Abstract

This arts-based autoethnographic piece explores my layered experiences as a queer educator working in a rural high school, where heteronormativity and small-town familiarity often complicate notions of teacher identity, professionalism, and belonging. Using paper dolls and narrative vignettes, I explore how a queer teacher-self is negotiated and expressed within the cisheteronormative and gendered expectations of schooling. Emphasizing the disruptions possible in queer work, I emphasize that rural schooling can be a site of empowerment and joy through disruptions that students and I called “gray spaces” of possibility and affirmation—for both them and me. By highlighting moments of tension, joy, resistance, and community, I challenge notions of rural schools as solely hostile terrains for queer people, and underscore how they might alternatively be spaces of relationality, playfulness, empowerment, and transformation. Through the use of paper dolls as both metaphor and method, I accentuate that teacher identity, like pedagogy, is always layered and richly textured by context.

How to Cite:

Shelton, S. A., (2025) ““Why You Wearing Them Barrettes?”: A Playful(ly) Queer(ing) Reflection on Teacher-Self in Rural Education”, Journal of Research in Rural Education 41(6), 1–8. doi: https://doi.org/10.26209/JRRE4106-01

Rights: Copyright