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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.

Drawing on a yearlong ethnography I conducted at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the midwestern United States, in this article I analyze a classroom instructional conversation about gender and trans identities in a sophomore humanities (grade 10) course that combined English language arts and social studies. In the conversation, youth constructed temporalities (i.e., relationships among pasts, presents, and futures) that were out of sync with the temporalities sanctioned by the school. In doing so, they drew on ideologies about gender, religion, race, sexuality, and class. Yet different youth offered futures that were incommensurate, particularly because they clashed over whether temporalities were rigid, fixed, and unchangeable or fluid, variable, multiple, and thus open to change. Being out of sync signaled possibilities, but not guarantees, of more just futures and suggested a need for literacy educators and researchers to rethink the roles of (un)certainty, (in)stability, and (non)linearity in classroom instruction with respect to sexual and gender diversity. In making this argument, I integrate queer and trans theorizations of temporality and futurity with adolescent queer literacies scholarship, specifically the concept of literacy performances.

This book is a collection of chapters and response essays that seek to take up key tensions, possibilities, and gaps in the field of queer and trans studies in education. The authors work across contexts and engage a range of theoretical, methodological, and practical issues with an eye toward building generative futures in the field.

Purpose Current legislative, policy and cultural efforts to censor and illegalize classroom discussions and curricular representations of LGBTQ+ people reflect longstanding challenges in English education. In an effort to explore what curricular inclusion can (not) accomplish – especially what and how current struggles over inclusion, censorship, illegalization and ultimately representation in English education might (not) contribute to queer and trans liberation – the purpose of this article is to feature the experiences of queer and trans youth as knowers in classroom lessons with LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum. Design/methodology/approach Drawing from a yearlong literacy ethnography at a Midwestern high school in which the author explored youth and adults reading, writing and talking about sexual and gender diversity, in this article the author focuses on one literacy learning context at the high school, a co-taught sophomore humanities that combined English language arts and social studies. Findings Engaging theories of epistemic (in) justice, the findings of this article highlight the experiences of queer and trans youth – especially two queer youth of Color, Camden and Imani – as knowers in the context of an LGBTQ+-inclusive classroom curriculum. The author describes epistemic harms with respect to distortions of credibility and homonormative assimilationist requirements and reflects on alternative possibilities that youth gestured toward through their small resistances. Originality/value By centering the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth, this article contributes to research about LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum in English teaching. Previous research, when empirical rather than conceptual, has tended to focus on the perspectives of teachers.

Previous research has revealed that U.S. schools are hostile and unsafe for queer youth, yet school-based supports, such as LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum, are associated with more welcoming schools. Studies focusing on inclusive curriculum have implicitly characterized this curriculum didactically, in other words, as a direct intervention into the homophobia, transphobia, and ignorance of straight, cisgender students. Drawing on a yearlong literacy ethnography at a public high school in a Midwestern U.S. city, I explored the complex layers of queer-inclusive curriculum’s significance. Focusing on two illustrative Socratic seminar assignments from a sophomore humanities course, I argue that the queer-inclusive curriculum was consequential less because it functioned didactically and more because it fostered a classroom context where youth’s already existing queer activism could flourish. These classroom examples suggest the importance of literacy educators collaborating with youth to offer choice alongside curriculum that represents religiously and racially diverse queer communities, queer joy, and possibilities beyond binaries.

Scheer discusses the importance for teachers to listen to and learn from students, highlighting queer activism in English education. He states that there were countless moments of small conflict with students, colleagues, parents and families, and administrators. It felt like these clashes were nonstop, coming from every direction. As these instances accumulated across the year, it made the work hard, even exhausting. He believess that it was largely because of the support of each other and a teacher inquiry group that they felt able to keep trying.

This project focuses on the co-teaching and co-researching of a high school LGBTQ-themed literature course with particular attention to the reading and discussion of a queer-themed young adult novel, Brezenoff’s Brooklyn, Burning. In blending teacher inquiry and ethnographic methodologies, we found that students and teachers encountered ruptures to normative literacy practices of seeing, understanding, and connecting. When the class collectively treated these disruptions as excesses and problems, they disengaged with these ruptures such that dialogue was destabilized and sporadic. Without sustained dialogue, the class reproduced dominant literacy practices of seeing, understanding, and connecting, which in turn contributed to reifying normativities around sexuality, gender, race, and epistemologies. In contrast, when students and teachers stayed with disruptions and continued to dialogue about them across time, they took them up as opportunities for learning. Collectively they co-constructed alternative enactments of literacy practices, centered around visualizing and hypothesizing, which in turn facilitated empathizing. Through these alternatives, they contested normativities around sexuality, gender, addiction, and epistemologies, although not race and whiteness. Ultimately, we argue that with ruptures as obstacles, readers may or may not be able to see, understand, or connect with characters; but with ruptures as opportunities, readers can visualize, hypothesize about, and more deeply empathize with characters and their circumstances. Therefore, reading with ruptures is a risk worth taking.

In this essay, two English language arts teacher educators reflect on their efforts to live out a queer anti-oppressive pedagogy and explore tensions in navigating emotionality and discomfort.