Queers Teach This! - (Radical Politics and Education) by Adam J Greteman (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In this open access book, philosopher of education Adam Greteman offers commentary on five lessons queers teach: transparency, inconvenience, others, hatred, and coming into. Intentionally idiosyncratic, each of these lessons takes seriously the work of teaching, the work of teachers, and the complex realities that unfold around LGBTQ+ issues and lives as they enter educational conversations. These conversations are conditioned by contexts and communities that make bold proclamations difficult, but also point toward possibilities rooted in specifics. Combined, these five lessons provide commentary on an educational project that forefronts queers and their practices amid complex and changing realities. Recognizing the mutual importance of theory and practices, each chapter tacks between practical concerns that are part of education as it exists day to day and theoretical insights that intertwine and intervene in those everyday practical realities.Yet, Greteman offers no prescriptions for teaching, nor an overarching theory. Rather, Greteman takes up each "this" that queers teach so to offer commentary that may provide opportunities for further engagement with ongoing needs that schools, teachers, students, and communities have in their impossible work. Queers teach. These lessons are never ending yet vital to not only queer's surviving in schools, but encountering an education that aids in their thriving alongside others.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Review Quotes

Queers Teach This!is a call to arms like no other. Compassionate, wise, inclusive, but also fearless and tough in all the ways the world demands of queer youth and their educators. That is, all of us. With his elevation of commentary as a form of community building, Greteman is to education theory what Eve Sedgwick is to queer theory. Someone whose humility and strength of purpose cuts through the vanities of the field in pursuit of something worth holding on to: a sense of care and a brightness of thought that honours the occasion of shared learning wherever it may occur.

This book is breathtaking. Like Jen Gilbert's Sexuality inSchoola decade ago, this book finds Greteman offering some of the most inspired tours through the history of queer theory, including very "difficult" queer theory, in a way that never loses touch with the questions, lives, and vocabularies of teachers and students working in the messiness and inconvenience of educational sites (primarily but not only schools).

About the Author

Adam J. Greteman is Assistant Professor of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. He is the author of Sexualities and Genders in Education: Toward Queer Thriving (2018) and the co-author of The Pedagogies and Politics of Liking (2017).