The Intersection of Queerness and Education: E Ciszek's Journey as a Parent and Educator

Bryan (he/they): 0:27

Teaching While Queer is 2SLGBTQIA+ podcast for educational professionals to share their experiences in academia. Hi, I'm your host, Bryan Stanton, a theater pedagogy and educator in New York City, and my goal is to share stories from around 2SLGBTQIA+ world from educators. I hope you enjoy Teaching While Queer. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Teaching While Queer. I'm your host, Bryan Stanton, my pronouns are he, they, and I am so excited to have you with me today. Today, I will be interviewing E Ciszek. Hi, e, how are you doing?

E (they/them): 1:08

Hey, good afternoon, good morning, Whenever you're listening nice to meet you, nice to see you.

Bryan (he/they): 1:14

My favorite phrase from the Truman show. That TV show was good afternoon, good evening and good night, just in case I don't see you. Good afternoon, good evening and good night. So that just kind of took me back to a team. Why don't you go ahead and tell everybody about yourself?

E (they/them): 1:33

Sure, sure. So, as you mentioned, as you introduced me, my name is E Cisic. I use they, them pronouns. I am a college professor at the University of Texas at Austin and I live in Austin, so that's a little bit about sort of my professional orientation. I also am a parent of two young children that are in elementary school and so you know I have experience in those spaces as a parent and an active member of the PTA and interact a lot with the elementary school administration and staff and faculty as a very out and queer parent in my kid's school.

Bryan (he/they): 2:25

I love that you get the intersectionality of like teaching and also parenting, because that's something that I have as well and it's nice to kind of be able to share that experience with someone.

E (they/them): 2:37

Yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 2:37

Especially like your family, with like parent organizations, because that's so important, especially right now, because parent organizations have a lot of power. And I just moved from San Antonio, and so I'm very familiar with the power of parent organizations in Texas right now. Yeah, but before we dive into that, let's talk a little bit about you and your past. So what was it like for you growing up as a queer youth?

E (they/them): 3:05

Yeah, sure. So what was it like? I grew up in New England and so I was born and raised in a suburb of Hartford, connecticut, and I was an only child of an immigrant from Poland and a Catholic school teacher turned sort of factory working, you know, middle class working family, and so growing up, a lot of my experiences were really sort of rooted in my sort of sense of class and sense of and class being sort of like my socioeconomic status and my sense of space, living in this suburban working class, you know, part of Connecticut. So you know, when thinking about this question thinking about, you know you asked me about sort of being a queer young person and thinking about the different ways in which now, looking back sort of retrospectively, that you know I embodied queerness as a young person in terms of my, you know, like I didn't come to learn and understand about my neurodiversities until my late 30s, mid to late 30s, and so I think a lot of how I anchor my understanding of queerness as an elementary age young person really has to do with those neurodiversities, the way, those manifested in friendships and relationships, you know, with my peers and with teachers and adults in my life and the ways in which those, I think those neurodiversities really prove to be challenges and misunderstandings for me and for the other people in my life. And so I guess that's that is my starting point for thinking about queerness at a young age. I think it's. You know, I haven't given much thought to this question outside of you posing it for me, so I guess you and I are going to sort of tease things out together. But I think you know where I came to understand my sexuality and gender identities in queerness really, yeah, you know, sort of happened in my freshman year of high school, you know like freshman and sophomore year as high school, and so the educators in my life at that time were really, really formative when it came to holding space in terms of course materials or in terms of visibility in the classroom and in the school or on the playing field in ways that I did not have in my home life. And so those proved to be really really significant for me and also proved to be sources of great tension and chaos internally, emotionally, because those sort of were not, those were not welcome, those points of sort of queerness weren't welcome and weren't understood within my home and family dynamics. So I'll just sort of leave that there and we can, you know, tease apart whatever you think your listeners would be into.

Bryan (he/they): 7:21

What I think is fascinating about it is that when you look at queer theory, like from an academic standpoint, queer theory I mean like there's a definition of queer where it's kind of like apart from, like separate from. And I think when you talk about your neurodivergency, that like that also is kind of encompassed in what doesn't mean to be queer, because it's apart from what we would say is typical. And so it's interesting that your journey kind of is an intersectionality of those two things, because it makes perfect sense to me from an academic theorist standpoint that those two things would come together and kind of create your queer identity. And there's so many of us who are in our late 30s, early 40s, mid 40s who are neurodivergent but like we didn't get that kind of diagnosis or resources for it until we were adults because it was like so tabooed at the time in the 80s and early 90s and whatnot, that like we kind of got not shunned but like they're just hyper and just a little bit different, instead of like actually getting something that would help us the resources to be able to know how to utilize our brains fully. Yeah, yeah, so like I think it's a shared experience what you're saying, because I think there's a lot of us who are on that, that kind of that same kind of journey, whether it be like ADHD or being on the autism spectrum. I think that there are so many queer people who have had that kind of experience where it's almost like that becomes an attribute of queerness. And again in a theoretical setting that makes so much sense.

E (they/them): 9:09

Yeah, absolutely yeah, and I think increasingly about those intersections and the intersections like from the theoretical space around disability studies and queer theory, as really ripe spaces for intellectual exploration these days, you know. So yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 9:35

Those are actually my research areas. Those are my research areas within the realm of theater. But those are my research areas. It's basically disability and queer theory separately, but all that work end up coming together and creating like pedagogy and curriculum. That is encompassing of everybody.

E (they/them): 10:03

Yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 10:04

And so I think they're absolutely. I was reading so many. I've read so many Disability studies books as well. I've taken several courses and a lot of them point back to these same things can be applied when you're looking at queer theory, and then I read queer theory books and they're quoting those Folks who've been studying and researching disability and so really those two things are so parallel that It'll be interesting to see what happens when people start combining them and combining the efforts on that. Yeah, absolutely.

E (they/them): 10:41

You know, I don't know it's not my area of focus, but I know there's a lot being done in Crip theory. Crip, which I think is this come with you know which I believe is to be this space in which disability studies and Queer theories really do intersect. And so I think a lot of what is the focus point in some of these intersectional theories is is bodily autonomy and bodily agency, and the ways in which we apply these theories to our, you know, different fields of Pedagogy or research Is really interesting.

Bryan (he/they): 11:22

And that's funny because when I look at like, how do we teach gender and sexuality or anything to like children, autonomy is like the number one thing. We start with talking about consent and like this is your body and whatnot and I like was at a doctor's appointment the other day for my teenage daughter and the doctor kept turning to me and I was like bodily autonomy, answer your questions, let her guide what you want to do. She, she needs to have the ability to make choices about her body and she should be really the only one.

E (they/them): 11:56

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I feel that as a parent, very much so, but also think we're at a moment of history in which, in the public school space, there are these tensions between young people's autonomy and Whether it's bodily autonomy or intellectual autonomy, where that's really being debated in terms of who knows best and so, while on the sort of really fundamental early childhood Educational sort of we also, conversely, have I lost my train of thought sorry, incoming call my apologies. Yeah, I mean we're at a particular. We're at a moment in which there's this there's a tension that exists between bodily autonomy as a concept that we teach to young people in early childhood education, right in terms of physical space, in terms of respect, right, some of these social emotional fundamentals. But then we see the ways in which bodily autonomy is sort of used as a political tool in the K through 12 curricular debates.

Bryan (he/they): 13:34

Yep, I just read like an article and it was definitely a biased article in which somebody Wrote into like an advice column and they were like well, we made the decision to teach our three and four-year-old boys about consent, and now they are not consenting to doing their chores or cleaning their bedroom or taking a shower or whatever the situation is. They're not consenting to it. And it was a lot of like. It was written to me from a perspective of like I don't believe this is real, but it's. It's like weaponizing this idea of autonomy in a way that it's like see, you need to control your kids. You can't have them choices, otherwise you're gonna lose control, and it it really is a power dynamic which only gets worse when you have teenagers like I will vouch for that, I have three of them, or I had three of them, and I will have one more coming up eventually as a teenager, and I'm just like whoo, if you are a parent who can't handle like lessening control, yeah, you're gonna find yourself in a situation where, like, there's a lot of tension.

E (they/them): 14:44

Yeah, absolutely, you know, and that that sort of resonates with me as an educator of Young adults, right as I'm a college professor at the University of Texas and so I Get to, you know, I sort of intercept young people at this critical moment where they're 18, 19, 20 years old, where I think there's this space and struggle for autonomy or for, you know, agency, and it plays out right in my classroom, even though they're sort of technically adults, right, but I see that, you know, happening.

Bryan (he/they): 15:37

Yep, and I see that like as a high school educator for five years, watching what happens like senior year of high school and what, watching people kind of transform and become more independent, and then also like having these very converse. Sometimes I had more or negative information or negative experiences with parents during senior year and it had literally very little to do with me when in fact their child was capable of Taking, doing whatever they needed to do on their own or like it was an independence battle and it was kind of like brought to the teacher because there was this other battle happening elsewhere. Mm-hmm so it's so interesting because I think that the teenage years are the years Step up that idea of independence, so that way they're not struggling as much when they get into your classes.

E (they/them): 16:36

Yeah. With that idea of autonomy, because it shouldn't be a new Idea when they leave the coop, you know yeah, absolutely yeah, and it impedes upon their successes, I think, intellectually or academically, if they're also simultaneously, and you know, like learning how to be autonomous individuals in the world and making choices about their, their bodies and their lives. And you know their sleep patterns and their social activity patterns and all of that, right, yeah, yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 17:17

So diving a little bit more into you. You mentioned at the start that you use they, them pronouns. Did you always know from a young age that you were going to go on a gender journey, or is that something that you kind of discovered later on?

E (they/them): 17:29

Yeah, sure, so did I know. I guess there was. You know, as many of us who grew up in the 90s and sort of came of age in the early 2000s, there wasn't as much of a vocabulary for that, and so there wasn't a vocabulary for sort of the gender expression or the agency around gender, right, where queerness was really about sexuality and sexual orientation. It was very binaristic, and so models of queer identities for me were really limited to, you know, these really abstract, taboo concepts like these taboo, you know, gay and like lesbian people, right, and so I did not know, right, like there was no vocabulary for that, there was no representation within my realms of accessibility, right, like I just didn't have any of the language or the images. There were no cultural touch points for me growing up, and so I think a lot of my gender journey has been around back to questions of, like, bodily autonomy and reclaiming, and not even reclaiming I mean, yeah, I guess reclaiming, because I never sort of claimed to begin with the body that I was born into. So, but that came at a much older, a much, much, you know, older point in my life, right, it wasn't into my 30s. And the ways in which I performed queerness when I was a high schooler, you know, were based on what was available to me and so, right, I was very limited into like a handful of lesbian identified faculty in my high school, and those faculty and teachers and coaches came also sort of shrouded in stereotypes and misrepresentations, you know that were perpetuated by culture by other students, right, and so there were taboos associated with that and so those individuals were not sort of these angelic featured humans, but they came with you know baggage, and so my journey into sort of like queerness as like a gender identity was sort of by way of, you know, sexuality, and it's not until later in my life where I can tease those apart and, you know, have the vocabulary and the skills to tease them apart as not mutually inclusive, right. So, yeah, I came to identify, as I think I like used the word gay a lot, because I didn't like the word lesbian, because that identity and that history didn't fit and I didn't feel as though that word worked, but they didn't know what alternatives there were. And you know I just recently got this shirt that I wore yesterday by a poet named Andrea Gibson, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with, but they're really wonderful. They're a non-binary spoken word poet out of Colorado, and the shirt reads my pronouns have not been invented yet and I think that's really beautiful, but it's yeah. So I think I'm still on that journey, you know, especially as I come to better understand my ability and my neurodiversities and, you know, continue to age. So yeah, yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 22:13

I think that makes a lot of sense to me because I also, like those of us in the millennial and Gen X age group like you're absolutely correct, there was no terminology for it. I have a distinctive memory of like knowing that the only phrase regarding gender at the time was transvestite, and I learned that phrase from Suzie Isard like a Suzie Isard special, when Suzie Isard was not Suzie at the time and she had said like I am a transvestite, I am a man who likes to dress as a woman. And that's like. That was my only understanding and it had nothing to do with gender. And then, like, that word was expanded upon through media to then be like, fetishized into like it's not only a man who dresses as a woman, it's like a man who dresses as a woman and wants to have sex with people. And then, like, from my perspective, there was no like gender journey for women period, because the only references to anybody who was a part of the trans community at the time were references of those who were transitioning from male to female. And so I'm with you in just kind of being in an era of, like, a lack of information, and so those of us who have had some sort of gender journey later in our lives in our lives, as it were. I feel like it came out of necessity because we finally had this information to explain some things we've been feeling a while. I love that shirt you've got.

E (they/them): 23:54

Yeah, yeah. Well, it also makes me think of you know, as you were bringing up your own story. It made me think of the moments in which I saw sort of non-cisgender representation, non-cisgender representations in media. And you know, I was a latchkey kid right in the late 90s where I'd come home from middle school or whatever, yeah, either elementary school or middle school, and what would be on TV would be Ricky Lake, jerry Springer, right the programming, and they did have queer folks right, and they had transvestite sort of characters and narratives, but they were very, they were very. They were caricatures and they were stereotypes and they were these cartoon-esque depictions of queer lives and they, yeah, and so I guess that was and that wasn't me right, that didn't resonate, that's not really yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 25:05

It's funny that's the second time that like the afterschool programming of, like those talk shows have come up like in a previous episode someone had mentioned that like their only reference to queer people was Jerry Springer and you're absolutely correct. Like that was it, and the answer I could have is whatever showed up on Jerry Springer, and it was always bad. It was always something that was not good for you.

E (they/them): 25:33

Yeah, and it was always clouded and deceit. It was always this character that was going to reveal that they were born a different gender and it was always a non-white person and none of those things resonated with me and that very much became sort of like an other experience. That was not something I could relate to.

Bryan (he/they): 26:03

Absolutely.

E (they/them): 26:04

Yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 26:05

How do you think that your career shows up in your pedagogy, when you're working with your students?

E (they/them): 26:10

Sure. So as a university educator, I think it shows up all the time. So how does I mean where to begin? Really, I teach courses. I'm in the College of Communication and so I teach a class on law and ethics and we talk a lot about the ethical implications of representations in media, in advertising, in public relations, and many of the students I have in my classes go on to be producers of advertising and public relations campaigns, either for big corporations or for nonprofits, and so there is a big responsibility that falls on them. And so how does my queerness show up? Well, I mean, I show up, I come to class and I am in my class Canvas page, the learning software that we use at the university. I've got my photo and I am very intentional in the way that I dress and the way I present myself when I am teaching, and I always wear a bow tie, sort of part of my outfit and part of my public persona. In the Canvas platform I use they, them pronouns, and I have that in my email signature. So my queerness is very visible in the written communication in my pedagogy, in my communications to my students. It shows up in my physical performances in the classroom I teach one required large lecture class. That's about 150 to 200 students per semester and it's a required class for all majors, and so I draw from examples from queer culture when I'm talking about contemporary issue. I've got a module on sex and gender where I talk about the history around gendered media representations and the role that advertising and public relations have played in those, and then we have a unit on sexuality where we specifically talk about cis normativity and heteronormativity in commercial media and advertising and campaigns. So, yeah, those are a couple examples. I've also very much queered my door and my office, where it's just very visible if you walk by my door and my floor whose office that is and what their values are.

Bryan (he/they): 29:10

Absolutely. I love that. I think about the fact that just showing up is querying your pedagogy and I think that's really impactful because you can't really separate yourself from your identity. So, thinking about that, have you ever had to encounter queer phobic behavior at the university setting, or has it been pretty mellow?

E (they/them): 29:37

Sure, yeah, I mean, I think about this a lot right now, especially in the wake of SB 17, which is the Antidiversity and Equity and Inclusion, a state bill that passed in Texas and is going into effect in January. So your question asks do I think about or do I encounter sort of anti-queer resistance? Is that accurate? Yeah, yeah, and I guess I want to answer it in a couple different ways. So there's overt sort of anti-queerness and then there's more covert anti-queerness. So recently I received a letter. This was back in February, but I hadn't checked my mailbox for a while on campus and so I didn't get it until a couple months after that. But I received a mailing in my campus box that was addressed to me and it was a lot of religious nationalist rhetoric panflits that said Jesus died for my sin, for your sins, and just like a panflit that had a lot about Christian nationalism, with an American flag, bald eagle. And I received a letter with that material in my campus box and I sent an email out to my fellow faculty in my school and I was the only one who had received the mailing, and so I filed a police report or an investigation through our Title IX office, and it came to learn that I was part of a handful of other faculty who work on equity topics who had received these mailings, so that was one of the more explicit examples of being anti-queerness, sort of explicitly feeling that Also in my teaching evaluations. It's part of our course structure that at the end of the 14-week semester students fill out course instructor surveys. Those become then part of our permanent record file and it's not a lot of comments. But sometimes there will be remarks about my values, where students are critiquing my perspectives or saying things in which they disagree with my political orientation, where I don't ever talk about or teach about my political orientation, or where I fall on different political issues but the comments would suggest that I do so. Course evaluations is another area and then recently I've been thinking a lot about self censorship in a sort of SB17 landscape in terms of the kind of work I do, and I do a lot of research, academic research that uses queer theories and critical race theories and queer color critique in my field. So my Google Scholar page is very clear as well and the topics I engage with are very clear. But I think about the ways that I might be internalizing anti-queer sentiment and anti-queer resistance in the work that I choose to do as a researcher, as well as the ways I might be showing up for my students in the classroom or the ways I might be less available than I have been in the past. But I also want to anchor that self-censoring, or thoughts about self-censoring, and the fact that I also am a parent of two children, and so it's not only my own identities and my own safety that are as part of the conversation, but I also have a responsibility for caretaking and the safety of my family as well.

Bryan (he/they): 33:53

So, yeah, I get that entirely. I worked for a school district in San Antonio. When I got there I thought, wow, this is the place I'm going to stay. And then things started to take a turn. They did diversity, equity, inclusion, like evaluation, and they created a whole committee that we went through this audit process and then, because we were doing that, there was a bunch of sort of pushback. And during that time I became the teacher of the year for that district and was very much in the spotlight and left the school district for the safety of my children, who were students in the school district. So from that perspective, I can completely understand how you can internalize this anti-queer behavior in a way to protect those that you love and also to protect yourself. And there needs to be some of that to an extent, as long as it's not like a complete retreat. But like putting up some walls.

E (they/them): 34:54

Yeah, boundaries right. The older I get, the more that I think about that in terms of where I'm willing to engage and where I need to have more boundaries around?

Bryan (he/they): 35:12

Yeah, absolutely. So what would be some advice that you would give to someone if they were just starting out in education and they weren't sure how to be authentic in the classroom, or if it's okay to be authentic in the classroom?

E (they/them): 35:28

Yeah, yeah. So I think my answer if I can speak from the perspective of a university and college educator, if that's okay, just because I'm not rooted in the K through 12 education space and so I don't wanna lead your listeners astray but when thinking about the university setting and the higher education space, thinking about safety, I guess my brain automatically goes to the Maslow's hierarchy of needs in terms of where these individuals are in that hierarchy and making sure their needs are being met before venturing into spaces where they may be willing to take more risks with their identities. You're right, that's a good point, I think that's a good point. And so I don't always. I don't think that being out and open is always what's best for folks, right? If there are other needs are not being met and they're not feeling in a space of safety. So, yeah, sort of checking in with yourself around what needs do you have? And if those needs involve self-actualization as it relates to your different identities, including your maybe multitude of queer identities, then finding spaces and people that already exist in those and tapping into existing infrastructure that might already be there within your institution or external to your institution, whether they be in person or virtual, whether they be formally sanctioned and sponsored by your place of work or whether they're informal. And I'm thinking a lot about community building these days and am part of a group of faculty in which we don't have a formal community building sort of infrastructure and trying to construct one feels a bit performative, where we're actually performing a lot of community of care work amongst ourselves, but it's not sort of university sanctioned or university sponsored. And I think in this current political moment a lot of the queer community building is happening offline and outside of formal institutions, because it can't be anymore or it is no longer the most productive way to build community or to build capacity. And so I would encourage new educators to sort of be observers in their environment and to explore where there is community across a multitude of identities already happening in their think and their institutions, both formally and informally. And maybe I have more to say about that. But yeah, I'm happy to continue and go in any other direction you'd like me to.

Bryan (he/they): 39:31

No, I think that's really fantastic, and I want to say that you're not far from like, far off from what we talked about K-12 perspective, like. I think we're all dealing with the same kind of worries and so, really, number one, it comes down to exactly what you mentioned Maslow's hierarchy of needs and whether or not you are feeling safe. And then kind of growing from there, reaching out, finding your resources, like across the board. That is probably the number one immense or I've received.

E (they/them): 40:01

Yeah, and you know, I was gonna say I think these resources look differently right there there are resources that are specific to your career and your line of work, but there are also resources for your personal and mental and physical worlds that you occupy right. And so, for example, I recognized we had been in Austin for five years and I still didn't have any sense of belonging. And so thinking about that and thinking about, well, what other spaces already do exist, and like there's a queer book club that exists and that is more in alignment with my values than maybe going to a queer bar, given where I am in my life. And so thinking about that and then also finding other spaces of intergenerational queer communities, maybe for faith communities that might be affirming. So the non-professional spaces are equally as important, I think, as the professional spaces as well, to really provide a sense of belonging for folks who are just coming into their careers as educators.

Bryan (he/they): 41:22

Absolutely. And from a higher education perspective, what do you think that academia in a whole could do to be more inclusive of LGBTQ plus people?

E (they/them): 41:32

That's a really big question right. Yeah, and my brain automatically goes to safety. Right, because it feels like a particularly precarious time for in which safety is going to be challenged, right? So when I think about safety, I think about physical safety, and so do I feel comfortable and protected within my classroom. Right, do I have fears in my classroom that something might happen? And in the reality, as we live in an era of gun violence and school shootings? Right, that's a reality, that is not something that's contestable, and so I think about that. What can? What can? What was your question? What can higher education do?

Bryan (he/they): 42:31

Yeah, what can they do to be more inclusive of LGBTQ folks?

E (they/them): 42:35

Yeah, I don't know how I got to gun violence, but there's a path there that we can tread.

Bryan (he/they): 42:41

It's very valid though.

E (they/them): 42:42

Yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 42:43

It's one of those things that I think about a lot, because I saw recently like in a this is for high school, but like a question about, you know, dressing rooms in theater and we have trans students and some people are uncomfortable and I went immediately to like. Every changing area I've ever been in in my life has been incredibly uncomfortable because of of of who I am. Yeah the like undertone threat of violence that exists for queer people in a heterosexual world. So I think, that what you're saying is on point, like we need to get to a point where schools feel safe again, and they don't. I think whether you're in a high school campus, elementary school, you're on a college campus there's so much violence happening in the United States that that threat of violence is probably the number one thing. That would probably be a universal help.

E (they/them): 43:45

Yeah, yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 43:46

We're included in that universal reality.

E (they/them): 43:49

Yeah, absolutely. And I want to maybe challenge one of the things you said, that like how do we get back to a sense of safety? And I don't know, as a queer young person, I don't know if I ever had a clear sense of safety, if that makes sense.

Bryan (he/they): 44:03

Yeah, fair enough.

E (they/them): 44:04

Yeah, and so maybe the threat of physical violence wasn't there. But when I think of what safety looks like for me and what safety could have looked like for me as a young person, I don't think it was there, and so I don't want to lament and nostalgize a past that felt safe that wasn't actually that. You know, for myself and for many of us queer adults.

Bryan (he/they): 44:37

Mm-hmm, I appreciate you bringing that up, because oftentimes when I'm on the podcast, I am speaking in rough draft like it's a dynamic right yeah. And so you know, specifically with regarding to gun violence, that's kind of taken off since I was in high school.

E (they/them): 44:51

What.

Bryan (he/they): 44:54

But you're absolutely correct, the idea of safety, especially for queer kids, probably hasn't ever existed.

E (they/them): 45:01

Yeah, yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 45:05

So at this point I have the opportunity to have you ask a question, so I'm gonna turn the mic over to you and you get to ask me a question whatever you like and I will go ahead and answer that for you.

E (they/them): 45:17

Sure, so okay, all right, this is going to be edited, right, yeah, okay, so I was just curious. I don't know much about you, so could you give me a little bit of background about yourself so that I could ask a more intelligible question?

Bryan (he/they): 45:34

Sure.

E (they/them): 45:34

Yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 45:35

So for the past five years I've been teaching high school theater and I'm getting my MFA in theater pedagogy right now with a focus on culturally responsive pedagogy and universal design for learning, which is where I get my queer theory and my disabilities studies kind of combined.

E (they/them): 45:58

Yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 45:59

And I actually will be working for a university in New York City shortly. I'm just waiting on board approval at the moment. But that's kind of me. I'm a parent of four.

E (they/them): 46:12

And do you live in?

Bryan (he/they): 46:14

I live in New York City. I moved from San Antonio because I didn't want to live there after the bill passed regarding DEI, because to me, I feel like that was very targeted, not to mention all the other shenanigans, like my husband and I and our children went to protest at Capitol several times this year because of all the 300 something LGBTQ bills.

E (they/them): 46:41

Yeah, so maybe my question is. So my question for you is could you offer some insight into your own thoughts and processing as it relates to moving really far right from one particular part of the country to another in the midst of a cultural moment and, as an educator, knowing you know, and as a parent, knowing the challenges that that would pose on your own children as in your own career, why you chose to do that and what drove you to that decision?

Bryan (he/they): 47:24

Yeah, absolutely so. Moving across countries like a really big decision, and this is the second time that my husband has done it. We moved from California to Texas seven years ago because his job moved us there. And it was good in the sense that, like I was able to become a teacher and I started this educational career while in Texas and then and at the time like things looked positive, like that there was some substantial change happening. And then, after the four years of Trump, it kind of really spiraled quickly downward in Texas and so, like the moving from a school district because of wanting to keep my children safe, I realized in doing that this was a place that I thought I would be forever. My kids loved it and so in, in moving from there, I realized how much I needed to get like toxicity out of my life. And after a year of working at another school, I realized that it was Texas that was toxic. So there was conversation about moving back to California and then now moving. We ended up moving to New York City because our thought was we can go back to where we've been and life will be the same as it was and that's not really what we wanted or we can go someplace new and explore someplace new in a place that we think that our children will thrive. And there were some growing pains. We've only been here almost almost three months and in that first month, like my kids, had an extra long summer because school ended right. And it doesn't start till after Labor Day in New York City, and during that time they were just like in the house, stuck in the house because there wasn't a lot that they knew that they could do. Now that they're in school and they kind of have their own lives, all those fears that I had about moving them across country and kind of dissipated because I feel like they found their own stride Already. We're seeing like I enjoy the fact that we will get on the bus in our neighborhood and my husband and I are the only white people on the bus. My kids are Mexican and black, and so I really want them to be in a space where there are moments where they are the majority in a room.

E (they/them): 49:57

And.

Bryan (he/they): 49:58

I think that is so incredibly important, and it was ultimately that kind of love and desire for them to feel a sense of power and acceptance that I didn't always feel, even like being able to pass as a cisgender white man for a long time, you know, I could pass as that and I also didn't feel that sense of acceptance and so I wanted to get them to a space where they can stand on their own, because I say this with a lot of respect to my children and in a lot of growth upon their part, because three of them were adopted and so they they are hiding between the shield of white privilege that they don't know they're hiding behind.

E (they/them): 50:49

Yeah, sure.

Bryan (he/they): 50:50

And so I worried so much because when we were living down in San Antonio, we lived in an area of San Antonio that was referred to as the bubble, because it was like its own little community in space, and people didn't go out of it and most of the people there are white, so even in that bubble it's a like shield of white privilege.

E (they/them): 51:13

Yeah, yeah.

Bryan (he/they): 51:15

And I wanted to get them to a space where they could experience being autonomous.

E (they/them): 51:26

Yeah, yeah. Excuse me, I have a little bit of a hold. Sure, no, I also do. But I understand, yeah, feeling autonomous and also a sense of empowering your, your children, through their own agency and their own accord and not through white privilege.

Bryan (he/they): 51:49

Right, right, because eventually, they're going to, they're going to leave and that white privilege will leave with them. And yeah, I do a lot, you know, to kind of do good with the privilege that I have. And that doesn't change the fact that, like, it's giving my children an unrealistic view of the world and I want them to be able to develop a view of the world that doesn't necessarily include my identity.

E (they/them): 52:24

Yeah, understood, understood.

Bryan (he/they): 52:27

Thank you, I appreciate that yeah no problem, and I appreciate you for joining me on the episode today.

E (they/them): 52:32

Absolutely. Thank you for for your willingness to include me in the conversation. Thank you.

Bryan (he/they): 52:39

My pleasure and thank you all for listening at home. I hope you all have a great day. Bye. Thank you for joining us on this episode of teaching while queer. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, make sure to subscribe. Wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, leave a review, and that would help out tremendously. You can also support the podcast by going to www. teachingwhilequeer. com and hit support the show. Thanks so much and have a great day.