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Background: This study took place within a policy context in which the state of Ohio, echoing moves across the country, adopted a set of K-12 Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) standards based in the work of the Collaborative for Academic and Social Emotional Learning (CASEL) and its core competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. As one of the first states to make such standards part of the state reporting system for school progress, and considering recent critiques of the hegemonic, normative impacts of SEL, we engaged in a systematic analysis of these standards to consider how they affect and further exacerbate the systemic oppressions experienced by multiply-marginalized people in schools. Purpose: This article reports on the normative assumptions in the Ohio SEL standards, using critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the DisCrit tenets to engage in an ethical critique of the real and potential social effects of these standards. Situating these standards relative to existing scholarship on race and dis/abilities in school, we show how the Ohio SEL standards and the CASEL competencies ignore racism, ableism, and other oppressions; privilege civility over productive conflict; and focus on behaviors over emotions, especially when expressed by Black, Brown, dis/abled, and queer people. Research Design: This is a qualitative study whose data were derived from an analysis of the Ohio K-12 Social and Emotional Learning Standards and the CASEL core competencies. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our ethical critique of the Ohio K-12 SEL standards and CASEL core competencies demonstrates how benign acquiescence to their expressed assumptions may negatively affect the experiences of multiply-marginalized people in schools. By ignoring racism, ableism, and other oppressions; privileging civility over productive conflict; and focusing on behaviors over emotions, especially when expressed by Black, Brown, dis/abled, and queer people, SEL standards may undermine or erase the critically productive role that emotions have played in movements for social justice. If we truly want to prioritize the actual social and emotional learning of all students in schools, we need a framework that explicitly names inequities, allows for collective agency, and acknowledges and enables access to emotions. Making space for these emotions, although considered by some to be outside the "norm" of acceptable classroom behaviors, would allow all students to be seen for who they are, to truly express how they feel, and to create and take up opportunities, themselves, for social change and justice.

Purpose: This study aims to share the development of new conceptual tools, which merge theories of critical whiteness studies (CWS), epistemic injustice and abolitionist teaching, applying them to the discourse of pre- and in-service teachers across the predominantly white institutions (PWIs) as they discuss antiracist teaching through the book Stamped and a series of online discussions. Design/methodology/approach: This qualitative, collaborative practitioner inquiry derived data from video-recorded, online discussions, interviews and weekly research meetings. Critical discourse analysis revealed theoretical gaps and prompted the integration of additional theories, resulting in new conceptual tools, which are applied here to both "in the moment" exchanges between participants and individuals' reflections in interviews. Findings: Applying new conceptual tools to discussions of whiteness and race revealed how epistemic harm, microresistance and epistemic justice emerge in talk along with the importance of cultivating critical vigilance among antiracist educators. Originality/value: This study elucidates how merging the conceptual frameworks of CWS, epistemic injustice and abolitionist teaching provides new tools for interrogating antiracism relative to whiteness in participants' and researchers' experiences. It challenges teacher educators, particularly at PWIs, to recognize how epistemic harm may be inflicted on students of color when centering whiteness in teacher education.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a hot topic in K-12 schools. According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), as of 2018, more than half of [...]

This study examines LGBT-inclusive and queering discourses in five recent award-winning LGBT-themed young adult books. The analysis brought scenes of violence and sex/love scenes to the fore. Violent scenes offered readers messages that LGBT people are either the victims of violence-fueled hatred and fear, or, in some cases, showed a gay person asserting agency by imposing violence on a violent homophobe. In contrast, sex and/or love scenes offered readers more nuanced messages about LGBT people. In some sex/love scenes, LGBT people are isolated by homophobia, internalized, or otherwise. In others, though, LGBT people are able to connect better with those who love them as a result of their unlearning or removal of transphobia and/or homophobia. If books with scenes of violence and sex/love are prohibited, then messages about how people connect to and distance themselves from one another by knowing and loving themselves are lost. We argue that teachers and librarians must understand the discourses that shape how they read and discuss LGBT-themed literature and know how to help students navigate these in ways that challenge but do not damage readers; this paper can facilitate such efforts.

This paper retrospectively examines a collection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* (LGBT)-themed books discussed by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, and questioning (LGBTQQ) and ally students and teachers across 3 years of an out-of-school reading group. Through a textual content analysis of a sub-set of these books, we examine what queer literature looks like, identifying qualities it shares, and considering particular resources and possibilities it offers readers that are distinct from the broader category of LGBT-themed literature.

Scholars have argued for reading and discussing children's and young adult literature containing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or questioning (LGBTQ) characters and related themes with youths. Yet, we know very little about how to do this among LGBTQ people and their allies. This study examined 18 transcripts of talk from a literature discussion group of 32 adolescents and adults, including the authors, using 24 texts over three years in an LGBTQ youth center. The goal was to identify the nature of the talk and the ways it was liberatory and/or oppressive. A Foucaultian analysis of the talk, combined with ethnographically collected information, was conducted, identifying discourses, uses, and ways of operating to reveal possibilities and limitations of LGBT-inclusive and queering discourses. Findings suggest a complex, reciprocal process among texts, talk, and context in which no discourse is monolithically liberatory or oppressive. Complementary and competing discourses in conversation with each other around diverse texts and in complex contexts, however, provide opportunities for conflicts and potential for change. (Contains 3 notes, 3 tables, and 1 figure.)

Interns in a US teacher education program were surveyed regarding their attitudes towards diversity, particularly issues of sexuality, their feelings of "cultural competence" around diversity, and the repertoires of practices and resources they feel prepared to draw on in their work with middle and high schools students (11-18 year olds). Analysis of course materials provided insight into distinctions between anti-homophobia and LGBTQ-ally stances among students. Extensive semi-structured interviews with 7 students explored these issues in more depth, documenting their sense of preparedness and cultural competence, where locate and how they identify useful experiences in learning how to teach LGBTQ youth, and the concerns they face in their work against heterosexism and homophobia in schools. (Contains 3 figures.)

The authors' belief that using LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender)-themed literature in schools is possible and necessary, coupled with students' sense that either it cannot or is not being done, prompted them to write this article. While the authors are sympathetic with students' perspectives, and agree that examples are limited, such work is happening and has been documented in scholarship. One goal of this article is to bring that scholarship together to showcase what is happening in classrooms. A second, related goal is to trouble this scholarship and consider how work around LGBT-themed literature in classrooms may be limited by the context of school. Through analysis of these studies, the authors identify limitations and constraints relative to "positioning" of readers and texts, the acknowledgment and uptake of "pleasure" around these readings, and issues of "politics" and "power" that shape engagements with LGBT-themed literature in schools. Finally, drawing from work in out-of-school, queer-inclusive communities, the authors suggest ways of opening up spaces in classrooms to a range of reading positions and work around texts that offer more possibilities for young people to become readers of LGBT-themed literature in schools and to work with adults against homophobia and heterosexism. (Contains 2 notes.)

Sybil Wilson is a composite representation of an English teacher that typifies much of what most preservice English teachers have seen and experienced in U.S. classrooms. The authors' aim is to articulate textual frameworks often competing and unnamed in English curriculum (and evident in Sybil's classroom) and to argue for a particular reframing of the curricular domain of English studies that will broaden the analysis of texts and their contexts in relationship to race, class, and gender, especially in secondary schools. Drawing on work in curriculum theory, cultural studies, and media education, the authors attempt to illustrate "the trouble with English" by suggesting three text modality frameworks at work in Sybil's classroom and the concomitant domain claims they make in terms of how texts and students are positioned as they study English. They conclude by suggesting a fourth modality framework, one that attends to concerns of curricular consistency and coherence while also addressing the often missing or erratically addressed dimensions of English studies: the social, political, and economic dimensions of text production, representation, and reception.

Explores the role of authoritative discourse in the "learning disabled" labeling of a student enrolled in a literacy course for preservice teachers. Provides a concrete example of the power of authoritative discourse and the role that teachers, through their pedagogy, may play in accepting or interrupting that discourse. (SG)

Throughout this essay, we invite you to reflect on yourself and your understandings of adolescent literacy as we review the Handbook of Adolescent Literacy Research and Meeting the Challenge of [...]