Making Sense of Queer Inclusion: A Multi-Method Case Study Examining How Elementary Educators in Illinois Mediate Policy in Practice

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Making Sense of Queer Inclusion: A Multi-Method Case Study Examining How Elementary Educators in Illinois Mediate Policy in Practice

Utilizing a qualitative case study approach, this project explores how elementary teachers in the first year of policy enactment understand, interpret, and teach lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) inclusive social studies in Illinois. Bridging institutional theory with organizational sensemaking, it seeks to examine the material and ideological affordances and constraints teachers identify as obstacles and supports for teaching LGBTQ-inclusive social studies as well as detail, across scale (e.g., school-level, district, state), how the LGBTQ subject is discursively produced as (in)human. Building on scholarship that considers how educational policy is interpreted, implemented, and mediated, this study will reveal the promises and precarity embedded in the work teachers do in understanding, interpreting, and teaching queer-inclusive curriculum. Simultaneously, it will contribute new insights into how these processes are always and already subject to complex relations of culture and power.

Author

• Jon Michael Wargo, Boston College