(In)Human Histories: Exploring How Educational Policy Shapes the Teaching of LGBTQ-Inclusive Elementary Social Studies

Jon M. Wargo

Conceptualized as an anthropological study of educational policy, this project explores how elementary teachers in the first year of policy enactment understand, interpret, and teach lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) inclusive social studies. Designed as a vertical case study, it seeks to examine the material and ideological affordances and constraints teachers identify as obstacles and supports for teaching LGBTQ-inclusive social studies as well as detail, across scale (e.g., school-level, district, state) how the LGBTQ subject is discursively produced as (in)human. Building on scholarship that considers how educational policy is interpreted, implemented, and mediated, this study will reveal the promises and precarity embedded in the work teachers do in understanding, interpreting, and teaching LGBTQ-inclusive social studies while simultaneously nuancing how this is always and already subject to complex relations of culture and power.

About Jon M. Wargo

Jon M. Wargo is an assistant professor in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. An educational scholar who attends closely to qualitative research methods, Wargo engages in ethnographic, design-based, and arts-informed methodologies to examine how technology mediates contemporary conceptions of minoritized children and youths? civic and social education. Publishing extensively across the areas of critical literacy, childhood and youth studies, and qualitative research, his scholarship can be found in the pages of the Journal of Literacy Research, Qualitative Inquiry, Educational Studies, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Voices from the Middle, New Media & Society, Learning, Media, and Technology, Social Studies and the Young Learner, and Language Arts. Wargo?s scholarly profile and body of research has been both nationally and internationally recognized. In 2018, he was named a Concha Delgado Gaitan Presidential Fellow by the Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE), a section of the American Anthropological Association. More recently, he was honored with the 2019 ELATE National Technology Leadership Initiative (NTLI) Award as well as the 2020 Divergent Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research. A former Denver Public Schools teacher, Wargo holds a B.A. in English and Gender Studies from Indiana University ? Bloomington and a Ph.D. in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education from Michigan State University.