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Free To Be: One Charter School's Approach To Supporting Gender And Sexual Minority Students, Katherine Sieger

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation presents three and a half years of ethnographic data from an “LGBT” charter school. It explores how gender and sexuality appear within educational spaces and how providing students an anti-heteronormative inclusive education impacts a student’s sense of self. I show how critical pedagogy is deployed as an anti-heteronormative approach to supporting all students. The term anti-heteronormative is used to express an explicit rejection of heterosexism and genderism, acknowledging the complex oppressive factors that develop given the normative expectations of gender and sexuality and the impact such expectations have on all bodies and all students. Findings reveal how the …