Caroline T. Clark

Continuing the Dialogue on Collaboration

In this article, we seek to establish a dialogue with the authors of “The Challenge of Studying Collaboration” (John-Steiner, Weber, & Minnis, 1998), a piece written in response to our previous AERJ article (Clark et al., 1996). Although we agree with some parts of their critique, we resist some of their suggestions because of our differing sets of assumptions about the appropriate goals and criteria for scholarly inquiry. The dialectic between our differing approaches to studying, theorizing, and representing collaboration illuminates issues that we hope others may find useful in examining their own assumptions about the nature and scope of scholarly inquiry.

Changing Places: Theorizing Space and Power Dynamics in Service-Learning

This chapter reflects our long history as collaborators around issues of service-learning and literacy. That history, beginning as co-teachers of an undergraduate service-learning course at the University of Michigan in 1995, has since moved with us across time and institutional contexts into new spaces, places, and understandings of service-learning. Our interest, in this chapter, takes up these issues of time, space, and place, and considers how our theorizing of service-learning has broadened and changed over time. In it, we discuss predominate ways of conceptualizing and theorizing service in undergraduate contexts; our work across service-learning courses and sites; and new possibilities for understanding service-learning in relation to space.

Scenes of violence and sex in recent award-winning LGBT-themed young adult novels and the ideologies they offer their readers

ABSTRACT This study examines LGBT-inclusive and queering discourses in five recent award-winning LGBT-themed young adult books. The analysis brought scenes of violence and sex/love scenes to the fore. Violent scenes offered readers messages that LGBT people are either the victims of violence-fueled hatred and fear, or, in some cases, showed a gay person asserting agency by imposing violence on a violent homophobe. In contrast, sex and/or love scenes offered readers more nuanced messages about LGBT people. In some sex/love scenes, LGBT people are isolated by homophobia, internalized, or otherwise. In others, though, LGBT people are able to connect better with those who love them as a result of their unlearning or removal of transphobia and/or homophobia. If books with scenes of violence and sex/love are prohibited, then messages about how people connect to and distance themselves from one another by knowing and loving themselves are lost. We argue that teachers and librarians must understand the discourses that shape how they read and discuss LGBT-themed literature and know how to help students navigate these in ways that challenge but do not damage readers; this paper can facilitate such efforts.

Examining Queer Elements and Ideologies in LGBT-Themed Literature: What Queer Literature Can Offer Young Adult Readers.

This paper retrospectively examines a collection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* (LGBT)-themed books discussed by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, and questioning (LGBTQQ) and ally students and teachers across 3 years of an out-of-school reading group. Through a textual content analysis of a sub-set of these books, we examine what queer literature looks like, identifying qualities it shares, and considering particular resources and possibilities it offers readers that are distinct from the broader category of LGBT-themed literature.