BiblioVault - Books about Homosexuality and education

Failing Sideways

Queer Possibilities for Writing Assessment

Stephanie West-Puckett

Utah State University Press, 2023

Failing Sideways is an innovative and fresh approach to assessment that intersects writing studies, educational measurement, and queer rhetorics. While valuing and representing the research, theory, and practice of assessment, authors Stephanie West-Puckett, Nicole I. Caswell, and William P. Banks demonstrate the ways that students, teachers, and other interested parties can find joy and justice in the work of assessment.

A failure-oriented assessment model unsettles some of the most common practices, like rubrics and portfolios, and challenges many deeply held assumptions about validity and reliability in order to ask what could happen if assessment was oriented toward possibility and potential. Working to engage a more capacious writing construct, the authors propose queer validity inquiry (QVI) as a model for assessment that values failure, affect, identity, and materiality. These overlapping lenses help teachers honor parts of writing and learning that writing studies faculty have struggled to hold onto in a world overly focused on quickness and efficiency in schools.

Through programmatic and classroom examples, Failing Sideways privileges what is valued in the classroom but traditionally ignored in assessments. Reimagining what matters in the teaching and learning of writing and using assessment data differently, this book demonstrates what writing can be and could do in a more diverse and just world.

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LGBT Youth in America's Schools

Jason Cianciotto and Sean Cahill

University of Michigan Press, 2012

Jason Cianciotto and Sean Cahill, experts on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender public policy advocacy, combine an accessible review of social science research with analyses of school practices and local, state, and federal laws that affect LGBT students. In addition, portraits of LGBT youth and their experiences with discrimination at school bring human faces to the issues the authors discuss.

This is an essential guide for teachers, school administrators, guidance counselors, and social workers interacting with students on a daily basis; school board members and officials determining school policy; nonprofit advocates and providers of social services to youth; and academic scholars, graduate students, and researchers training the next generation of school administrators and informing future policy and practice.

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Not Alone

LGB Teachers Organizations from 1970 to 1985

Jason Mayernick

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Between 1970 and 1985, lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) educators publicly left their classroom closets, formed communities, and began advocating for a place of openness and safety for LGB people in America's schools. They fought for protection and representation in the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, as well as building community and advocacy in major gay and lesbian teacher organizations in New York, Los Angeles, and Northern California. In so doing, LGB teachers went from being a profoundly demonized and silenced population that suffered as symbolically emblematic of the harmful “bad teacher” to being an organized community of professionals deserving of rights, capable of speaking for themselves, and often able to reframe themselves as “good teachers.” This prescient book shows how LGB teachers and their allies broadened the boundaries of professionalism, negotiated for employment protection, and fought against political opponents who wanted them pushed out of America's schools altogether.

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Re/Orienting Writing Studies

Queer Methods, Queer Projects

William P. Banks

Utah State University Press, 2018

Re/Orienting Writing Studies is an exploration of the intersections among queer theory, rhetoric, and research methods in writing studies. Focusing careful theoretical attention on common research practices, this collection demonstrates how queer rhetorics of writing/composing, textual analysis, history, assessment, and embodiment/identity significantly alter both methods and methodologies in writing studies. The chapters represent a diverse set of research locations and experiences from which to articulate a new set of innovative research practices.

While the humanities have engaged queer theory extensively, research methods have often been hermeneutic or interpretive. At the same time, social science approaches in composition research have foregrounded inquiry on human participants but have often struggled to understand where lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people fit into empirical research projects. Re/Orienting Writing Studies works at the intersections of humanities and social science methodologies to offer new insight into using queer methods for data collection and queer practices for framing research.

Contributors: Chanon Adsanatham, Jean Bessette, Nicole I. Caswell, Michael J. Faris, Hillery Glasby, Deborah Kuzawa, Maria Novotny, G Patterson, Stacey Waite, Stephanie West-Puckett

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Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom

Zan Meyer Goncalves

Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Applying the complexities of literacy development and personal ethos to the teaching of composition, Zan Meyer Goncalves challenges writing teachers to consider ethos as a series of identity performances shaped by the often-inequitable social contexts of their classrooms and communities. Using the rhetorical experiences of students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender, she proposes a new way of thinking about ethos that addresses the challenges of social justice, identity, and transfer issues in the classroom.

Goncalves offers an innovative approach to teaching identity performance theory bound by social contexts. She applies this new approach to theories of specificity and intersectionality, illustrating how teachers can help students redefine the relationship between their social identities and their writing. She also addresses bringing social activism and identity politics into the classroom, helping writers make transfers across rhetorical contexts and linking students' interests to public conversations.

Theoretical and practical, Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom provides teachers of first-year and advanced composition studies with useful, detailed assignments based in specific identity performance. Goncalves offers techniques to subvert oppressive language practices, while encouraging students to recognize themselves as writers, citizens, and active participants in their own educations and communities.

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Sexuality in School

The Limits of Education

Jen Gilbert

University of Minnesota Press, 2014

From concerns over the bullying of LGBTQ youth and battles over sex education to the regulation of sexual activity and the affirmation of queer youth identity, sexuality saturates the school day. Rather than understand these conflicts as an interruption to the work of education, Jen Gilbert explores how sexuality comes to bear on and to enliven teaching and learning.

Gilbert investigates the breakdowns, clashes, and controversies that flare up when sexuality enters spaces of schooling. Education must contain the volatility of sexuality, Gilbert argues, and yet, when education seeks to limit the reach of sexuality, it risks shutting learning down. Gilbert penetrates this paradox by turning to fiction, film, legal case studies, and personal experiences. What, she asks, can we learn about school from a study of sexuality?

By examining the strange workings of sexuality in schools, Gilbert draws attention to the explosive but also compelling force of erotic life in teaching and learning. Ultimately, this book illustrates how the most intimate of our experiences can come to shape how we see and act in the world.

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