Harry Potter and Queering the College Classroom

This dissertation reimagines the college classroom through a queer pedagogical practice that, I argue, results in a queer space. Through a mixed method study that utilized duoethnography and student survey, I find that queer pedagogy, or the resistance of heteronormativity, challenging binaries, welcoming the student’s lived experience as fodder for learning academic concepts, paired with a beloved fantasy text such as Harry Potter, can be a medium with which to deconstruct the traditional college classroom and reconstruct a queer space that encourages student self-authorship and questioning of the traditional hierarchy in higher education. The data suggests that queering the college classroom in these ways increases students’ feeling of belonging and ownership of their education, encourages sitting in discomfort and not-knowing, invites student-led discussion and revelation, increases learning and retention, and is pedagogically effective in addressing societal concepts around marginalization, biases, oppression, and socially constructed binaries. This dissertation is an invitation to students to own their learning process, and for faculty to re-evaluate their pedagogical practices and choice of text