Colgate Classroom Session: Queering Education

LGBTQ youth have traditionally been marginalized in schools. K-12 education offers few curricular and institutional spaces where queer identities are affirmed and queer voices are heard. From sex education to the prom, most schools and educators operate under the ahistorical guise of heteronormativity–a term used to describe ideologies and practices that organize and privilege opposite-sex gender relations and normative gender and sexual identities. Using critical lenses developed by queer and feminist theorists and critical pedagogues, this course seeks both to explore how heteronormativity operates in a variety of educational spaces and how students and educators are confronting these processes by using schools as sites of resistance.