Dear Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, And Transgender Teacher: Letters Of Advice To Help You Find Your Way is full of the voices of queer educators and calls for educational leaders to be allies in their social justice leadership roles. Queer professionals write personal letters to junior queer colleagues answering the general prompt, "What have you learned as a queer educator that you believe is essential to the success of current or future gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered educators?" The responses are thoughtful, powerful, poignant, and direct. The collection of letters includes senior queer professionals, pre?service teachers who were currently in university courses at the very beginning of their careers, PreK?12 professionals at the beginning, middle, and end of their careers, administrators, counselors, teacher?educators at the university level, community educational leaders, lawyers, and heterosexual allies. There are early childhood teachers, elementary teachers, middle school and high school teachers representing nearly every content area, special education teachers, GSA (Gay Straight Alliance) leaders, school counselors, university professors of education across various fields of specialization, and activists. There are many races and ethnicities represented as well as eight countries. There are rural professionals and urban professionals. There are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered educators represented. This group of letters represents the intersectionality of queerness in all of its rich splendor.

Frustrated by the challenge of opening teacher education students to a genuine understanding of the social justice concepts vital for creating an equitable learning environment? Do your students ever resist accepting that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer people experience bias or oppression, or that their experiences even belong in a conversation about "diversity," "multiculturalism," or "social justice?" Recognising these are common experiences for teacher educators, the contributors to this book present their struggles and achievements in developing approaches that have successfully guided students to complex understandings of such threshold concepts as White privilege, homophobia, and heteronormativity, overcoming the "bottlenecks" that impede progress toward bigger learning goals and understandings. The authors initiate a conversation - one largely absent in the social justice education literature and the discourse - about the common content- and pedagogy-related challenges that social justice educators face in their work, particularly for those doing this work in relative or literal isolation, where collegial understanding cannot be found down the hall or around the corner. In doing so they hope not only to help individual teachers in their practice, but also strengthen social justice teacher education more systemically. Each contributor identifies a learning bottleneck related to one or two specific threshold concepts that they have struggled to help their students learn. Each chapter is a narrative about individual efforts toward sometimes profound pedagogical adjustment, about ambiguity and cognitive dissonance and resistance, about trial and error, and about how these educators found ways to facilitate foundational social justice learning among a diversity of education students. Although this is not intended to be a "how-to" manual, or to provide five easy steps to enable straight students to "get" heteronormativity, each chapter does describe practical strategies that teachers might adapt as part of their own practice.

Frustrated by the challenge of opening teacher education students to a genuine understanding of the social justice concepts vital for creating an equitable learning environment? Do your students ever resist accepting that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer people experience bias or oppression, or that their experiences even belong in a conversation about "diversity," "multiculturalism," or "social justice?" Recognising these are common experiences for teacher educators, the contributors to this book present their struggles and achievements in developing approaches that have successfully guided students to complex understandings of such threshold concepts as White privilege, homophobia, and heteronormativity, overcoming the "bottlenecks" that impede progress toward bigger learning goals and understandings. The authors initiate a conversation - one largely absent in the social justice education literature and the discourse - about the common content- and pedagogy-related challenges that social justice educators face in their work, particularly for those doing this work in relative or literal isolation, where collegial understanding cannot be found down the hall or around the corner. In doing so they hope not only to help individual teachers in their practice, but also strengthen social justice teacher education more systemically. Each contributor identifies a learning bottleneck related to one or two specific threshold concepts that they have struggled to help their students learn. Each chapter is a narrative about individual efforts toward sometimes profound pedagogical adjustment, about ambiguity and cognitive dissonance and resistance, about trial and error, and about how these educators found ways to facilitate foundational social justice learning among a diversity of education students. Although this is not intended to be a "how-to" manual, or to provide five easy steps to enable straight students to "get" heteronormativity, each chapter does describe practical strategies that teachers might adapt as part of their own practice.

This volume is an attempt to serve as a venue for giving a voice to queer people from all faiths and no faiths to describe how they negotiate or have negotiated spiritual violence in their lives, as well as the voices of heterosexual allies who strive for the inclusion of queer people as a counter narrative to spiritual violence of full inclusion and embracement and demonstrate that some communities of faith do not operate from paradigms of violence, but instead operate with love, affirmation, and inclusion. These counter narratives are important. This volume is a collection of narratives that describe a variety of experiences - stories of pain and rejection, joy, and overcoming and transformation. The voices of the authors in this collection are a mixture of personal narratives, theoretical or academic thought, and because art and spirituality often go hand-in-hand, some of the authors offer the reader more creative writing that reflects their ideas.

This volume is an attempt to serve as a venue for giving a voice to queer people from all faiths and no faiths to describe how they negotiate or have negotiated spiritual violence in their lives, as well as the voices of heterosexual allies who strive for the inclusion of queer people as a counter narrative to spiritual violence of full inclusion and embracement and demonstrate that some communities of faith do not operate from paradigms of violence, but instead operate with love, affirmation, and inclusion. These counter narratives are important. This volume is a collection of narratives that describe a variety of experiences - stories of pain and rejection, joy, and overcoming and transformation. The voices of the authors in this collection are a mixture of personal narratives, theoretical or academic thought, and because art and spirituality often go hand-in-hand, some of the authors offer the reader more creative writing that reflects their ideas.

Dear Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, And Transgender Teacher: Letters Of Advice To Help You Find Your Way is full of the voices of queer educators and calls for educational leaders to be allies in their social justice leadership roles. Queer professionals write personal letters to junior queer colleagues answering the general prompt, "What have you learned as a queer educator that you believe is essential to the success of current or future gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered educators?" The responses are thoughtful, powerful, poignant, and direct. The collection of letters includes senior queer professionals, pre?service teachers who were currently in university courses at the very beginning of their careers, PreK?12 professionals at the beginning, middle, and end of their careers, administrators, counselors, teacher?educators at the university level, community educational leaders, lawyers, and heterosexual allies. There are early childhood teachers, elementary teachers, middle school and high school teachers representing nearly every content area, special education teachers, GSA (Gay Straight Alliance) leaders, school counselors, university professors of education across various fields of specialization, and activists. There are many races and ethnicities represented as well as eight countries. There are rural professionals and urban professionals. There are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered educators represented. This group of letters represents the intersectionality of queerness in all of its rich splendor.