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Shifting the Conversation around Teaching Sensitive Topics: Critical Colleagueship in a Teacher Discourse Community Abstract: In this book club study designed to examine practicing teachers’ perspectives on a young adult book dealing with identity, mental health, sexuality, and family, researchers describe the tensions that arose in participants’ dialogue regarding self‐censorship and the desire to meet students’ needs. Authors note findings related to how teachers from rural schools responded to the novel under study and collaborated to reach new understandings. Findings also included a pattern of critical colleagueship, where participants both challenged ideas regarding the limits of sensitive topics and supported one other in building upon ideas of how to teach texts with potentially taboo content, highlighting the value of discourse communities as professional development.

The presentation of information in the mainstreamed classroom setting to profoundly hearing impaired children is frequently based on the translation of auditory information into word-for-word visual representation (speech read/sign language) through the services of an interpreter. The effectiveness of these selected delivery systems, particularly documented within the regular classroom, have yet to be realized. The following discussion presents a model based on the premise that visual and conceptual delivery of information presented in the classroom is more important than the verbal transliteration of the spoken material. The following does not examine the social, fiscal, or moral issues related to mainstreaming hearing impaired children (Vernon, 1981) but rather addresses the changing role of the “educational interpreter.”

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