ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will examine how pedagogy informed by notions of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) can be manifested when teaching elementary English Language Arts. Specifically, I will look at what using a queer lens for reading children’s literature (Ryan and Hermann-Wilmarth, 2013) looks like when deployed in a 5th grade literature circle. Building on queer textual analyses of LGBTQ middle grades texts (Hermann-Wilmarth and Ryan, 2014, 2016), I explore the ways that I, the researcher and part-time co-teacher in the classroom, planned and implemented queer curriculum in an upper elementary classroom (Ryan and Hermann-Wilmarth, 2018). Subsequently, I focus on how one student, whose learning was contextualized by two years of English Language Arts curriculum that had an intentional focus on social justice, racism, and LGBTQ topics, considered the ways in which Jacqueline Woodson (2008) exposes silence from the hip hop community around gender and sexuality in her middle grades book After Tupac and D Foster.
