the students in this space and grounded in reality as well, knowing that when these students leave, they're going to be confronting a lot of what we are trying to prevent and challenge in our own spaces.
Scott Storm ’08 Yeah, this is something that my students have talked about a lot. And one of the things they always tell me is, Scott, we have enough of those kinds of conversations at home, we're actually really good at dealing with those, right? Well, we want to know how we can take the next step, right? They're like, we're used to dealing with our racist and homophobic uncle, right? How can we take the next step among ourselves, right? And so sometimes there are students who are like, wow, this is all new to me. Like, tell me what you say to that, uncle, right? And then, like, use the knowledge and the wealth of knowledge in your classroom in order to get to those strategies, right?
And the other thing I'll say here is that I think a really cool thing about all of this work is that, like, what I'm describing is not speculative. We did all of it at the school that I worked at for 11 years. And so like, and it was a totally public New York City public school, right. And so these things are possible in some places at least, including in public schools and private schools and lots of different places.
Twan Claiborne ’07 This question comes from Jeff Ruda, class of 69. What age breakdowns do you use in addressing students' needs? Does it go year by year or are broader age groups workable? Can you work with students who haven't reached high school yet?
Scott Storm ’08 Oh thanks, Jeff. Yeah. Great question. One of the things I would say is that you can do a lot of this work even as early as early childhood. You won't use the same kinds of academic discourse for it, right? But you're going to be thinking about, like what it means to treat another person in a human way, right.? We think about some of the great work that's been done, with, drag Queen Story Hour, which is where drag queens come in, read a story, usually in a public library, or another space and do kinds of thoughtful pedagogy around that work. This is done with early childhood and so this is something that can start really, really early. And it's not like getting students to be all at the same level, right? One of the things that I didn't say is that, in this particular school that I worked in, we had fully inclusive, untracked classrooms. So that means the students were not segregated by ability. Instead, everybody was in one classroom, and we differentiated based on the student's needs. What that looks like is we start class with 20 to 30 minutes of independent reading, where I'm doing one on one really intensive reading intervention with people who need that, and other people are reading together in the corner, maybe they're reading Angels in America, maybe they're reading a really, really high level text. And there's also a special ed teacher that teaches with me so that we can serve all students, right? And so that's some of the ways that I think it's about inclusion at all levels, both age and ability.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Very, very practical in a lot of ways. And also to give us time to plan so we can do all of these things, right? Because that's also another limitation. It's like even with the flexibility that you have to implement all these things, a lot of those deadlines approach and some of them aren't even real. It's just this is what the admin wants us to do. And speaking of admin and community culture, this is from Anna, class of 08 as we say during R&M commercials. So her question goes back to the changing of minds of faculty in terms of viewing their students at a deficit model because she is a head of her department, primarily science teachers and she's tried to bring in different pedagogies to move away from that approach and to incorporate diverse teaching practices. But it's really hard to shift an adult's mindset about a student, even with all this research. What are some ideas that you can share with how you can get teachers to change this perspective or to leave the deficit approach of viewing their students behind?
Scott Storm ’08 This is a great question. Thank you. Anna. Also ’08! And so for this question, I think one of the really important things to remember is like, yeah, changing ideology is really hard, right? And we can't really change ideology directly. We can only do it through pedagogy and curriculum, right? And so when we think about changing the ideologies of our teachers, right, I like to think about like, from a professional development perspective, what is the curriculum of the professional development. And so one of my favorite things to do for this particular issue, I'll share two. One is something called descriptive review of a student, which comes from the Prospect Center and is written about by Pat Carini and others. And what you do for that particular model is you look at student work, and you look at maybe a lesson that the students are participating in, it's really great to have a video or an audio with a transcript. And you look and you say, what are all the things this student can do? And when you do that, just like, as literally as possible, you start to name a whole bunch of things that just go unnoticed in the everyday of classroom teaching experience, because we often don't have time to slow down and do that kind of thing, right? So even if you're just going to use the four teacher professional development days that are built into the school year, like Election day is coming up, let's get that one right. Even if you do this a couple times, it can have really big dividends. The other thing that I love to do, just similar, is videotape a teacher's lesson, a teacher who is like, at least open to this particular thing and then have everyone look at it and pause it and be like, okay, this student just said X, what are the like 12 different things the teacher could say next, and which one is going to like lead us toward the student feeling like they are the most empowered? Are the most part of this community and are the most able to take the next step in their learning. I like to always bring it back to ‘Okay, but you want to take the next step in the student's learning’. If you just jump to ‘They don't know X, Y, and Z’, you haven't said what they do know and therefore you don't know what the next step is because they might not know X, Y, and z, but the next step might not be any of those things. And so it's important to see where they are so that you can take the very next step in the learning.
Twan Claiborne ’07 And I would like to specifically highlight that for our faculty members who are trained in working with students with language based learning disabilities and any learning disabilities, because by default, we're all the way we are programmed to view deficits and to work through deficits and this model really challenges that and probably help us deal with a lot of the things that our students are seeing in terms of their own deficits and struggles that make them feel successful. I personally really like this question because it gets to the ‘why’, and I'm always about the ‘why’ coming directly from Becky Voorhees. And hopefully you can do this in, you know, two minutes, but we'll see. Can you help articulate why lifting up queer and trans students lifts up all students?
Scott Storm ’08 Oh yeah. Absolutely. Thank you, Becky for an awesome question. All these questions are amazing so far, right? The thing that I would say is that when we design school structures, we want to do so with the people who are sort of most on the margins, because if we can serve them, then we can serve everyone. This also goes for people with disabilities. For example, if you put in a ramp, then no one is hurt by the ramp getting into the school, it makes everything easier, including for the person with a physical impairment that needs that and so they feel less stigmatized, everyone feels more equal. We have very, very similar things about lifting up queer and trans students, right, when everyone then can feel seen, right? And so the lens we're looking at this today is through queer and trans students. But, we could have done this very, very similar talk, thinking about any other kind of marginalized group. Right. And there would be some differences. But there would also be a lot of overlap. And so thinking about designing a system for the people who are at the margins, really then we'll make it work for everybody.
Twan Claiborne ’07 This question goes back to an earlier point you made about the students who feel comfortable and having these conversations already. And they're like, what's the next step? This is coming from class of 98, Matt Neil, where he opens up saying that this work is the best [inaudable] actually, let me read the comment: Given the political moment in which we find ourselves, what does your research suggest about the potentiality of the dual tasks of minimizing imminent harm while simultaneously striking toward utopia? So going right back into sort of that idea of balancing the real and the fantasy.
Scott Storm ’08 Thank you Matt. This is really what it's all about, right? As you know, Muñoz often talks about how we might be in a quagmire in the present. We want to have one eye on the future, and then we're going to, like, move together, right? And I think that the way to do that is to make sure we have time to dream and to then implement those dreams, but also to know what people are going to say. And to train each other for how to speak back against people who are going to try and stop us. And think about, like okay, this person is one of my colleagues and they're really, really good at combating these kinds of stereotypes or these kinds of gripes that people might have. This person is really good at this thing, so we're going to use that network in order to really push it forward while also doing what we want to do. I also, sort of connected to this, would always say sometimes to my students, I'm a teacher, educator, and my students are preparing to be literacy specialists, and they serve K through 12 classrooms. And one of the things my students are always worried about is, what if there's a father who comes up and, like, doesn't like what I'm doing? And then I have to talk to them and like, oh my gosh, I don't know. And I always say, yeah and that's a really important question for you to have, because who's not going to push against you is the student who's queer in your classroom, right? And so for every conversation that you have with someone who is sort of against some of the ideas, there's also probably someone in your classroom who you're helping and you don't even know it.
Twan Claiborne ’07 We have two more questions. Thank you all to the audience members for hanging with us, I know it's coming up to 9:00, so if you all need to leave, feel free to, don't all rush with these two questions are marvelous to sort of get us set up Jerry Springer, final thought. This question is coming from Fred Rossum in the class of 78. Another question about dealing with the real versus the ideal, where we're thinking about the size of the institution. This sounds great for a student, for an institution with a small size, because it sounds like it's catering to small classrooms in the small school communities. How might this be scaled up for a large school?
Scott Storm ’08 Oh, yeah, I love the scalability question. It's always a fun one, right? And I think that you know, in a lot of ways it's a lot of the same kinds of structures that you that can be put in place as long as you're thinking about, like, what is the time that we can have for teacher learning? What is the time that we can have for teachers working together? And you're having, like, good pedagogy in those spaces and not wasting adults time. I think that is one of the key parts there, is that the people leading the PD, whether they be teachers or administrators or a mix or whoever, right, wants to really think about that. And one of the things that I've seen is, as I worked in my career in many different kinds of school contexts, including with all my students who sometimes come from these huge high schools, they are also able to sometimes really push in, in ways that I wanted to be able to, in a smaller school. Because there are systems already in place and there are ways to do things, and there are sometimes ways for people to complain to, right, and people to make a fuss, too. And so sometimes, they even have more success I would say, because once you know the structure, you can work with the structure.
Twan Claiborne ’07 That it's much like you said, it's much easier to see and I think that people often think that the larger something is, it's more untamed and that then smaller structures, it's easier to implement that. And sometimes the smaller the structure is, the more difficult it is because you have a lot of dreamers and that the space is built for change automatically, and you want to do all the changes, but there's no structure to navigate that change at all. So that's something to always keep in mind too. And then our final question of the evening from Ed Stickler forgot to put their class, but, a former member of the LGBTQ+ steering committee with me and now on the Alumni council with Anna - have students named their utopian vision to be comparatively conservative, to be abstinent until marriage, to be chaste in marriage, to work hard, to provide for family, and regularly attend their faith community and follow their moral standards. How would that utopian visit be accepted and welcomed? I have my own ideas for this question, but I'll let you take it.
Scott Storm ’08 Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you, Ed. One of the things that, students that I've worked with have often come from faith based communities, and have embraced this kind of ideas. And one of the reasons is because they think about humanity, right? They think about, like, making sure that there's not prejudice toward anyone, that we can lift up people who are more misfortunate than others, right. I've had students that are both queer, and also our, quoting Bible verses, in the same, like person. And that is a fairly normal thing. And so one of the things that I think is really powerful is to have those students sometimes be the sort of moral compass of the class, right. And really think about, okay, well, what does all this really mean, like to, to treat each other in human ways as opposed using dehumanizing language, for any person.
Twan Claiborne ’07 And also framing framing is key. I think these are students who really understand what they are learning and where they learn things from, and having them articulate that and divorce it from these ideologies or understanding the root of them, and really just being like, it's a human experience, right? And, you know, you think of the triad wives and while that's rooted in conservatism, there isn't anything wrong with staying home and taking care of the household. It's just associated with this and the ideology you're attacking actually allows for you to be able to make that choice. So I think that, again, maybe that's an adult complication to bring in things because you're like, utopia means everyone's free and then they say something and it's like, is it wrong to be abstinent, or is it because it's associated with white Christian nationalism? What's bringing the discomfort?
Well, thank you, Scott, so much for this important and timely discussion. Lots of wonderful morsels to chew on and think on for those who are interested. Where can they find more of your work and research? And also some of these wonderful authors and thinkers that you discussed.
Scott Storm ’08 Thanks Twan. You can find me on Blue Sky and you can also find me on Google Scholar or LinkedIn. Just search my name and it's pretty easy to find. And so thank you all. Thank you, Twan, for amazing moderation. And thank you everyone for amazing questions. And all the Swatties out there. Thank you and spread the love.
Twan Claiborne ’07 Yes, please. Especially in this time as it gets darker. And once again, thank you to the Alumni Council. Jason Zengerle who coordinated this talk and on the back end, we have Melissa Hendricxson and Amy Garawitz. And also to the LGBTQ+ alumni network and the steering committee who put this together. And stay tuned for more talks of this nature. And once it becomes live, share it with your friends. All right. Good night, everyone.
Scott Storm ’08 Night, all
