Discussing the Intersections of Queerness and Race in a Secondary Classroom: Literacy Orientations and Epistemology

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Languaging Queerness, Race, and Relational Agency

Abstract

This presentation draws from a broader literacy ethnography conducted at a public, comprehensive high school in a Midwestern U.S. city. I focus on a classroom lesson in a sophomore humanities course that combined English language arts and U.S. studies, and I explore the epistemological practices of students and teachers during a classroom literacy and language event in which people discussed a popular news article about the intersections of queerness and race. To add to the growing body of queer literacy education research that considers intersectionality, I combine Ahmed’s (2006, 2007) queer theorization of orientations with Blackburn’s (2003) scholarship on literacy performances in order to conceptualize the heuristic of literacy orientations.

Author

• Ryan Schey, University of Iowa