Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Queering Elementary Education is not about teaching kids to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight. It's not part of a sinister stratagem in the Ogay agenda.O Instead, these provocative and thoughtful essays advocate the creation of classrooms that challenge categorical thinking, promote interpersonal intelligence, and foster critical consciousness. Queer elementary classrooms are those where parents and educators care enough about their children to trust the human capacity for understanding and their educative abilities to foster insight into the human condition. Those who teach queerly refuse to participate in the great sexual sorting machine called schooling where diminutive GI Joes and Barbies become star quarterbacks and prom queens, while the Linuses and Tinky Winkies become wallflowers or human doormats. Queeering education means bracketing our simplest classroom activities in which we routinely equate sexual identities with sexual acts, privilege the heterosexual condition, and presume sexual destinies. Queer teachers are those who develop curriculum and pedagogy that afford every child dignity rooted in self-worth and esteem for others. In short, queering education happens when we look at schooling upside down and view childhood from the inside out. This groundbreaking volume demands we explore taken-for-granted assumptions about diversity, identities, childhood, and prejudice.
Synopsis
Queering Elementary Education is not about teaching kids to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight. ItOs not part of a sinister stratagem in the Ogay agenda.O Instead, these provocative and thoughtful essays advocate the creation of classrooms that challenge categorical thinking, promote interpersonal intelligence, and foster critical consciousness.
Editorials
CHOICE
Queering Elementary Education is a must-read for all teachers and, perhaps more importantly, for preservice teachers. It is a smart, clearly written collection of essays exploring the complex interactions of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. . . . Begins to map out some solutions to the homophobia in American schools.— M. J. Carbone, Muhlenberg College
Gay Today
Probably no other title in the pantheon of liberationists literature will evoke more controversy than Queering Elementary Education.Queering Elementary Education is the first carefully constructed work written for educators who are ever on the front lines in the worldwide struggle to eliminate prejudices born of societal ignorance.
This extraordinary book was conceived in the summer of 1997 when its editors envisioned what one of them, William J. Letts, IV called: 'a project that would take into account the lifeworlds of children, their families, their teachers, and their schools.'
— Jack Nichols