In this essay, Harper B. Keenan draws on his own experience as a white queer and trans educator to consider the meaning of a critical trans pedagogy. Amid dissonant narratives of equal rights and subjection, he explores how his classroom teaching is shaped by his own experience of gender conditioning as well as by the contemporary political climate surrounding trans identity. Keenan argues that a critical trans pedagogy requires unscripting and must necessarily support children in constructing new knowledge.
Since 2010, California passed three laws that address the safety and inclusion of transgender students. Seth's Law (SB 48), the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act (AB 9) and The School Success and Opportunity Act (AB 1266). The policies of 10 large urban districts in and around the San Francisco Bay Area were analysed using policy archaeology methodology (PAM) to critically evaluate the possibilities and limits of transgender-inclusive policies to support and affirm gender-diverse (transgender, agender, non-binary, etc.) students. The analysis presented here aims to trouble the normalizing categories of the gender binary that get reified in these policies and offers additional ways to create schools that are more affirming and supportive of all forms of gender diversity.
Over the past decade, public awareness of transgender people has rapidly increased. Yet people who do not conform to the expectations of their assigned gender often face social prejudice and structural marginalization. Within this context, an increasing number of education researchers have shown interest in taking up questions related to transgender communities. Although there is great potential for education researchers to play a useful role in cultivating trans-competent educational environments, this heightened engagement raises new challenges. How can education researchers design methodologies that avoid reinforcing the structures and epistemologies that have done harm to trans people? This article places that question in historical context through an overview of the relationship between transgender people and social science research over the last century, and the emergence of transgender studies as a response to that history. Then, the article presents a consideration of the role of education research in bridging tensions between the fields of social science and transgender studies.
In recent years, a programme for young children called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) has risen to simultaneous popularity and controversy. This article, written collaboratively by an education scholar and a drag queen involved in organizing DQSH, contextualizes the programme within the landscape of gender in education as well as within the world of drag, and argues that Drag Queen Story Hour provides a generative extension of queer pedagogy into the world of early childhood education. Drawing on the work of Jos e Esteban Muñoz, the authors discuss five interrelated elements of DQSH that offer early childhood educators a way into a sense of queer imagination: play as praxis, aesthetic transformation, strategic defiance, destigmatization of shame, and embodied kinship. Ultimately, the authors propose that "drag pedagogy" provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but living queerly. KEYWORDS Community-based learning; early childhood education; equity and inclusion; gender issues in education; queer pedagogy Drag queens have historically been relegated to the realm of the night. In the past few years, however, drag performers have made their way from the dimly lit bars of gayborhoods and into the fluorescent lights of libraries and classrooms. Drag superstar Nina West released a children's music album entitled Drag Is Magic in 2019, and multiple children's books about drag were published in 2020 (Bussell, 2020). These efforts build upon the foundational work of many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth organizations, like San Francisco's Queens of the Castro, which has explored drag with high-school students for the last decade (Hsu, 2016). In this article, we explore the pedagogical contributions of a programme called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) as a form of queer imagining in an early childhood context. Through this programme, drag artists have channelled their penchant for playfully "'reading' each other to filth" 1 into different forms of literacy, promoting storytelling as integral to queer and trans communities, as well as positioning queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education. We are guided by the following question: what might Drag Queen Story Hour offer educators as a way of bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children?
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Background/Context Across the nation, people living in the United States are embroiled in conflict over the meaning of its past. Many of the most fervent conflicts relate to acts of historical violence: war, enslavement, conquest, and colonization among them. Elementary school students commonly study the early colonization of the land now known as the United States, the nation's Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and other periods of history that historians describe as rife with violence. In the field of California colonial history, there is virtual consensus among historians that the Spanish mission system was a period of violence and devastation, most especially for California Indians, but school history curricula have been criticized for avoiding this history of violence. This raises questions about the role of intellectual honesty in teaching elementary-aged students about U.S. history. Though a small body of scholarship engages with questions of whether and how to talk with young children about human atrocity, few studies have empirically examined what state-recommended elementary school curriculum actually say about historical violence in the formation of the United States. Research Questions/Focus of Study This study examines the representation of violence in state-recommended elementary school history textbooks on the topic of the Spanish colonization of California. Specifically, the study responds to the following questions: How do the textbooks’ content address the topic of violence? Are California Indian and Spanish acts of violence represented differently? If so, how? Research Design Data were derived from a content analysis of fourth grade-level history textbooks recommended by the California State Department of Education in public use at the time of the study. Data Collection and Analysis Using qualitative coding software, chapters on California colonial mission history in each of the four state-recommended textbooks were coded and analyzed at the level of the sentence (n = 1,601). Coding and analysis took place in two stages. First, each sentence was coded for references to violence and ethnic group(s), which allowed for analysis of the number of references to acts of violence and ethnic groups throughout the entirety of the text. The second stage more closely examined the set of sentences that referred specifically to violence, allowing for comparison of the representation of violence according to the ethnic group with which it was associated. Findings/Results The study shows that violence is only minimally addressed in California fourth-grade history textbook content on the topic of Spanish colonization. Although generally underrepresented throughout the text, California Indian people are disproportionately over-represented as perpetrators of violence in the early colonization of California, a framing that is drastically out of alignment with the historical record as it is agreed upon by historians. Conclusions/Recommendations This study makes two key conclusions. First, the article argues that, in this case, elementary school history curriculum presents a distorted vision of violence in the colonial past. Second, the article complicates the issue of when young children are old enough to learn about violent histories in school by revealing that they are already learning about violence in the past, although such representation is both minimal and problematic. The article concludes by recommending the design of learning activities that engage in preparatory version of a more intellectually honest investigation of the historical record, as well as its relationship to the present.
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