Gender identity and sexuality play crucial roles in the educational experiences of students, parents, and teachers. Teacher education must more directly address the ways that schools reflect and reproduce oppressive gender norms, working to combat homophobia, transphobia, heteronormativity, and gendered expectations in schools. This volume examines teacher candidates' experiences with gender and sexuality in the classroom, offering insight and strategies to better prepare teachers and teacher educators to support LGBTQ youth and families.

This volume addresses the need for broader, more in-depth qualitative data describing teacher candidates' responses to diversity in the classroom (including gender, sexuality, race, class and religion). By using pedagogical tools such as narrative writing and positioning theory, teacher candidates explore these issues to better understand their own students' narratives in deeply embodied ways. This book calls for schools to be places where oppression, in all its complexity, is explored and challenged rather than replicated.

Heather Killelea McEntarfer is Assistant Professor of English, SUNY Fredonia, USA.

Preface 1. Why This Course? Why This Book? 2. The Course: Transforming Belief into Action 3. "I Thought of Myself as Neutral in Some Ways, and Then Them as Other Things": Recognizing and Challenging Heteronormativity 4. "It's Hard to Wrap Your Head Around": Teacher Candidates' Discourse Concerning Gender Identity 5. "Perhaps I am Not as Open-minded as I Thought": Religion and Sexuality 6. "Knowing the Unknowingness at the Core of What We Know": Queered Teaching 7. "Was I Supposed to Just Continue With My Lesson?" Working Within and Around Constraints in Schools and Developing Teacher Agency 8. Conclusions