For more than 30 years, the field of agricultural education has grappled with complex questions of how to recruit, support, retain, and teach diverse youth. Yet the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community is rarely included in published agricultural education research. In Chapter 2, this philosophical paper addresses the immediate need for understanding more about LGBTQ youth in agricultural education, while identifying opportunities and specific strategies to shift the culture of agricultural education research towards inclusion. Queer theory is leveraged to reveal a nascent body of literature related to sexuality in 4-H and school-based agricultural education. LGBTQ youth in agricultural education face significant challenges: educators ill prepared to meet their needs, a lack of policies to inform decision making, active homophobia from teachers and peers, among others. Agricultural education researchers face methodological and disciplinary barriers to conducting LGBTQ research. Authors employ unique tactics to conduct and disseminate their work. Understanding these strategies and analyzing the conditions that necessitate their use contributes to the disciplinary knowledge of how to conduct inclusive research – not just for LGBTQ youth – but for the profession writ large. As the largest youth development organization in the United States, 4-H may be uniquely positioned to meet the needs of rural LGBTQ youth. 4-H has undergone a significant shift towards increasing access, equity, and belonging for youth over the last ten years. However, there is a specific need for research that considers the unique experiences of LGBTQ youth in accessing 4-H in their home communities, and a need for theory to guide research and policy-making decisions in 4-H among other generalized youth development organizations. This qualitative research study in Chapter 3 proposes a conceptual model of the affordances and constraints rural LGBTQ youth encounter in accessing 4-H. Interviews were conducted with former 4-H members and analysis was informed by grounded theory. Findings suggest that rural LGBTQ youth are influenced by cultures of place, family, community, and rurality. These cultures give rise to certain agricultural traditions and values, youths’ personal interests, a gendered and sexualized coding of interests, low tolerance for difference, and a lack of queer community. The resulting tensions between affordances and constraints shape youth involvement patterns, and give rise to unique cultures around queerness in 4-H. The proposed conceptual model developed from this research provides a novel way of considering how rural LGBTQ youth access generalized youth development programs, and the factors that inform decisions to be involved in out-of-school programs such as 4-H.
In Chapter 4, the conceptual model proposed in Chapter 3 is extended to look at the context-adaptive strategies that youth engage in to survive and thrive in the in 4-H, and how these strategies are implicitly and explicitly supported by 4-H. LGBTQ youth navigated these complex environments by engaging in strategies that allowed them to survive and put them on pathways towards thriving in the context of 4-H. Youth sublimated their sexuality in 4-H through busyness, not talking about it, and seeking out desexualized environments. They accepted tolerance in 4-H because they were broadly supported outside their sexuality, received subtle messages of non-support, and lacked the expectation that they would be acknowledged as LGBTQ people in 4-H. These context-adaptive strategies are supported by the culture, policies, and structure of 4-H and youths’ home communities. The results of this study can be applied to make 4-H a more affirming place for LGBTQ youth and can be leveraged to enact broader systemic changes that address the root issues these youth face. Taken together, this dissertation leverages queer theory and grounded theory to advance an emergent understanding of LGBTQ resilience in agricultural education.
