Queering the teacher as a text in the English language arts classroom: Beyond books, identity work and teacher preparation

Classrooms reflect and contribute to normative sex, gender, and sexuality categories in school culture, rules, and rituals. Texts, materials, curriculum, and the discourse we employ as educators perpetuate the pervasiveness of these categories. This article explores the less visible ways sex and gender categories are constructed in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms, and how institutionalized heteronormativity positions students within normative categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. These limiting conversations are difficult to identify and even more difficult to challenge. But it is precisely this dynamic – the subconscious reinforcing of sex and gender binaries – that upholds the dominance of the institution of heterosexuality. Merely addressing LGBTQ issues in the field of teaching reading, writing, and literacy is an incomplete strategy. I argue that to disrupt normative narratives in the ELA classroom, educators must first identify the everyday practices occurring in school spaces, specifically recognizing the teacher as a text. For sustained challenges to institutionalized norms, ELA teachers must engage in this work outside of LGBTQ-inclusive instructional materials and anti-homophobic education, and I offer specific methods for disrupting mainstream narratives in ELA classrooms

The 2023 Whippoorwill Award: The 2023 Whippoorwill Award: Complex Representations of Rural Identities and Places

Announcing the 2023 Whippoorwill Award winners

La Campana de Gracia: Any LIV Batallada 2836 - 1923 octubre 27

The format and content of LGBTQ graphic novels make them effective pedagogical tools for engaging students in critical discussions about gender and sexuality. By using two exemplar texts, the authors offer teachers a vocabulary and method for engaging in these conversations

Reciprocity in the practice of publicly engaged scholarship – Reflections from a transnational literacy project

We examine the concept of “reciprocity” in publicly engaged literacy scholarship. The idea of reciprocity suggests that projects using a publicly engaged research model should be two-way partnerships with an effort given to balancing benefits to the researcher and to community partners. We (the researcher and the community partner) explore this dynamic by considering our own experiences working on a project with groups of youth in Honduras and in the United States. The groups share their cultures and experiences through writing and technology and challenge ideas about security and public space. Given the national, racial, cultural, economic, linguistic, and power dynamics inherent in this publicly engaged scholarship project, reciprocity is a theme we pay close attention to and are in constant discussion about. We answer a series of questions about reciprocity and scholarship, and find we have learned to define both in ways that aren’t traditionally measurable and can’t be mapped out as directional