An excerpt from:
Book Review - Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue about Sexualities in Schooling
Progressive Perspectives
Vol. 4, No. 1, John Dewey Project on Progressive Education, Spring 2002
College of Education and Social Services, University of Vermont
"Queering Elementary Education is unique because as it's title suggests it does not apologize for the stance that it takes, nor does it wallow in the problems of being homosexual in a heterosexist society. It is a book all educators should read whether they are elementary school teachers, administrators, or college professors. It challenges assumptions about how we view education and how we view caring for children. Edited by William J. Letts IV and James T. Sears, it offers many perspectives on the various aspects of elementary education and the myriad ways it is heterosexist.
In the first chapter James T. Sears proposes several ideas that appear throughout the book: speaking the unspoken by teaching about queer issues in elementary school, homosexuality as part of the human condition, and asserting that heterosexism and homophobia are acquired or learned beliefs. Bickmore asks, "why discuss sexuality in elementary school?” and answers “given the amount of (mis)information about gender relations and sexuality that flows freely these days in public spaces, media and peer groups, elementary educators could not prevent children from acquiring sexual information even if they wanted to do so"(p. 15). These concepts as well as others are discussed in various ways throughout the book..."
An excerpt from:
Queering Elementary Education - Book Review By Jack Nichols, GayToday.com
"Probably no other title in the pantheon of liberationist literature will evoke more controversy than Queering Elementary Education. If there was an unseemly uproar over Daddy's Roommate and Heather Has Two Mommies, just wait till the Religious Reich spies this august tome on some thoughtful teacher's shelf.
Its editors, both educators, have provided what some see as a companion volume to the award-winning film, It's Elementary. They take it for granted that children in the earliest grades have already been introduced "through schoolyard and media" to the concept of same sex love and affection, that most remain confused about it and that it is best to begin demystification processes early in life rather than allowing mistaken perceptions to take root.
It's Elementary's producer, Debra Chasnof, exults: "What a relief to finally have such a thoughtful collection of essays and research to back up what we've found in schools across the nation... an examination of the ways children's lives are hurt by homophobia and an inspiring array of strategies educators can use to turn this problem around."...
The American Pediatric Association recently called for the teaching of sexuality to begin by the middle of elementary school. Dr. Sears requests that Queering readers remember that "by the time boys and girls have become teenagers they have well-developed gender and sexual scripts: how boys and girls should behave, who makes up a family, and so on. These become our cultural straightjackets that cultivate the homophobia and sexism we see in the adult world."
( EdReform's note: the pro-homosexual activism in the American Academy of Pediatrics is documented in reply 284 in this thread )
"Rather than focussing on reducing such prejudices, shouldn't we consider how not to instill, foster, or intensify these prejudices in the first place?" he asks. Queering Elementary Education begins with "Foundational Issues" answering queries such as "Why Discuss Sexuality in Elementary School?".
The book's second section deals with children's sexual and social development, including supposed effects of being taught by openly gay teachers. Part three looks at possible curriculums, examining and critiquing the "heteronormative nature of elementary school science." Part four deals with family ties while the final section examines educators and their allies..."
Here are some excerpts from Queering Elementary Education that were posted in reply 16 in the thread Congress Needs to Hear From Public re:Marriage Amendment:
In one chapter, a woman describes how she and her male lover have raised their daughter "queerly" by taking her to "gay pride" parades and teaching her the intricacies of masturbation while she is still a young child.tuesday afternoon: Is that actually in the book? It totally blows my mind that would be in a book about educating children.
It is indeed in the book, and it doesn't even scratch the surface of the way that daughter has been raised. However, I have to tell you, the stories that unmarried, 'identified as heterosexual' Australian sociologist Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli tells about her biological daughter Stephanie are difficult to believe. Even if the essence of the accounts are true, I have never heard of a 1st grade child who was so well-versed in psychosocial pretzel logic.
Nevertheless, here are excerpts from chapter 7 (page 71) of Queering Elementary Education, "My Moving Days": A Child's Negotiation of Multiple Lifeworlds in Relation to Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality." (Bold and bracketed text is mine; Italics apparently are from Pallotta-Chiarolli's previously published works.)
...[O]ur child is "queerly raised." She travels within and between multicultural and multisexual world as well as undertaking geographical journeys: to and from Adelaide, where she was born, raised principally by Italian migrant grandparents while we worked full time,...to and from Sydney, where her father lived for two years while she was three and four and where she attends queer events with her parents' friends; and to and from Melbourne, where her father is now primary care-giver supported by a network of multicultural and multisexual friends as my work takes her away at regular intervals....To be "queerly raised" is to interrogate the taken-for-grantedness of such fixed categories and the way society divides people into "normal" and "abnormal," "natural" and "unnatural," according to their locations in these categories...[it is] to thrive in the destabilization and disruption of normalizing discourses of family, gender, and compulsory heterosexuality. It is an upbringing that encourages stability in mobility, security in change, clarity in ambiguity.
...this chapter explores the kinds of understandings, negotiations, and dilemmas "queerly raised" children experience...For example...How does a child respond to AIDS phobia at school when HIV-positive persons, and griveing over AIDS-related deaths, have been a part of one's life since birth?
Here is an excerpt from Steph's story [for show-and-tell] entitled "My Moving Days":
[Stephanie] interrogates defintions of Truth, Reality, Purity, and Identity constructed by dominant social discourses, thereby revealing the Truths, Realities, Impurities, and Identities that these discourses say do not exist at all or exist only in forms they can control and distort as being "wrong" or "strange."
I go to Sydney sometimes especially at Mardi Gras time and have fun with Mum and her friends. We go to interesting shops and restaurants. I was in the Mardi Gras one year pretending to be Alan and Malcolm's daughter. I wore my purple fairy costume and waved a wand and the gay flag. Lots of people took pictures and I was on the news...I love my life. It's exciting.
..."Queerly raised" children are agents. People are, and always have been, active agents in the constitution of their unfolding social worlds...Their personal world is "an emergent, situated, negotiated one where considerable variation becomes possible."
Getting ready for school one morning, seven-year old Steph asks, "What's artificial insemination?"I ask, "Were you interested in what Uncle Matteo was saying last night?" I had been chatting to a gay Italian friend, Matteo about his daughter, a baby he'd had with a lesbian and his plans to have another. Steph had been sitting with us silently listening.
Steph nods. "If they don't have sex, how can they have babies, that's all I wanted to know, really. At school we learned that it takes a man and woman who are married to each other to have a baby, but Uncle Matteo is gay and he isn't married. But I know he's had a baby."
I explain how many gays and lesbians are now becoming parents without having sex with each other. And this leads to a chat about women's decisions about having sex and babies, and that leads on to how women should never let anyone explain their sexuality. And this leads to a conversation about what else was missing from the "sex education" lessons in school -- the clitoris! We talk about the book Steph has at home showing where the clitoris is. The question comes: "But why didn't they show it in the book at school? I looked for it but the teacher acted like nothing was there. I know it's there." Steph has been taught that it is the clitoris that gives her pleasure when she masturbates.
Steph picks up her schoolbag. She's ready for another day at school, and as we head out the door, she says with a scornful snort, "They don't say all the truth at school but I know it anyway."
...A "queerly raised" child can "travel" between these "worlds" and inhabit more than one of these worlds at the very same time.
When Steph [was] three, I am tucking her into bed one evening and am about to read her a children's version of The Swiss Family Robinson. "No, I'll read it to you," Steph says, which means she'll tell the story through the pictures.There is one picture where the parents stand in the middle of their sons, one son next to his father, and two, with arms around each other's shoulders, next to their mother. Steph describes the family, pointing to the people as she goes: "This is the father. This is the first son," pointing to the boy on his own. "This is the second son" -- and then to the third son next to his brother -- "and this is the second son's boyfriend."
...Steph's writing and experiences of agency exemplify children's great potential to demonstrate and transcend categorical limitations, oppressions, and the splitting of concurrent realities inherent in the heteronormative, Anglocentric, and phallocentric need to homogenize, categorize, and simplify...
One evening, as we wait for [now ten year old] Steph's computing class to begin, three girls around twelve years old come cheerily in to collect some material for their next class. They look confident and speak assertively, arms and hair swinging. I notice Steph has taken my hand and is squeezing it.I look across and notice a faint shy blush on her ace. "What's up, Steph?"
Steph is still staring at the girls. She whispers, "Which one do you like?"
"All of them. They look like nice, smart young women."
Steph persist (sic). "No! I mean, which one do you like?"
"Which one do you like, sweetie?"
Steph nods her head toward the long-haired girl in jeans and T-shirt who's doing most of the questioning in articulate computer-speak. "Do you like her too?"
"Yes, I do," I reply.
Steph smiles slightly, pleased, still not taking her eyes off the girl.
"What're you feeling, Steph?"
Steph smiles shyly. She shrugs and looks at me with embarrassment. I squeeze her hand. "It's okay, Steph. She's gorgeous, and if you think that, that's fine. Enjoy those feelings, there's nothing wrong with them."
In the meantime, Steph also has crushes on two boys. Getting out of the car one afternoon with a friend who's come to play, she looks at the houses across the street and declares, "I wish Peter and Anthony lived there. Then I could see both of them."
Her friend looks scornfully at her. "You can only love one person."
"Who says?"
"That's the way it is. Unless you're a lesbian."
"If I was a lesbian, I'd want Peter and Anthony to be girls. Anyway, maybe I'll love no one. Maybe I'll love girls or boys, or both. Maybe lots of both!" And she laughs cheekily as her friend remonstrates.
...As I write this chapter...[o]ne of Steph's friends, a girl in her early teens, has now confieded to Steph and to us that she thinks she is a lesbian. She can't tell her own parents, she says. She can't tell anyone else at school. Steph has now become her confidante, and we can hear them chat into the night during sleepovers...
An excerpt from 'Queering the Schools':
"... As for teaching aids, a 1999 book, Queering Elementary Education, with a foreword by GLSEN executive director Kevin Jennings, offers essays on “Locating a Place for Gay and Lesbian Themes in Elementary Reading, Writing and Talking” and “How to Make ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ in the Classroom”—the scare quotes showing the queer theorist’s ever present belief that categorizing gender is a political act...
Two videos come particularly highly rated by gay activists and educators as tools for making primary school queer-friendly. Both films strive to present homosexuality in a favorable light, without saying what it actually is. It’s Elementary, intended for parents, educators, and policymakers, shows how classroom teachers can lead kindergartners through carefully circumscribed discussions of the evils of prejudice, portrayed as visited to an unusual degree on gays and lesbians. In That’s a Family, designed for classroom use, children speak directly into the camera, explaining to other kids how having gay and lesbian parents is no different from, for example, having parents of different national backgrounds.
GLSEN even provides lesson plans for the promotion of cross-dressing in elementary school classes. A school resource book containing such lesson plans, Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry for Kids, Parents, and Teachers, has already been used in second-grade classrooms in California. A children’s play in the book features a little boy singing of the exhilaration of striding about “In Mommy’s High Heels,” in angry defiance of the criticism of his intolerant peers:
They are the swine, I am the pearl. . . .
They’ll be beheaded when I’m queen!
When I rule the world! When I rule the world!
When I rule the world in my mommy’s high heels!..."
Related replies posted in this thread: 55, 141, 147, 152, 155, 161, 163, 188, 216, 256, 266, and 271.