Full Description
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.
Contents
Introduction. Investigating LGBT-themed literature and trans informed pedagogies in classrooms 1. Teaching about sexual minorities and "princess boys": a queer and trans-infused approach to investigating LGBTQ-themed texts in the elementary school classroom 2. Gay penguins, sissy ducklings...and beyond? Exploring gender and sexuality diversity through children's literature 3. Queering chapter books with LGBT characters for young readers: recognizing and complicating representations of homonormativity 4. Scenes of violence and sex in recent award-winning LGBT-themed young adult novels and the ideologies they offer their readers 5. The social importance of a kiss: a Honnethian reading of David Levithan's young adult novel, Two Boys Kissing 6. Reading queer counter-narratives in the high-school literature classroom: possibilities and challenges 7. Exploring queer pedagogies in the college-level YA literature course 8. Learning from preservice teachers' responses to trans-themed young adult literature: improving personal practice in teacher education 9. Queer and trans-themed books for young readers: a critical review
