Queer, Trans, and Intersectional Theory in Educational Practice - (Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Educat)

About the Book

Offering an examination of educational approaches to promote justice, this volume demonstrates the necessity for keeping race, ethnicity, class, language, and other diversities at the core of pedagogical strategies and theories that address queer, trans, gender nonbinary and related issues.

Book Synopsis

Offering an examination of educational approaches to promote justice, this volume demonstrates the necessity for keeping race, ethnicity, class, language, and other diversities at the core of pedagogical strategies and theories that address queer, trans, gender nonbinary and related issues.

Queer theory, trans theory, and intersectional theory have all sought to describe, create, and foster a sense of complex subjectivity and community, insisting on relationality and complexity as concepts and communities shift and change. Each theory has addressed exclusions from dominant practices and encouraged a sense of connection across struggles. This collection brings these crucial theories together to inform pedagogies across a wide array of contexts of formal education and community-based educational settings. Seeking to push at the edges of how we teach and learn across subjectivities and communities, authors in this volume show that theories inform practice and practice informs theory--but this takes careful attention, reflexivity, and commitment.

This scholarly text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, teachers, libraries and policy makers in the field of Gender and Sexuality in Education, LGBTQ studies, Multicultural Education and Sociology of Education.

Review Quotes

With this book, we dive deeply into the contradictions, impossibilities, and unpredictable outcomes of pedagogy and advocacy that surface when engaging queer, trans, and intersectional theories and lenses, and it is exactly these "misses and connections" that make educational work politically generative, even if emotionally fraught, especially for those of us who think we already do anti-oppressive work. Mollie Blackburn, Cris Mayo, and colleagues offer analyses of refreshingly original and creative classroom, community, and cultural interventions that give us pause as they illuminate, inquire, inspire, and undoubtedly, as they queer your own approach, your very vision for justice in education.

-Kevin Kumashiro is Assistant Professor at Bates College in Lewiston, USA and author of Troubling Education: "Queer" Activism and Antioppressive Pedagogy.

Queer, Trans, and Intersectional Theory in Educational Practice: Student, Teacher, and Community Experiences is a ground-breaking collection. Each chapter weaves together intersectional, queer, and trans theories of education in order to imagine classrooms that welcome, cultivate, and think difference as the grounds of learning. Accessible, practical, and provocative--this collection will be indispensable to educational researchers from K-12 to college and university who want to infuse their practice with the insights of queer, trans, and intersectional theories.

- Jen Gilbert is Associate Professor at Faculty of Education, York University, Cannada.

Neoliberal assaults on educational spaces have intensified the enforcement of scripted and decontextualized approaches to teaching and learning, the anti-intellectual dismissal of theory's importance to pedagogy, and the surveillance of difference and dissent as disruptive pedagogical forces. Blackburn and Mayo's edited collection reclaims the transformative possibilities of educational practice by re-centering theory, difference, and disruption despite (and because) of mandates to the contrary. The chapters in this collection embrace the legacy of outlaw pedagogies -- works that defy the constraints of what is allowable in order to expand the boundaries of what is imaginable.

- Ed Brockenbrough is Associate Professor and Calvin Bland Fellow at Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, USA.

About the Author

Cris Mayo is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at West Virginia University, US.

Mollie V. Blackburn is Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Ecology at the Ohio State University, US.