Growing into Resilience: Sexual and Gender Minority Youth in Canada

by Andre P. Grace, Kristopher Wells (With)

Overview

Despite recent progress in civil rights for sexual and gender minorities (SGM), ensuring SGM youth experience fairness, justice, inclusion, safety, and security in their schools and communities remains an ongoing challenge. In Growing into Resilience, André P. Grace and Kristopher Wells – co-founders of Camp fYrefly, a summer leadership camp for SGM youth – investigate how teachers, healthcare workers, and other professionals can help SGM youth build the human and material assets that will empower them to be happy, healthy, and resilient.

Grace and Wells investigate the comprehensive (physical, mental, and sexual) health of SGM youth, emphasizing the role of caring professionals in an approach that that recognizes and accommodates SGM youth. Throughout, the authors draw upon the personal narratives of SGM youth, emphasizing how research, policy, and practice must act together for them to be able to thrive and fulfill their promise.

Both a resource for those professionally engaged in work with sexual and gender minorities and a comprehensive text for use in courses on working with vulnerable youth populations, Growing into Resilience is a timely and transdisciplinary book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442625655
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	09/15/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

André P. Grace is Canada Research Chair in Sexual and Gender Minority Studies and a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Alberta.

Kristopher Wells is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and the Director of Programs and Services, Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services, University of Alberta.

Table of Contents

Preface: Remembering the Vriend Decision

Part I: Steeling Life in the Face of Adversity

InterText I – Mara: Learning to Own Gay

InterText II – Vincent: I’m Passing

1. Making It Better NOW for Sexual and Gender Minority Youth

InterText III – Sean: I’m a Man, Yes I Am

2. Gender Beautiful: Living in the Fullness of One’s Affirmed Gender Identity and True Gender Self

InterText IV – Larissa: My Heritage is a Big Thing

3. Camp fYrefly: fostering, Youth, resilience, energy, fun, leadership, yeah!

InterText V – Mark: Being the Boy I Am

InterText VI – Paul: Bringing People Out of Silence

4. Making and Implementing Policies to Protect Sexual and Gender Minority Youth in Schooling and Healthcare

Part II: From At Risk to At Promise

(Chapters with Kristopher Wells)

InterText VII – John: Learning to Own Gay

5. The Marc Hall Prom Predicament: Queer Individual Rights v. Institutional Church Rights in Canadian Public Education

InterText VIII – Sam: It’s Like Piranhas, Man

6. Gay and Bisexual Male Youth as Educator Activists and Cultural Workers: The Queer Critical Praxis of Three Canadian High-School Students

InterText IX – Jon: Born to Be, Deserving to be Happy in My Own Skin

7. The Mental and Sexual Health Nexus in the Comprehensive Health of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth

InterText X – David: Stealth, But Living Trans Fulltime

8. Gay-Straight Alliances and the Quest for Recognition and Accommodation of Sexual and Gender Minority Students in Canadian Schools

Appendix: Growing into Resilience: An Emergent Research Typology of a Dynamic Process from the 1980s into the Present Moment

What People are Saying About This

Karleen Pendleton Jimenez

"Growing into Resilience captures the practices, agency, and dreams of sexual and gender minority youth, presenting beautiful portraits of complex young people, their everyday difficulties, and their demands for more inclusive institutions."

Editorial Reviews

"Growing into Resilience captures the practices, agency, and dreams of sexual and gender minority youth, presenting beautiful portraits of complex young people, their everyday difficulties, and their demands for more inclusive institutions."

—Karleen Pendleton Jimenez, School of Education, Trent University

From the Publisher