Peer reviewed articles and book chapters by sj Miller
B. Guzzetti. JD, Bean, & T. Bean (Eds.), Literacies, sexualities, and gender: Understanding identities from preschool to adulthood, 2018
People in the United States are born into a culture still fastened to historical policing of gend... more People in the United States are born into a culture still fastened to historical policing of gender and gender identities. While social and political movements have helped galvanize and afford some material, social, and economic gains about gender and gender identities, schools and many other institutions providing youth services remain as inheritors of gender norms and their subsequent attributions. Unfortunately, such changes have yet to be systemically addressed and rooted across or studied over time. Such gaps have left educators and those working with youth ill-prepared and ill-equipped to sufficiently address gender identity topics through coursework, curriculum, and pedagogy (Kosciw, Greytak, Diaz, & Bartkiewicz, 2016; Miller, 2016a. Schools have become a type of prison that mirror social, cultural, and economic modes of reproduction. Seen in this way, some bodies are instantiated with multiple forms of cultural capital or social currency while others have diminished capital. Specifically, some youth are vulnerable to experiencing gender identity insecurities that manifest as disproportionate rates of bullying, dropping out, truancy, lowered grade point averages (GPAs), mental health and substance issues ; pushout into the juvenile processing system ; homelessness presence in foster care and/or group homes; and suicidal ideation. The numbers of these incidents are much higher for youth of color . In addition, suspensions result in exclusion from classroom instruction and the school community. When these students are not present in school, everyone has diminished opportunities to learn and grow. These microaggressions and forms of gender identity-based violence could be disrupted if the schooling system and other youth-serving agencies were to embrace policies and procedures that shifted beliefs and practices about gender identity. Recognizing the
Trans*+ and gender identity diverse students’ right to use a Bathroom: Debating human dignity.
In M. Levinson and J. Fay (Eds.), Democratic discord in schools: Cases and commentaries in educational ethics, 2019
Teachers College Record, 2019
Persons who have complex gender identities are among the most under-researched, undertheorized, a... more Persons who have complex gender identities are among the most under-researched, undertheorized, and least understood populations in schools. Such persons are also the most vulnerable to experiencing various forms of violence. While interventions to support persons with complex gender identities are becoming increasingly evident in schools, scant attention has been paid to the role of emotion as a mechanism for supporting such youths' learning. Since bodily and emotional responses cannot be generalized to all experiences, the responses of others who are not attuned to the experiences of persons with complex gender identities compel such youth to expend debilitating emotional labor.
Social Justice across the curriculum: The practice of freedom, 2022
This chapter recognizes the enormous power that can arise for classroom-based engagement when stu... more This chapter recognizes the enormous power that can arise for classroom-based engagement when students with complex gender identities are positively affirmed through pedagogy and praxis. The space between in-and-out of school learning is diminished as teachers integrate the lived discoursed and bodily experiences of student with complex gender identities. Amplified opportunities for learning are expanded when teachers reset their understandings for shifts in literacies. This is referred to as a Gender Identity Complexity Turn (Miller, forthcoming), a turn that does not do away with binary understandings of gender, or gender identity, but complicates them with inclusive-for-all practices. A particular practice of complicating the binary occurred in a middle and high school photography class. For these classes, students created memes that critiqued the gender binary and participated in a school-wide gender identity equity audit. Students with complex gender identities are agents of, and for, literacy learning (Miller, , 2019, forthcoming a, b, in press, forthcoming a, b, in press). The agentive-power that can arise for classroom and school-based engagement when students with complex gender identities are positively affirmed through pedagogy and praxis is nothing less than prodigious. When their identities are centered and integrated, along with, not as additive, their peers, students-and educational stakeholders---are posited to benefit in myriad ways. As space diminishes between in-and-out of school learning, the integrating, or folding in of their lived discoursed and bodily experiences amplify opportunities for learning. Many challenges with such complex moves are not relegated to these students, nor should they be encumbered by or held responsible for those around them to understand and develop the strategies and tools for "them" to be engaged or to have opportunities for academic and social success; rather, it is the larger school system's responsibility to learn, understand, hold, apply, and sustain changes that embrace and envelope these students. The points of inquiry that guide and support a leaning into these challenges include: How can literacy-generated processes become embedded in and across schooling practices? How do we do this work? And, how can
Queer, trans and intersectional theory in educational practice. Cris Mayo and Molly Blackburn Eds., 2020
Expanding the Theory of Trans* + ness into Literacy Practice sj Miller In the U.S., people are bo... more Expanding the Theory of Trans* + ness into Literacy Practice sj Miller In the U.S., people are born into a culture still fastened to a historical policing of gender and gender identities. Certainly, while social and political movements have helped galvanize and afford some level of material, social, and economic gains about gender and gender identities, schools remain as inheritors of gender norms and their subsequent attributions . Unfortunately, such changes are rooted across or studied over time in teacher education and classroom practice and are yet to be systematically addressed. Such gaps have left educators and key educational stakeholders ill-prepared and ill-equipped to sufficiently address gender identity topics through policy, coursework,
about Gender Identity Justice in School and Communities, 2019
These resources are from my book: about Gender Identity Justice in School and Communities. They a... more These resources are from my book: about Gender Identity Justice in School and Communities. They are for use but if used, you must cite them from my book
about Gender Identity Justice in Schools and Communities, 2019
Gender Identity Complexities Framework (GICF), a framework guided by axioms, with principles and ... more Gender Identity Complexities Framework (GICF), a framework guided by axioms, with principles and commitments is a tool produced for educators to guide, both themselves and students, to experience gender identity self-determination and usher in gender identity justice. Ultimately, stakeholders who practice this framework have increased capacities to shift mindsets and physical environments and lead to new way of thinking about and playing with inventing language.
Literacies, sexualities, and gender: Understanding identities from preschool to adulthood , 2018
Theoretical models and processes of literacy edition 7 , 2018
A Theory of Trans* + ness for Animating Literacy Practices sj Miller This work evolved out of obs... more A Theory of Trans* + ness for Animating Literacy Practices sj Miller This work evolved out of observing, speaking to, and reading about how students are self-determining their gender identities. I cannot claim this work to be original because they are the ones who are original. Instead, this work is a map created to find and understand them, while simultaneously a place for them to locate themselves. A hope for this work is that students will continue to create maps, to carve out new contexts to mine meaning from and within, and to keep co-crafting new identities for continued growth and socio-emotional expansion. They are the guides that have paved ways for this work to be made possible. .. for infinite terrains to be traversed, and for new knowledges to be generated. Gender Identity Awakening Identities are shaped and informed by language: Language shapes and informs identities. In particular , uses of inflammatory and bullying language within political climates that police gender identity and regulate bodies in different school contexts position nonbinary gender identities to be vulnerable for social isolation and marginalization. Such is unfortunately front-facing, as evi-denced by shifts in the U.S. political climate that have brought trans* + identities into critical focus, warranting immediate attention in classroom practice 1 —these are not just local issues, they are of increasingly global concern. Of importance is how to draw from coded literacy practices used by gender identityWOKE 2 students as they safeguard themselves within their own peer networks. Gender identityWOKE is the self-awareness about one's gender identity that simultaneously questions its construction, the impacts of its social positioning, and its ties to ideological beliefs while staying engaged and ready to participate in its reinvention. Since language helps locate and find gender identities, such WOKENESS can help to imagine, invent, and reinvent language. Seen this way, language becomes a critical agentive nexus for self-identification, legitimization, and recognition and its inimitable qualities call on others to form a community dedicated (even unknowingly) to discursive and dialogical processes of language affirmation. Resultant from such WOKENESS, literacy educators are summoned to understand, unpack, and unveil how school systems, literacy researchers, and teacher educators reinforce gender identity nor-mativity and contribute to gender identity violence in schools and beyond, in order to open up spaces for opportunities and new knowledges to be activated and recognized. To disrupt reinscription of a gender identity binary (i.e., male/female as the only ways to identify gender), this work cannot live siloed or tokenized in books, texts, poems, art, songs, math problems, policies, scientific rationalizations , pictures, the media, or individuals; it has to be embodied by all as an agentive mediator that Theoretical Models and Processes of Literacy, edited by Donna E. Alvermann, et al., Routledge, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Multicultural Perspectives, 2018
International Journal of Transgenderism, 2018
Background: Gay-straight alliances (GSAs) have potential to facilitate conversations on transgend... more Background: Gay-straight alliances (GSAs) have potential to facilitate conversations on transgender and gender-diversity issues among members. We examined how frequently GSA members discussed transgender and gender-diversity topics within GSAs, whether GSAs varied from one another in the extent to which these conversations occurred, and identified factors that distinguished which members and GSAs discussed such topics more often than others. Methods: Participants were 295 members of 33 high school GSAs in the state of Massachusetts who completed surveys that assessed their experiences within their GSA. Results: On average, youth discussed transgender and gender-diversity issues with some regularity, but this varied significantly across GSAs and among youth within each GSA. Youth who had transgender friends, perceived a more respectful GSA climate, and accessed more information/ resources and engaged in more advocacy within the GSA reported more frequently discussing transgender and gender-diversity issues. Also, GSAs with transgender members, whose members collectively perceived a more respectful climate, accessed more information/resources and did more advocacy, and who reported lower socializing or support discussed transgender and gender-diversity issues more frequently than other GSAs. Conclusions: This information could inform GSA programming to facilitate more transgender and gender-diversity topic discussions and ensure that members feel encouraged to participate in them.
TeachingWorks, University of Michigan School of Education.
Students with non-binary gender identities enter into our schools with gender identities they see... more Students with non-binary gender identities enter into our schools with gender identities they seem to already readily understand. These students are highly attuned to how schooling practices mostly speak to binary gender identities and reinscribe cis-and-gender identity normativity. Considering that access and recognition shape and inform students' identities, those with nonbinary gender identities are positioned by their gendered relationality to school-based relationships, which are co-constitutive of the other. Their bodily awareness enables them to dislodge from the norms that many students are vulnerable to inheriting and embodying. As they move back and forth between their in-and-out of school lives, their bodies are generating different forms of literacy. Outside of school of-school, their gender identities are always in conversation as they simultaneously question its construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. When they are recognized through the eyes and/or words of another, their validation confers gender identity selfdetermination, and this legitimization generates emergent language, positioning them as agents of literacy. Their gender identities then are complex and indeterminate, and provide the field of education an opportunity to have a different relationship with the body that is expressed through different manifestations of refusal. Expressions of their refusals that resist assimilation and enculturation, posits them as both dexterous and agentive as they move from context to context. The body then as literacy, is a source of learning literacy. This research shares how a group of students with non-binary gender identities spoke to teachers, counselors, principals, school personnel, peers, and family members about what they needed to feel safe, included, and legitimized at school. Dr. Miller has included an extended and rich set of resources from these findings and additional appendices which can be used in teacher education as well as in pre-K-12 classrooms.
UNESCO MGIEP, 2018
By 2030 ensure all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable developmen... more By 2030 ensure all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture's contribution to sustainable development.
Sex Education, 2017
This paper examines the current state of law and policy in relation to US transgender youth and t... more This paper examines the current state of law and policy in relation to US transgender youth and their lived experiences. We approach this from different disciplinary backgrounds, identities, and ways of writing terms related to gender identity. We begin with an examination of the current legal climate in the USA and explore how students have pushed back against gender and sexuality norms even in a restrictive climate. Some transformations are already happening in public schools and some backlash, too, is being felt. Laws and policies in some locations are encouraging students, teachers, school leaders and community members to collaborate in making schools more educationally concerned about trans student success and teaching the school community about gender diversity. In shifting among scales and experiences of youth thinking and working on gender, we aim to emphasise youth agency and outline young people's frustrations at the obstacles related to trans, gender dissidence and sexuality. In conclusion, we point to changes that can be made in schools to help professionals understand how policy and curricular innovation can bolster the openings that trans, gender creative and gender non-binary youth are already creating, whether or not those opportunities are officially recognised.
Background/Context: This article describes the fundamental role of social justice in public educa... more Background/Context: This article describes the fundamental role of social justice in public education and professional teacher education. Design: Using a policy narrative approach, the authors explicate the grassroots political processes, professional political action and advocacy, and policy procedures and scholarship undertaken to construct a successfully vetted, approved, and fully implemented national policy in one subject-area professional association (SPA). The authors demonstrate how other SPAs and affiliated groups may pursue similar policies for socially just teaching and teacher education across disciplines, fields, and contexts across education. Conclusions: Using research to theorize responsive teaching pedagogies and using findings from social psychology research to generate a socially just orientation to teaching in public schools, the authors highlight the ways in which social justice teaching is not simply a possible orientation for professional educators to consider but a fundamental tenet and primary consideration of public education overall. The authors conclude that SPAs and public education professionals not only may but must engage in social justice policymaking for educational equity in order to succeed in attaining education reforms that truly serve the public good.
Gender and sexuality norms, conscribed under cis/heteropatriarchy, have established violent and u... more Gender and sexuality norms, conscribed under cis/heteropatriarchy, have established violent and unstable social and educational climates for the millennial generation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, agender/asexual, gender creative, and questioning youth. While strides have been made to make schools more supportive and queer inclusive, schools still struggle to include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender* + , intersex, agender/asexual, gender creative, queer and questioning (LGBT* + IAGCQQ)-positive curricula. While extensive studies must be done on behalf of all queer youth, this work specifically focuses on how to support classroom teachers to uptake and apply a pedagogy of refusal that attends to the most vulnerabilized population of queer youth to date, those that are trans* +. A pedagogy of refusal will be explored through an evolving theory of trans* + ness, then demonstrated through a framework for classroom application, followed by recommendations for change. Keywords: trans* + ; sociospatial justice; trans* + theory; trans*space; trans* + pedagogy; preservice teacher education; post trans* + ; trans* + /gender creative youth
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Peer reviewed articles and book chapters by sj Miller