In working with preparatory teachers, we have tried to "place diversity front and center" to help students "see culture" as a prerequisite for culturally responsive teaching. The language arts methodscourse students who, like the authors, are White women from middle-or upper-income families, participated in learning opportunities that included writing cultural memoirs, field experiences in diverse settings, and written reflection on the relation between their cultural constructions and those of the students they were teaching. In this article, we turn around the culture question we've pushed the students to consider to ourselves: What are we learning about our students as cultural beings that is helping us prepare them more effectively to be culturally responsive teachers? We identified three areas of growth: We reconstructed our understanding of students as complex cultural beings, of ourselves as privileged teachers of the privileged, and of the nature and relationship of resistance and risk.

Gay and lesbian issues are often silenced in teacher education programs. Such silencing has serious consequences for teachers who feel unprepared to discuss such issues in their classrooms. Challenging the silence regarding gay and lesbian issues that often permeates early childhood classrooms, we share a teacher's critical inquiry into teaching gay and lesbian issues through teacher action research. We posit that while gay and lesbian issues need to be an intrinsic part of teacher education classes, practising teachers may create the opportunity to take steps toward addressing diversity, fully including gay and lesbian issues in their classrooms. We propose that the case presented may provide a practical possibility for teachers to find ways to fully include all students in their literacy practices.

This essay explores what it might mean to read children's literature in elementary school classrooms through a queer lens. The authors argue that because queer theory has a history as a literary theory that destabilizes normative associations among gender, sexuality, bodies, and desire, it provides a set of analytical tools classroom communities can draw on to create alternative readings of a wide range of familiar texts. Such readings of books already on the shelves of elementary school libraries and classrooms can highlight experiences and subjectivities of nonnormative sexualities and gender identities in the hopes of making classrooms more inclusive. Specifically, we argue that four high-quality, award-winning children's books already included in many schools and classrooms-Sendak's (1963) Where the Wild Things Are, Woodson's (2001) The Other Side, DiCamillo's (2003) Tale of Despereaux, and Patterson's (1977) Bridge to Terabithia-can be fruitful sites for opening up these more inclusive readings and conversations. The article offers possible queer readings of these texts as well as suggestions for how to encourage elementary-aged students to think about both books and the socially constructed norms of real life through a queered lens. By first queering on-the-shelf texts and then asking students to think about how that queering connects to larger social issues, elementary classrooms can become places where strict identity categories-categories that can marginalize queer students and families-are made visible, are questioned, are stretched, and can even fall apart.

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