For this final blog I want to talk about my own experience
of what the educational
theorist Martin Nakata (2007) calls the cultural interface, a theory developed
in reference to Indigenous students who encounter the often conflicting
“meeting points” between different world views or identities that arise in
everyday experience by being privy to two different knowledge systems. The
cultural interface can also be applied in discussions about nationality,
gender, or sexuality.
Unfortunately
for my teenage self the cultural interface was something I knew
experientially, but didn’t have a vocabulary to describe or receive any kind of
acknowledgement that it is possible for one person to hold numerous and
potentially conflicting identities. Such a concept was of course completely
foreign to the essentialist point of view I held: that a person was a coherent
system.
The cultural interface that I encountered in high school was
the conflict between my homosexuality and the dominantly heterosexual body of
students and teachers in a public all-girls school. Having been raised to be straight, I know the
ideology of heterosexuality and what it means to not consider a trip to the
grocery store with your partner an event worthy of the attention of strangers.
So what did it subsequently mean to discover my own disenfranchisement from the
privilege of being sexually value-neutral? And what impact did that transition
bear on my education? The previous meaninglessness of hetero-normative remarks
from teachers e.g. “when you girls get married…” smacked me in the face like a
cow bell. Similarly on one teaching prac I undertook a teacher addressing the
entirety of a school’s student body during assembly on Women’s Day told the
students that women are important and deserve respect, after all women will be
their future partners. Such a statement about developing respect was undermined
by its homogenising definition of hundreds of people’s futures. Nakata makes a
point of mentioning that teachers themselves are present and contributing to
the cultural interface, whether consciously or not (pg. 37).
Now, as an educator myself, sexuality and the cultural
interface in schools present themselves as a system of power struggles. A
student I taught during my internship asked me if I was a lesbian, to which I
replied: “would that matter?” His answer was no, and I asked him why he was
asking questions about things that don’t matter. His question may very well
have been “Can I derail your authority with an inappropriate question?”
Teenagers are very cognizant of the power relations that exist between dominant
and minority groups, and between the authority of teachers and the enforced passivity
of students. As far as professionalism is concerned, GBLT (gay lesbian bisexual
and transgender) teachers often make the decisions to keep their personal lives
invisible, a big leap from heterosexual teachers who I have heard frequently
talk about their partners, husbands or wives with students to relate their
teaching to the real world. The decision to keep ones private life invisible is
to combat the particular discrimination revolving around the concept that
“teachers guide their students by the example they set” and “serve as role
models for students” (DeMitchell, Eckes & Fossey, 2010, pg. 104), giving
rise to a fear that gay teachers will somehow impose their lifestyle on
children, I take issue with this because gay students exist despite their
heterosexual examples their teachers set.
References
Nakata, M. (2007). The cultural interface. The Australian Journal or Indigenous Studies
36, pp. 7 – 14.
DeMitchell, T. A, Eckes, S. & Fossey, R. (2010). Sexual
Orientation and the Public School Teacher. Public
Interest Law Journal, 19; 65, pp. 65 – 105.
