(In)Human Histories: Exploring How Educational Policy Shapes the Teaching of LGBTQ+ Inclusive Social Studies

• In Event: Enacting Curriculum Policy Reform With Equity and Inclusion Goals: Exploring Barriers and Possibilities

Abstract

Conceptualized as an anthropological study of educational policy, this project explores how elementary teachers in the first year of policy enactment understand, interpret, and teach LGBTQ-inclusive social studies in Illinois. Designed as a sequential mixed-methods study, it examines the material and ideological affordances and constraints teachers identify as obstacles and supports for teaching LGBTQ-inclusive social studies. Simultaneously, it details how the LGBTQ subject - as made sense of by teachers - is discursively produced as (in)human. Building on scholarship that considers how educational policy is interpreted, implemented, and mediated, this paper reveals the promises and precarity embedded in the work teachers do in understanding, interpreting, and teaching queer inclusion.

Author

• Jon Michael Wargo, Boston College