Ecologies of School Discipline for Queer Youth: What Listening to Queer Youth Teaches Us About Transforming School Discipline

Abstract

Bellinger et al. feature queer youths’ voices to illuminate the ways in which they are formally and informally sanctioned, disciplined, and pushed out of school. The authors investigate two under-explored questions: (1) how do queer youth’s experiences with school discipline relate to their intersecting identities? and (2) how are those discipline experiences connected to and/or shaped by their experiences with bullying and harassment? Three themes emerged: schools as sites of gender normativity and regulation, complex social ecologies of school discipline, and acts of resistance and self-advocacy. The authors recommend a comprehensive, contextualized approach to rectify the disparate impact of school discipline on queer youth to uncover, understand, and respond to the ways institutional and interpersonal biases (direct and implicit) play out in school communities.