1st Edition
Queer, Trans, and Intersectional Theory in Educational Practice Student, Teacher, and Community Experiences
Offering an examination of educational approaches to promote justice, this volume demonstrates the necessity for keeping race, ethnicity, class, language, and other diversities at the core of pedagogical strategies and theories that address queer, trans, gender nonbinary and related issues.
Queer theory, trans theory, and intersectional theory have all sought to describe, create, and foster a sense of complex subjectivity and community, insisting on relationality and complexity as concepts and communities shift and change. Each theory has addressed exclusions from dominant practices and encouraged a sense of connection across struggles. This collection brings these crucial theories together to inform pedagogies across a wide array of contexts of formal education and community-based educational settings. Seeking to push at the edges of how we teach and learn across subjectivities and communities, authors in this volume show that theories inform practice and practice informs theory—but this takes careful attention, reflexivity, and commitment.
This scholarly text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, teachers, libraries and policy makers in the field of Gender and Sexuality in Education, LGBTQ studies, Multicultural Education and Sociology of Education.
Introduction, Misses and Connections: Queer, Trans, and Intersectional Pedagogies
Mollie Blackburn and Cris Mayo
Ch. 1 Spaces of Collision: Intersectionalities of Race, Gender Identity, and Generations
Cindy Cruz
Section I: Teachers and Students in Classrooms and Schools
Ch. 2 Gender Identity Complexity is Trans-sectional Turn: Expanding the Theory of Trans*+ness into Literacy Practice
sj Miller
Ch. 3 "I Don’t Write So Other People Notice Me, I Write So I Can Notice Myself…": Locating Queer at the Intersection of Rhetoric, Resistance, and Resource-Based Pedagogy
Jon Wargo
Ch. 4 Identity Deficits: Reading, Learning, and Teaching Trans and Racial Identities in an Upper Elementary Classroom
Jill M. Hermann-Wilmarth
Section II: Families and Communities in the Educational Lives of Students
Ch. 5 OtrasMadres: Latina Immigrants Doing Queer Advocacy Work
Rigoberto Marquez
Ch. 6 Queering Family Difference to Dispel the Myth of the "Normal": Creating Classroom and School Communities that Affirm All Students and their Families
Norma Marrun, Christine Clark, and Omi Cadney
Ch. 7 Visibility Alone Will Not Save Us: Leveraging Invisibility as a Possibility for Liberatory Pedagogical Practice
Z Nicolazzo
Section III: Students and Higher Education Policies
Ch. 8 Understanding Non-Financial Barriers of Queer and Trans Young Black Women in Canada Transitioning from High School to Postsecondary Education
Tanitiã Munroe, Lance McCready, and Kim Penney
Ch. 9 After Student Activism: Co-Curricular Engagement in Solidarity and Healing
Appy Frykenberg
Ch. 10 Undoing CisHet White Organizational Theory and Praxis
Erich N. Pitcher
Ch. 11 Border Pedagogies and States: Trans, Race, and Recognitions
Francisco J. Galarte
Biography
Cris Mayo is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at West Virginia University, US.
Mollie V. Blackburn is Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Ecology at the Ohio State University, US.
With this book, we dive deeply into the contradictions, impossibilities, and unpredictable outcomes of pedagogy and advocacy that surface when engaging queer, trans, and intersectional theories and lenses, and it is exactly these "misses and connections" that make educational work politically generative, even if emotionally fraught, especially for those of us who think we already do anti-oppressive work. Mollie Blackburn, Cris Mayo, and colleagues offer analyses of refreshingly original and creative classroom, community, and cultural interventions that give us pause as they illuminate, inquire, inspire, and undoubtedly, as they queer your own approach, your very vision for justice in education.
-Kevin Kumashiro is Assistant Professor at Bates College in Lewiston, USA and author of Troubling Education: "Queer" Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy.
Queer, Trans, and Intersectional Theory in Educational Practice: Student, Teacher, and Community Experiences is a ground-breaking collection. Each chapter weaves together intersectional, queer, and trans theories of education in order to imagine classrooms that welcome, cultivate, and think difference as the grounds of learning. Accessible, practical, and provocative—this collection will be indispensable to educational researchers from K-12 to college and university who want to infuse their practice with the insights of queer, trans, and intersectional theories.
- Jen Gilbert is Associate Professor at Faculty of Education, York University, Cannada.
Neoliberal assaults on educational spaces have intensified the enforcement of scripted and decontextualized approaches to teaching and learning, the anti-intellectual dismissal of theory’s importance to pedagogy, and the surveillance of difference and dissent as disruptive pedagogical forces. Blackburn and Mayo’s edited collection reclaims the transformative possibilities of educational practice by re-centering theory, difference, and disruption despite (and because) of mandates to the contrary. The chapters in this collection embrace the legacy of outlaw pedagogies — works that defy the constraints of what is allowable in order to expand the boundaries of what is imaginable.
- Ed Brockenbrough is Associate Professor and Calvin Bland Fellow at Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
