03/02/2022
Society gives most children classroom experience that often fails to include the range of their gender, sexuality, race, religion, exceptionality and socio-economic experiences, according to author, educational scholar and artist Michelle Knaier ’01, M ’03.
Knaier will return to her alma mater on Friday, March 4, to give the keynote speech during SUNY Cortland’s fourth annual TransAction conference. She hopes to provide a framework that the university’s future educators can use to promote inclusion and multiculturalism in the classroom.
Knaier, of Escondido, California, a lecturer at Purdue University within its curriculum studies program, will discuss “Queer(ing) approaches to curriculum and identity development: a queer keynote address” at 12:40 p.m. during the virtual conference.
TransAction, a conference about the needs and experiences of transgender and gender-queer students in the college environment, this year will focus on how to support trans students, particularly in higher education.
Registration is free to all participants and may be done online.
The schedule:
- 9:10 to 10 a.m.: session “Best Practices to Maintain Inclusion”
- 10:20 a.m. to 11:10 a.m.: session “Queer Social Justice in the Workplace”
- 12:40 to 1:40 p.m.: keynote address
- 1:50 to 2:40 p.m.: student panel “What do you wish the world looked like?”
Knaier, who earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Education in Curriculum and Instruction from Purdue University, researches, develops and advocates for queer, multicultural, social justice teacher education and LGBTQ-inclusive K-12 curriculum.
She is the author of a book, Queer Multicultural Social Justice Education: Curriculum (and Identity) Development Through Performance. For those who wish to read it, Knaier has donated a copy to Memorial Library.
Her interest in presenting scenarios faced by queer people is exemplified by her Purdue Photo Project.
“As a queer student growing up, and then as a teacher, I witnessed a lot of anti-gay language, taunting and bullying,” Knaier said. “So as a young educator or as a student of education, I made it my purpose to learn more about LGBTQ issues within classrooms. At the time, it really centered around bullying instead of trying to figure out how could we could make teaching and learning spaces more inclusive. We were doing it for students of color, although that in and of itself was not progressing as fast as it should. We also wanted to make classrooms and schools more LGBTQ inclusive.”
A former middle and high school science teacher, Knaier is an active practitioner of the multicultural education classroom who incorporates critical theories into research on queer(ing) curriculum based on her own experiences.
“Queering or to queer, it’s a verb, it’s an action,” she said. “It’s not necessarily tied to the LGBTQ identity. It’s really about addressing the heteronormative status quo in society. By doing so, we can break down binary identities or deconstruct socially constructed identities.”
According to Knaier, her approach is not just about the LGBTQ community.
“It is a multicultural educational movement,” she said.
“The queer approach envelopes a lot of techniques,” Knaier continued. “Ethnography is the study of culture and an autoethnography is the study of one's culture. It’s basically me studying my cultural identities, whether it’s socio-economic, race, ethnicity, exceptionality, gender, it could be an umbrella of things.”
For example, she recently has written about her own experience of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic in the era also encompassing the Black Lives Matter movement.
“My research started at SUNY Cortland,” Knaier said, recalling how supportive her School of Education mentors were to the non-traditional aged and self-identified queer student who floundered at first in the classroom. She ultimately graduated summa cum laude. Knaier even retains as a mentor Professor Beth Klein of the Childhood/Early Childhood Education Department.
“My first paper on the subject was written at SUNY Cortland,” Knaier said, referring to research she later revisited in a book chapter published in 2017 called “A Place Where They Can Be Themselves.”
At SUNY Cortland, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Education in elementary and early secondary education, with an emphasis in biology, and a Master of Science in Education in childhood education, with an emphasis in educational technology.
“I’m so excited about being able to come back and talk,” Knaier said.
She hopes that area secondary school educators who mentor SUNY Cortland student teachers attend the event.
TransAction participants may attend the entire conference or individual sessions.
Previous keynote speakers at TransAction include SUNY Cortland graduate Court Pineiro ’18, a model, artist and writer; Maybe Burke, a New York-based writer, actor and human rights advocate; and Harrison Browne, an actor, LGBTQ+ advocate and retired athlete, who was the first transgender athlete in professional hockey.
The event is presented by the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Expression Committee (SOGIE) and receives additional support from the Multicultural Life and Diversity Office, the Office of Institutional Equity and Inclusion, the Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies, and grants from Cortland Auxiliary and the Campus Artists and Lecture Series.
For more information, contact Morris or visit RedDragonNetwork.org/Transaction.