Drawing on a larger year-long ethnography at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the Midwestern United States, this article describes the texts students composed in a co-taught sophomore (grade 10) humanities course combining social studies and English language arts. Bringing together sociocultural perspectives on literacy and…

Drawing on ethnographic research in an urban high school in the USA, this article highlights how schooling structures and practices produce and reinforce an ideology of heteronormative binary gender. The construction of gender and sexuality occurs in systematic ways, shaped through structural forces and mapped onto social spaces and bodies. Yet,…

This paper focuses on Luan's race performances both on the web and in classroom interaction. Luan is a black young man, who identifies himself as gay. The study is part of a multi-sited ethnographic piece of research on a group of high-school students in the state sector, in the "periphery" of a town on the Rio de Janeiro State north…

This paper examines the work of a gay-straight alliance and the ways in which members use elements of queer theory to understand their own and others' identities, both to make sense of their experiences and to support their activist efforts. The analysis identifies queer perspectives on gender and sexual identity as useful tools for supporting…

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a 13-week Gay and Lesbian Literature course, this paper explores how a high-school teacher and her students engaged with queer-themed literature. Focused on episodes around the class' engagement with two of the novels read in the course--Rita Mae Brown's "Rubyfruit Jungle" and Michael Cunningham's…

This article offers insights on how students experienced and made sense of their learning in a trimester-long high school Gay and Lesbian Literature course. Drawing on questionnaires and interviews that the students completed as part of a larger ethnographic study of this class, the author shows how a queer-themed literature curriculum is relevant…

This study was concerned with an examination of the heteropatriarchy as it was performed by six self-identified heterosexual male English teachers and two high school administrators in the United States and Canada. These educators explained their efforts regarding their own thinking about identity and curriculum and their attempts to teach a…

Purpose: Previous research examining the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) youth in schools suggests that schools are not inclusive places for non-heterosexual students. Some scholars, however, suggest that a continued focus on how these young people are marginalised is itself a problem, and that research should also…

Using an ecological model, the individual-, school-, and sociocultural-level characteristics that affect gay-straight alliance (GSA) advisors were examined in the current study. The formation of GSAs has been one way that schools have sought to improve the school climate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth. Limited information…

This ethnographic study of a high school gay-straight alliance club examines unintended consequences of silence during the Day of Silence, a day of action aimed at addressing anti-LGBTQ bias in schools. While this strategy calls for students to engage in intentional silences to raise awareness of anti-LGBTQ bias, it does not necessarily lead…

This qualitative study used critical ethnography as a theoretical framework to investigate the social coping strategies of gifted and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students in middle and high school. Twelve LGBTQ college students from a selective Southeastern university were interviewed and asked to retrospectively…

This autoethnographic inquiry and resultant performative text examine individual choice in the formation of public and private identities. Central is the significant developmental role that socialization plays in the natural process by which biologically similar organisms establish unique perspectives: identity, specifically, the emergence of a…

Critical pedagogy, combined with partnerships with adults at school, enabled the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) advisor to create the foundation for reflective, activist-oriented learning at one Midwestern high school. Underreported in current literature, the use of critical pedagogy in school clubs and/or organizations has broad implications for…

The purpose of this critical ethnographic study is to provide an account from within a public school of some of the ways that heterosexist discourses and silences are reproduced and challenged. As a classroom teacher and critical ethnographer, I conducted this research with straight-identified high school students as they came to understand,…

Drawing on a larger ethnographic study of four high school young men, this paper foregrounds high school male-male friendships as a context for examining how heterosexism and homophobia operate to limit and delimit the ways masculinities are constructed. I begin this article by first highlighting an inconsistency between recent school initiatives…