Jacob (Jenna) McWilliams
Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences Program, University of Colorado Boulder
j.mcwilliams@colorado.edu
Research statement
I situate my work within poststructuralist and feminist strands of educational research and within
pedagogy-focused strands of queer and transgender studies. My research aims at forging livable
educational spaces for learners across the spectrums of gender and sexual identity. My work is
about transforming the social world in order to achieve increased support for those who identify
as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA), but
it is equally about dismantling misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia so that all people,
regardless of their sexual or gender identity, can be free. Cultural expectations about gender are
folded into, for example, the spoken and tacit rules for how women and men, girls and boys,
should dress and carry their bodies and engage with others and make decisions about
relationships, family, and careers. These expectations are also implicit in larger symptoms of
cultural dysfunction, as in ongoing efforts to silence, bully, intimidate, and threaten women who
speak up against sexism in video games and other popular media, as well as in cultural messages
about masculinity that lead male-identified people to distance themselves from their emotional
experiences and to engage, often unreflectively, in aggressive and sometimes violent behavior
toward others.
My scholarship focuses on the following strands:
Designing LGBTQIA-inclusive pedagogies and curricula. For my dissertation study, I worked
with elementary teachers to design and implement a ten-week curriculum on gender diversity.
The curriculum integrated critical, creative, and performance-based activities and invited
students to consider how gender norms are constructed and internalized, and to consider what
kinds of identities and experiences are marginalized or erased by those norms. Students
developed strategies for “talking back”—creating and circulating alternative messages about
gender that make space for their own or others’ varied experiences. A key principle that emerged
from this study is that gender variance is a common, shared experience—that we all learn from
an early age how to read community norms and shift our gender presentation in response to those
norms. I am continuing to study gender variance and gender-based community norms in my
current role as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I am part
of a project studying how Engineering undergraduates are socialized into their profession. My
focus within this project is on how gender and sexual norms are transmitted and internalized in
classrooms and in engineering workplaces, in order to develop strategies for increasing support
for sexual and gender variance.
Investigating and designing queer methodologies. Although queer and transgender studies have
been used productively to support cultural critique, less work has demonstrated how queer
frameworks can inform methodology—particularly for those working in the social sciences. My
work explores this issue from multiple perspectives. First, as a queer and transgender researcher,
I have an ongoing interest in exploring how my body mediates activity in my own classroom and
in research contexts. My dissertation explores, in part, the role my body played in pedagogy as I
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invited students to consider their own and others’ experiences of my gender presentation and
gender identity. Using autoethnographic methods, I have continued to explore how my body
interests with learning in my own courses and for attendees in my trans*-inclusive pedagogy
workshops. My more recent research in engineering classrooms and workplaces has led me to
consider how gender variant bodies are rendered invisible in heteronormative contexts, as well as
how the queer body’s position behind a camera interanimates with that invisibility.
Giving voice to trans* experiences and identities. Memoirs and narratives of gender variance are
an important feature of cultural conversations about transgender lives. Although the stories of
people like Caitlyn Jenner and Janet Mock are important tools for increasing awareness of and
support for transgender concerns, these narratives tend to present one perspective on who
transgender people are and what transgender people want. My work aims at making visible
alternative narratives of gender variance—by amplifying the voices of trans*-identified people
and by drawing on my own experiences as a trans* person. I am particularly interested in
exploring what the feminist science and technology studies theorist Susan Leigh Star referred to
as the “high-tension zone” of gender nonconformity: a site of intense pressure mixed with rich
possibility.
Across all of the strands of my research, I aim to contribute to interdisciplinary conversations in
the humanities and the social sciences about alternative models for theorizing gender and sexual
identities—in schools, in higher education, and in culture writ large. My publication record
reflects this interdisciplinary commitment. I have published in education-focused journals and
edited volumes such as Cognition and Instruction and Power and Privilege in the Learning
Sciences: Critical and Sociocultural Theories, but I have also contributed to ongoing
conversations in feminist and queer studies by publishing work in, for example, Gerald Walton’s
edited volume offering cultural analyses of efforts to permeate mainstream culture with “the gay
agenda” and Daniel Vena’s forthcoming anthology investigating trans* identities, nostalgia, and
cultural constructions of transgender lives.
I continue to interweave the strands above and extend my work into new areas. I hope to
undertake interdisciplinary study across elementary literacy contexts, and across multiple
academic subject areas, to investigate how gender and sexuality are and can be reproduced,
resisted, and challenged. My future research plans involve exploring the phenomenon of gender
variance across a wider range of contexts, investigating how gendered and sexual performances
intersect across childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. I hope to study queer and trans*
issues in a range of literacy contexts, including schools, afterschool programs, peer groups, and
family and community groups. I expect this qualitative, longitudinal work to be an important
contribution to developing knowledge about how to build LGBTQ-supportive learning
environments in elementary school and beyond.
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