This article explores how a queer-led online book club supported straight teachers in finding ways to enact LGBTQIA+-inclusive literacy pedagogy.

This interview shares the groundbreaking and optimistic vision of Drs. Jill Hermann-Wilmarth and Caitlin L. Ryan for expanding literacies to include the lives and issues of LGBTQIA+ people in elementary school language arts classrooms.

In this chapter, the authors share the history of a video capture and annotation technology (VCAT) implementation and provide summaries of research findings to support its continued use and refinement. They also detail the multiple uses and particular objectives they aimed to meet with the technology across different content areas and even across multiple educator preparation programs, including a collaboration between a teacher education program and principal preparation program that was enabled by the technology.

One of the most common responses from pre- and in-service teachers related to addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) topics in elementary school is a concern about parents' responses. This article explores these concerns by examining two elementary school teachers' interactions with parents in relation to their LGBTQ-inclusive teaching. This article provides a possible road map for other teachers who are nervous about parental responses to LGBTQ-inclusive teaching and interrupts notions that negative responses from parents are reason enough to avoid including these topics in elementary classrooms.

Reading LGBTQ-inclusive books and discussing issues of power, justice, and fairness can make full-class read-alouds a space for meaningful social justice work with students.

Using authoethnography, the authors analyze how queerphobia and cis/heterosexism shape their research process regarding (LGBTQ)-inclusive empirical work in elementary school spaces. With examples from their own experiences, they show how queerphobic gatekeeping affects site access, negotiations required during data collection, and dissemination of the results to others. The authors argue that, taken together, these forces complicate - if not outright prevent - empirical, school-based research with young children, thereby artificially constraining the knowledge base of the field related to LGBTQ-inclusive education. They offer these analyses as affirmations to those facing similar challenges and as education to those in positions of power to change perceptions of, support of, and responses to queer, school-based educational research.

Studies of adults who experienced sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) have documented a range of health risks. To date, there is little research on SOCE among adolescents and no known studies of parents' role related to SOCE with adolescents. In a cross-sectional study of 245 LGBT White and Latino young adults (ages 21-25), we measured parent-initiated SOCE during adolescence and its relationship to mental health and adjustment in young adulthood. Measures include being sent to therapists and religious leaders for conversion interventions as well as parental/caregiver efforts to change their child's sexual orientation during adolescence. Attempts by parents/caregivers and being sent to therapists and religious leaders for conversion interventions were associated with depression, suicidal thoughts, suicidal attempts, less educational attainment, and less weekly income. Associations between SOCE, health, and adjustment were much stronger and more frequent for those reporting both attempts by parents and being sent to therapists and religious leaders, underscoring the need for parental education and guidance.

Little is known about how adolescents cope with minority stressors related to sexual orientation. This study examined 245 lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) young adult's (ages 21-25) retrospective reports of coping in response to LGB minority stress during adolescence (ages 13-19) to test the reliability and validity of a measure of minority stress coping. Further, the study examined associations between LGB minority stress coping and young adult psychosocial adjustment and high school attainment. Validation and reliability was found for three minority stress coping strategies: LGB-specific strategies (e.g., involvement with LGBT organizations), alternative-seeking strategies (e.g., finding new friends), and cognitive strategies (e.g., imagining a better future). LGB-specific strategies were associated with better psychosocial adjustment and greater likelihood of high school attainment in young adulthood, whereas alternative-seeking and cognitive-based strategies were associated with poorer adjustment and less likelihood of high school attainment.

In this paper, we explore the intersection of critical literacy pedagogy, queer pedagogy, and transgender topics by turning our attention to the learning that supported the writing of an acrostic poem about Title IX and transgender students. We examine how this writing, in turn, created additional content and context that spurred others' learning. We examine this particular poem because of the ways it demonstrates how a 4th grade student drew on three overarching components of the classroom's instructional context to support its production: the critical literacy pedagogy present in the class, exposure to transgender topics, and the importance of situating students as expert teachers for an authentic audience.

This descriptive content analysis of Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer examines the ways in which Delphine, the African American female main character, is represented throughout the novel as she navigates the challenges she faces as a tween Black girl in the midst of the Black Panthers movement. Delphine’s story fills a gap in children’s literature that fails to focus on the experiences of tween black girls, particularly girls who work to enact change and agency throughout their community. This analysis of Williams-Garcia’s award-winning work examines the spaces “between” young girls’ adult influences, their geographical locations, and their understanding of what it means to be Black. For Delphine, navigating these components means learning from others while finding a way to “make and remake” her own Black girl power and Black girl magic even in the midst of change, uncertainty, and societal power structures.

In this paper, we consider the limited chapter book options with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) characters available for upper elementary readers. While these texts all include one or more LGBT character(s), the overall representations of LGBT people and issues highlight particular normative identities and silence others. We are concerned that these representations reify neoliberal ideas about sexuality's relationship to race and class, and encourage gay assimilation into normative but problematic, nonequitable institutions. Yet we also believe that an analysis of books focusing only on representations of LGBT characters' identities limits the queer potential of texts. Therefore, in addition to looking at representations within these books, we also consider how a second look at these books through a queer lens can help disrupt normative representations of a range of identity categories. We undertake this dual analysis for several purposes: (1) to find and review LGBT-inclusive chapter books available for pre-YA (young adult) readers, (2) to analyze gaps in this corpus of literature so as to push back against normativizing frameworks, and (3) to show how bringing queer critique and analysis of such texts can be used to deconstruct and diversify representations of LGBT people and families until/in addition to the publication of additional and more diverse texts.

This study investigated the sex education experiences of adults with visual impairments who attended either an itinerant or residential service delivery model during their school age years in the United States. We sought to answer the research questions through an online survey instrument that included quantifiable survey items. Findings demonstrate particular sex education content presented to participants in the school curriculum was more frequent for participants who attended residential schools. However, there were little or no meaningful methods or materials (e.g., role plays, explicit talk, tactile graphics, electronic materials, anatomically correct models) used by the participants in their sex education experiences regardless of their educational school setting. The information reported by participants in this study underscores the claim that more thorough and in-depth sex education is needed in all types of service delivery models that takes into account the needs of students with visual impairments.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth and young adults are known to have compromised physical and mental health, and family rejection has been found to be an important risk factor. Yet few studies have examined the positive role that support from parents, friends, and the community have for LGBT young adults. In a cross‐sectional study of 245 LGBT non‐Latino White and Latino young adults (ages 21–25) in the United States, sexuality‐related social support was examined in association with measures of adjustment in young adulthood. Family, friend, and community support were strong predictors of positive outcomes, including life situation, self‐esteem, and LGBT esteem. However, family acceptance had the strongest overall influence when other forms of support were considered. Implications for the unique and concurrent forms of social support for LGBT youth and young adult adjustment are discussed.

In this column, using a range of theoretical and pedagogical tools, the authors highlight how classroom teachers might make use of multiple approaches to addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) topics in their variously situated classrooms. Specifically, they outline three approaches to addressing LGBT topics through literature, each with its own benefits, drawbacks, possibilities, and risks—including books with LGBT characters, reading “straight” books through a “queer lens,” and queering LGBT-inclusive books. In these ways, the authors hope to help teachers shift the conversation away from what they think they can’t do to what they could do. They want to move teachers from considering if they can include particular lessons or particular texts in their instruction to how they might find multiple, even creative, ways to address the larger systems that enable homophobia and heterosexism in the first place.