Attending to gender and sexuality in learning: lessons from scholarship By, For, and with LGBTQ+ people

While interdisciplinary scholars have explored LGBTQ+ people’s educational experiences, and despite the learning sciences’ increasing attunement to issues of ethics, politics, and identity, the field has yet to deeply engage the salience of gender and sexuality for learning. In this symposium we center emerging scholarship in the field by, for, and with LGBTQ+ people to explore three questions: How has learning sciences research engaged LGBTQ+ communities? How does attending to gender and sexuality expand how we understand learning? And how can the field be mobilized to design affirming learning environments for LGBTQ+-identifying people? Across the papers, we explore gender and sexuality’s relevance for learning in contexts as wide-ranging as video channels on YouTube, an LGBTQ+ youth social group, Twitter networks of drag queen activists, and a public computing participatory simulation. Taken together, these papers will deepen the field’s attention to gender and sexuality in learning sciences theories, methods, and designs.