Author ORCID Identifier
0009-0003-4704-6030
Abstract
Through my own coming out process, I turned to LGBTQ+ books as mentors and guides on how to live authentically. These texts shaped my time as a middle and high school English teacher, as well as my time as a doctoral student. This article uses excerpts from Caught Between Closets (Panozzo, 2020), a social fiction written as my doctoral dissertation, to explore and highlight the way queer K-12 educators navigate personal and professional closets. These excerpts were written using a reiterative process (writing to research; researching to write) to re-examine personal experiences, empirical research, multimodal texts, and grey literature. This process was used to develop the fictional main character, Reid Gardner, and his journey to self-acceptance as a gay educator in a faith-based school. Writing through an arts-based approach helped me to understand my past experiences, make sense of my present vocation, and imagine an inclusive future for queer educators, like me.
Methodological Approach
Qualitative
DOI
https://doi.org/10.60808/7dny-5n02
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Panozzo, M. (2025). Queerly Writing, Queerly Researching: Using Art-Based Research to Re-Examine my Past and the Imagined Future of Queer Educators. Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.60808/7dny-5n02
Included in
Education Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons
