Queering outdoor education

By Jody Polukoshko (she/her), teacher, Vancouver

Within the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, “queering” is a phrase that, as part of reclamation of the term “queer,” has come to mean looking at ideas sideways, eschewing boundaries, disrupting the status quo, and facilitating the rise of something new and beautiful from the ashes of the old. It speaks to taking up space, doing things in ways that feel and are authentic and inclusive, always asking questions, and staying rooted in participatory and practical intersectionality.

Working within the current backlash against SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) in schools, and against 2SLGBTQIA+ rights, it’s essential that we demystify and move SOGI work out of the silos of humanities and physical health and into our day-to-day teaching, inclusive practice, and relationship building. This also means a critical examination of some of the performative allyship and pink-washing that affects activists working for fundamental social change.

In May 2025, the Vancouver Elementary and Adult Educators’ Society hosted a workshop on drag pedagogy featuring Daniel Gallardo a.k.a. Gaia Lacandona to encourage teachers to take on the work of queering their pedagogy. The workshop invited participants to consider the history and political context of drag, and consider it as a concrete methodology for recognizing and undoing binary thinking, while engaging in glorious celebration of the opportunities, agency, choices, and power in naming and creating oneself.

Drag pedagogy imagines a world where we each define ourselves and learn to use that lens on the world around us, including on our structures and in our schools.

Drag pedagogy is the result of the work of queer and trans academics, teachers, and drag practitioners, who have recognized drag as a portal to possibility and the decentring of static, binary, colonial, and imposed categories such as male/female, cis/trans, right/wrong, and inside/outside. It brings concepts of play, invention, creativity, and creation to the forefront, not only for student identity but also to the whole system (or cis-tem) for the purpose of shifting or destroying it.

If … we can see and appreciate the growth and change of a leaf, or a seed, or the relationship between plants in an ecosystem, why not appreciate and respect the fact that humans also change and grow?

In Vancouver, a small group of queer and trans folks, as well as cis and straight allies, have been working on developing ideas and curriculum to queer outdoor education (available online here). The project stems not only from thinking about the assumptions we collectively hold about nature’s binaries and the primacy of hetero-essentialist and gendered reproduction but also from a critical review of who gets to be in, enjoy, and be proficient in nature. Access and expertise in the outdoors is a classed, gendered, racialized experience where safety, capitalist gatekeeping, and transportation all present barriers. While intended to be a decolonial tool, the way we approach the outdoors can also reproduce or inadvertently affirm colonial discourses. Queering outdoor education practitioners work across K–12, and the project reflects a curiosity about accessibility and the cis-heteronormative assumptions that often flow from biological inquiry. We invite educators to consider the following questions as they review and plan their curriculum:

• What language do we use when we view, record, interpret, and convey our outdoor experiences? For example, are we gendering animals using binary gender or reinforcing male as universal?

• What lenses do we use when we make our analyses, inferences, and conclusions? Are they disproportionately and persistently gendered and binary? Do they include assumptions about family structure that silence queer narratives and organization?

• How can a desire to simplify complex ideas result in a flattening of diversity? Are we omitting spectra in favour of binaries as a tool of simplification?

• Where do concepts of spectra or fluidity bump up against traditional models of science and epistemology? Do we prioritize certainty over questioning? Do discussions privilege or disqualify individuality?

Queering outdoor education is not only about debunk-ing the universality of heterosexuality in nature, which is clearly perpetuated in science and pop culture, it’s also about learning to see the pervasiveness of constructed binaries, to perceive the hierarchies in the world around us, and consider the harm of essentializing and naturalizing heteronormativity. If, for instance, we can see and appreciate the growth and change of a leaf, or a seed, or the relationship between plants in an ecosystem, why not appreciate and respect the fact that humans also change and grow? Why do we continue to rely on gender as a sorting category despite the broad existence of natural diversity and informed advocacy against such categorization?

The lessons developed by teachers in Vancouver include the following:

• a literature review of relevant books

• investigating ourselves, privilege, and access to the outdoors

• viewing interrelationships as allyship

• relationships between land and Indigeneity

• considering the impact of colonialism on nature and identity

• learning to view the world as spectra

• interconnectedness within the natural world

• intersectionality

• the impact of language on understanding

• and many ways to explore viewing, moving through, interacting with, and stewarding nature. 

While these are concepts explored by teachers in many different settings, the opportunity to deconstruct our relationships with nature and the way we engage with students is always valuable, especially once we start to notice the assumptions and practices that validate and advance cis-heteronormativity in outdoor education.

It’s essential that our work as educators seeks to understand not only the way that queer- and trans-phobia operate in our systems but also to ensure that we avoid selectively lifting one identity up inside the matrix of oppression. As we implement SOGI content across the curriculum, it’s essential to remember that the queer and trans liberation movement is rooted in the activism of racialized queer and trans folks, often led by trans women. All our SOGI work must be informed by Indigenous and anti-colonial understandings and must centre the voices of queer, Indigenous, and racialized activists upon whose shoulders this work stands. And because true anti-oppression work is intersectional, it’s also insufficient to assume that one solution and its discourse will resolve or, at minimum, will not increase the harm to another.

Taking on the work of queering education helps counteract attempts to prevent queer and trans students from being represented or reflected in schools. The work often falls to queer and trans teachers who, in many cases, already work under legitimate fears of career-ending accusations based on stereotypes and bigotry. Community and district leaders in the 1990s and early 2000s took important and transformative risks to create policy, equity statements, and procedures to protect queer and trans staff and students. Today, allies can bring these rights and protections to life through their daily choices in the classroom and by challenging the assumptions that reinforce misguided stereotypes of gender.