Assembled Identities and Intersectional Advocacy in Literacy Research

Abstract

In this article, I present an overview of intersectionality, and its critiques as well as make visible how it is enacted in elementary school classrooms. I focus primarily on issues of gender expression, sexuality, and family diversity as a way of centering the role of advocacy in our work as teachers and researchers. Many language arts teachers, especially those in bilingual and multicultural settings, already practice inclusivity with students who bring diversity of languages and literacies to the classroom. Expanding these practices to include attention to gender expression, sexuality, and family diversity is an example of how an intersectional lens builds upon what most teachers are already doing-creating classrooms that explicitly reflect the intersectional identities of students. I conclude with a focus on how elementary school teachers can draw from students' multiple identities and develop intersectional advocacy in their classrooms and schools.

Absolute Illiteracy in European Union Policies. Exploring the Intersections of Gender, Migration and Education

“…However, these references rarely include more than two social categories, and, using Lombardo and Agustin's framework (2012), almost never include the explanation of intersectionalities, their contextualisation in larger systems of inequalities, the identification of the transformative potential of combating intersectional inequalities, or the questioning of prevailing power structures. As some scholars have been noting (Brochin, 2018;Jimenez Rodrigo, 2020;2022), this merely discursive use of intersectionality incurs the risk of transforming it in a buzzword, undermining its transformative potential.…”

“…The selection and identification of the axes of inequality, in itself, constitutes a difficulty in the adoption of an intersectional approach to public policies (Hancock, 2007;Jiménez Rodrigo, 2020, 2022. Other obstacles include the variety of uses and (mis)interpretations of the concept of intersectionality (La Barbera et al, 2022;Brochin, 2018;Jiménez Rodrigo, 2020), the compartmentalized structure of some policymaking institutions (La Barbera et al, 2022) or the unavailability of data able to inform policy (La Barbera et al, 2022). Consequently, to a large extent, public policies are still designed to target homogeneous social groups, concentrating on single axis of exclusion, or treating multiple inequalities as independent (Hancock, 2007), in what is often labelled the "one size fits all" approach (Béland, 2017;Hankivsky and Jordan-Zakhery, 2019;Verloo, 2006).…”