Teaching, Affirming, and Recognizing Trans and Gender-Creative Youth: A Queer Literacy Framework

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

How can teachers move beyond discussions relegated to only gender and sexuality and toward understanding the (a)gender complexities students embody? How can teachers undo restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life, unhinging one from the other, and treat them as separate and distinct categories? Even more critical, how can teacher education support emerging literacy professionals and inservice literacy teachers to develop the dispositions necessary to help all students learn while simultaneously supporting them to remain open to redefinition and renegotiation? Drawing on the Queer Literacy Framework, this presentation provides classroom models for those who work with trans* and gender creative youth as they address these questions with curriculum design, pedagogical knowledge and applications, and assessments across pre-K-12 literacy contexts.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Queer Studies

Chair

• Nicole Sieben, SUNY College at Old Westbury

Papers

• A Queer Literacy Framework Promoting (a)Gender and Self-Determination and Justice - SJ Miller, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Teaching The Laramie Project in the Secondary English Classroom - Toby Emert, Agnes Scott College

• Introducing (A)gender Into Foreign/Second Language Education - Paul Chamness Miller, Akita International University; Hidehiro Endo, Akita International University

• Challenging the Limits of Binary Language in Elementary Education Through Poetry, Word Art, and Creative Bookmaking - Benjamin Lee Hicks

• Risks and Resiliency: Trans* Students in the Rural South - Stephanie Anne Shelton, University of Georgia

• Teaching Our Teachers: Trans* and Gender Education in Teacher Preparation and Professional Development - Cathy A.R. Brant, University of South Carolina - Columbia

Discussant

• Cris Mayo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign