Queer and Trans Perspectives on Teaching LGBT-themed Texts in Schools

This book focuses on queering texts with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender (LGBT) themes in collaboration with students - young to young adult – and their teachers - both pre- and in- service. It strives to generate knowledge and deeper understandings of the pedagogical implications for working with LGBT-themed texts in classrooms across grade levels.

The contributions in this book offer explicit implications for pedagogical practice, considering literature for children and young adults, and work in elementary school, high school, and university classrooms and schools. They give insights on exploring how queer and trans theories might inform the teaching and learning of English language arts with great respect to people who live their lives beyond hegemonic heternormativity and cisnormativity. They provide wisdom on how to provoke, foster, and navigate complicated conversations about sexuality, queer desire, gender creativity, gender independence, and trans inclusivity. In addition, they show how all of these are informed by an epistemological and ontological understanding of gender embodiment as a process of becoming. They offer insights into how queer and trans theories, as informed and driven by trans, non-binary and gender diverse scholars themselves, can move all of us beyond LGBTQ-inclusivity and inform reading, discussing, teaching, and learning in all of the classrooms and school contexts where we live and work.

This volume was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

Mollie V. Blackburn is a Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the Ohio State University, USA. Her research focuses on literacy, language, and social change, with particular attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and the teachers who serve them.

Caroline T. Clark is a Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University, USA. Her research focuses on language and literacy practices in and outside of school and collaborative research with teachers, young people, and families for social action. Since 2004, she has co-led a teacher inquiry group with Mollie Blackburn committed to supporting LGBTQQ and gender creative students in schools.

Wayne J. Martino, Ph.D., is Professor of Equity and Social Justice Education in the Faculty of Education at The University of Western Ontario, Canada. His research interests are in the fields of gender and sexual diversity studies in education with a current focus on supporting transgender, gender independent and gender expansive youth in schools.