The intersection of anthropology and education has an intellectual history that can be traced back to the socialization studies of early anthropologists. The evolution of the field can be viewed through three heuristics. Anthropology of education refers to theory building in anthropology; anthropology in education refers to theory building in education; and anthropology for education refers to the enactment of educational change.
With recent decades showing an increase in educational literacy scholarship attending to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ) people and texts with LGBTQ themes, we sought to extend this scholarship through examining collaborative composition for public audiences beyond a classroom and school. We explored these composing practices through our ethnographically informed qualitative study of a semester-long LGBTQ-themed literature course for high school juniors and seniors, which we cotaught and coresearched. Ultimately, we found, through collaborative composing for public audiences, students and teachers in the LGBTQthemed literature course had opportunities for interrogating oppressive values. When students and teachers shared vulnerability in that they shared responsibility for oppressive values, they embraced these opportunities. However, when students and teachers failed to share vulnerability but, instead, imposed it on a single individual, they squandered these opportunities. These findings underscore the importance of sharing vulnerability when working to interrogate oppressive values through collaborative composition for public audiences.
In recent decades, there has been an increase in literacy education research attending to curriculum inclusive of sexual and gender diversity in secondary classrooms. Although valuable, most of this research has focused on the ideational and representational qualities of curriculum and thus has overlooked the significance of composition and genre. Seeking to add this scholarship, I focused on youth choosing to write about queer topics for compositional assignments in a secondary humanities course that combined English language arts and social studies (U.S. studies). Drawing from a broader literacy ethnography conducted at a high school in a Midwestern U.S. city, I argue that youth in the humanities course drew on curricular ideas and genres in their literacy performances in ways that resisted and reified oppressive values. Genres that encouraged extended dialogue resulted in interrogations of cisheteronormativity that were sustained and intersectional. However, youth's use of genres cited and reproduced racist and cisheteronormative Eurocentric, anti-Black, and assimilationist ideologies. Hence, there is a need for approaches to queer-inclusive curricula that explore intersections of queerness and race and attend to aspects of literacy and language practices beyond ideational and representational content.
Background Recent decades have seen an increased number of literacy education researchers attending to LGBTQ people and texts in secondary schools, frequently documenting tensions that emerge, such as conflict. However, this research tends to be limited in scope with respect to time, texts, and identities. Moreover, it shows that students tend to face challenges and constraints when attempting to challenge homophobia and transphobia. Focus of Study In this study, I sought to extend previous scholarship by exploring how students used reading and writing to work within, on, and against normative values and practices in a secondary classroom as they enacted queer activism, efforts I conceptualize as literacy disidentifications. Setting This study took place at a public urban comprehensive high school that I call Harrison High School, which was in a midsized Midwestern U.S. city. In this manuscript, I focus on one course, a sophomore humanities class that combined English language arts and social studies. Research Design I conducted a yearlong literacy ethnography at Harrison, acting as a participant observer throughout the high school but focusing on literacy learning contexts, including English language arts classrooms and a GSA (Genders and Sexualities Alliance) club. Data Collection and Analysis During my participant observation experiences, I constructed field notes. In addition, I made audio and video recordings of classroom lessons, collected documents, and conducted interviews with teachers, students, and administrators. I analyzed these data through an inductive and comparative grounded theory approach. Findings Drawing on sociocultural perspectives of literacy and language along with queer theories, I conceptualize literacy disidentifications and explore this heuristic through the actions of Imani, a queer youth of color who encountered a schooling context where her activism was frequently shut down. To legitimize and sustain her queer activism, she blended humor with other literacy practices, such as role-playing and signification, which resulted in critiquing, yet not necessarily transforming, transphobia. Conclusions These findings suggest that educators working to cultivate queer-affirming schools can: sanction conflict and teach youth how to navigate conflict in compassionate and humanizing ways; recognize, rather than squelch, youths’ queer activism; teach LGBTQ-inclusive curricula, especially curricular texts that foreground the lives and perspectives of trans people; and broaden the range of youth literacy practices valued in classroom lessons.
Drawing from a yearlong literacy ethnography conducted at a high school in a Midwestern U.S. city, this article extends queer literacies and queer pedagogies scholarship by exploring the frictions and resonances between strategies of inclusion and queering. While inclusion strategies emphasize using expanded representations of sexuality and gender, such as of LGBTQ+ life, queering approaches often trouble inclusion through, for instance, questioning normativities and epistemologies and embracing partiality, uncertainty, and crisis in learning. To unpack interconnections between inclusion and queering, I present an ethnographic case of a lesson in a sophomore humanities course, focusing on the teacherly moves of an English language arts educator leading an instructional conversation about a nonfiction article describing intersections among sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class with respect to food insecurity. Engaging Ahmed's ( 2006) queer theorization of orientations, I develop the heuristic of literacy (dis)orientations to describe the layered mixture of classroom literacy performances challenging and reifying oppressive values regarding intersections among sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class. The teacher disoriented students away from (homo)normativities regarding knowledge of LGBTQ+ communities and reoriented them toward and around nuanced, intersectional understandings of queer and trans life. However, these anti-oppressive possibilities were limited by orientations around a banking model of education and binaries. This ethnographic case suggests that educators sanctioning literacy orientations toward intersectional LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum presents possibilities for liberatory social change insofar as they disorient students away from education-as-banking and epistemological binaries and reorient them around alternative ways of knowing, specifically intersectionality as a queering epistemology.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.