Introduction: The Adventures of Trans Educators: A Comic Book Issue

Authors

Harper B. KeenanFollow
Lee IskanderFollow
Rachel Marie-Crane WilliamsFollow

Abstract

Through our work in teacher education and trans advocacy, the three of us (Harper, Lee, and Rachel) are lucky to regularly hear about the important work trans educators do every day. Whether it’s helping students to organize gender and sexuality alliances, mentoring trans youth, working with teachers’ unions to improve health care benefits for people of all genders, or simply showing up to school and being present for their students, there is no doubt that trans educators are making important and necessary contributions to learning environments across North America and beyond.

Author Biography

Harper Keenan



Harper B. Keenan is the inaugural Robert Quartermain Professor of Gender & Sexuality in Education at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Keenan’s scholarship examines how adults and children relate to each other within the structures of schooling and other educational contexts, and what their interactions reveal about the possibilities and challenges of public education. He is also the founder of the Trans Educators Network, a mutual aid organization for support and connection among trans people working in K-12 schools. Before becoming an academic, Dr. Keenan was an elementary school teacher in New York City.

Lee Iskander



Lee Iskander (they/them) is an artist and scholar working at the intersection of trans studies, curriculum studies, and teacher education. Lee’s research examines how discourses of gender and sexuality shape identities in educational spaces and has been published in the Journal of LGBT Youth, Teaching Education, and Teachers College Record. Lee's interest in gender and sexuality in schools arose from their experience as a youth activist. They are currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia.

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams



Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, a native of North Carolina, earned a BFA in Painting and Drawing from East Carolina University and an MFA in Studio Art and a PhD in Art Education from Florida State University. She spent 22 years as a professor and, later, department chair in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at The University of Iowa. She is lucky and happy to be the dean of liberal arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, a position she has held since 2022. She is the creator of two graphic historiographies, Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching (Verso Press) and Run Home If You Don’t Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 (UNC Press and the Duke Center for Documentary Studies). Her writing has also appeared most recently in Southern Cultures, Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures, Meridians, Feminist Studies, and Visual Arts Research. Her work as an artist is grounded in narrative painting, printmaking, and illustration. The natural world, field research, scholarship, ephemera, and drawing heavily influences her imagery. She works in oil, aqueous media, and digitally.

Recommended Citation

Keenan, H. B., Iskander, L., & Williams, R. (2024). Introduction: The Adventures of Trans Educators: A Comic Book Issue. Occasional Paper Series, (52). DOI: https://doi.org/10.58295/2375-3668.1552