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. 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.

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 "gay agenda." 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.

This book's predecessor, Black Sons to Mothers: Compliments, Critiques, and Challenges for Cultural Workers in Education (Peter Lang, 2000), sparked a decade of meaningful scholarship on the educational experiences and academic outcomes of African American males. Black Sons to Mothers proffered seminal contributions to the academic literature on the achievement gap, differential instruction, and minority schooling, and inspired further research - countless books, articles and reports written since about the educational challenges and successes of African American males directly reference the work. Educating African American Males: Contexts for Consideration, Possibilities for Practice continues, extends, and advances the research and conversations introduced in Black Sons to Mothers. The chapters in this volume were commissioned by the Alphas in the Academy Committee (AAC) of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated. The AAC addresses issues incident to collegiate life, employment in higher education, and postsecondary performance among African American males. This book reflects the fraternity's unshakable commitment to improving the contexts and outcomes of African American males in educational settings, and identifies important new territory for the next decade of scholarship on this critical topic.

This book's predecessor, Black Sons to Mothers: Compliments, Critiques, and Challenges for Cultural Workers in Education (Peter Lang, 2000), sparked a decade of meaningful scholarship on the educational experiences and academic outcomes of African American males. Black Sons to Mothers proffered seminal contributions to the academic literature on the achievement gap, differential instruction, and minority schooling, and inspired further research - countless books, articles and reports written since about the educational challenges and successes of African American males directly reference the work. Educating African American Males: Contexts for Consideration, Possibilities for Practice continues, extends, and advances the research and conversations introduced in Black Sons to Mothers. The chapters in this volume were commissioned by the Alphas in the Academy Committee (AAC) of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated. The AAC addresses issues incident to collegiate life, employment in higher education, and postsecondary performance among African American males. This book reflects the fraternity's unshakable commitment to improving the contexts and outcomes of African American males in educational settings, and identifies important new territory for the next decade of scholarship on this critical topic.