Teaching Queer‐Inclusive English Language Arts

Abstract

The authors argue for teaching queer‐inclusive English language arts (ELA). They report on a study that surveyed high school personnel across the United States, revealing that very few people in charge of ELA curricula value such inclusion. In response to these findings, the authors offer “images of the possible” in which texts and methods that could be used in queer‐inclusive ELA curricula are suggested. They advocate for teaching ELA that represents diverse people, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning, in a range of positionalities, as both insiders and outsiders in various texts. Such a curriculum is one way for all high school students to experience themselves amid “otherness,” or to experience the “other” in their midst. It is the vehicle for, and the echo of, a varied and varying society—a thesis‐antithesis dialectic that eschews synthesis. In order to accomplish this, teachers must educate students to examine and experience the multiple and mutable constituents of identity and culture, of which sexuality is a critical, but hardly constant, constituent.