The changing experiences of primary teachers: responding to scenarios involving diverse sexualities

Sex education and diverse sexualities are controversial topics within the primary school arena. Concepts of childhood innocence have influenced sex education curriculum, policy development and teaching practices within schools. However, research shows that primary school-aged students are aware of and talk about sexualities. The aim of this research is to reveal the pedagogical experiences of primary school teachers in relation to scenarios inclusive of diverse sexualities. Social constructionist theories of pedagogy and phenomenographic methods are used to provide a detailed analysis of the ways in which primary teacher participants conceptualise their encounters with students who introduce concepts of diverse sexualities. This research reveals that primary students ask questions about diverse sexualities, they use homophobic expressions (often as a daily occurrence), they sometimes reveal homosexual feelings to teachers, some have same-sex parents and some are being raised with knowledge of diverse sexualities. Without comprehensive policy and curriculum support, and appropriate professional learning for teachers, teachers are unable to make well-informed pedagogical decisions that promote inclusive education.     

Sexuality education in South African schools: deconstructing the dominant response to young people’s sexualities in contemporary schooling contexts

ABSTRACT

South African schools are tasked with providing sexuality education through the Life Orientation curriculum as a means of challenging continued high rates of HIV, unwanted pregnancy and gender-based violence. While in theory schools are well positioned to provide appropriate knowledge for reproductive health and navigating sexual challenges within a gender justice framework, research on sexuality education in South African schools indicates that this is not the reality in practice. This paper draws on a growing body of qualitative studies, with both educators and learners in South African schools, to understand the issues undermining the goal of a critical and social justice pedagogy of sexuality in Life Orientation classrooms. We argue that sexuality education has been deployed to regulate and discipline young sexualities, reinforce and perpetuate gender binarisms and heteronormativity, re-establish global northern family values of the nuclear family within a pro-family discourse, and represent continued assumptions of adult authority in a civilising mission over young people. We suggest that the failure to make critical use of Life Orientation is linked to the dominance of ‘expert’-based didactic pedagogy, and argue the possibilities of sexuality education as a productive space for young people’s active participation and agency in making meaning of gender and sexualities.     

Strategic Embodiment in Virtual Spaces: Exploring an on-line discussion about sexualities equality in schools

This paper analyses patterns of participation on a voluntary anonymous Web-based discussion forum, open to students and faculty in one UK university, concerning sexualities equality in schools. Analysis revealed that participants often rejected the security of anonymity and strategically embodied themselves and others (as gay, straight, parents, etc.) to provide authority and ethical grounding for certain arguments. These embodied arguments invited engagement and promoted dialogue. We found that while personal embodiments were crucial for meaningful interaction, they also brought the risk of personalizing systematic inequality and fostering a victimization discourse. In the light of this, we argue that both individual and collective perspectives are crucial for promoting sexualities equality in school.     

‘Charmer boys’ and ‘cream girls’: how primary school children construct themselves as heterosexual subjects through football

South African research on young children’s constructions of social identities illuminates the significance of play in the construction of gender identities. However, what remains largely understudied are the children’s construction of sexualities through play. The dominant discourse of ‘childhood innocence’ obscures the variegated understandings of the meanings children attach to sexualities. This paper will explore how some South African boys and girls aged 9–10 years construct themselves as active heterosexual subjects through football talk and play during break-time at school. The paper will demonstrate how the school playground is constructed by the ‘charmer boys’ as a ‘football space’ where they use football performance to impress and charm the ‘cream girls’ who are relegated to the margins as spectators of the football games. However, the paper will also argue that gender power relations are complex and that the position of the ‘creamers’ is infused with power as reflected in the role that they play as assessors of the boys’ performance.     

Queer trepidations and the art of inclusion

Abstract

Contemporary research and pedagogy telated to sexualities and schooling in Australia, Aotearoa1/New Zealand and the United States often focuses on ways to alleviate homophobia and heterosexism in the hope of creating schools that are more inclusive of lesbian and gay (and very rarely bisexual, transgender and intersex2) (LGBTI) teachers and students. Within this paradigm, the notion of what comprises sexualities is often taken as given. Alternatively, researchers and educators may invoke essentialising narratives in order to make arguments for the inclusion of students and teachers who adopt LGBTI identifications. Drawing on a theoretical framework influenced by the work of Deborah Britzman3 and other queer theorists within and outside education this article interrogates these strategies of inclusion. In particular, I focus on research methodologies and pedagogies related to sexualities and schooling devised in the name of inclusion of young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT)4 in secondary educational contexts. This analysis, which is based on my doctoral studies, commences with a consideration of queer theories and the art of inclusion. Subsequent to this I analyse pedagogies of inclusion and methodologies of inclusion, and, their nexus with queer theories.     

What does the teaching and learning of sexuality education in South African schools reveal about counter-normative sexualities?

ABSTRACT

Using the interlocking concepts of power, knowledge and discourse, this article focuses on how counter normative sexualities are discursively constructed in the sexuality education classroom and with what effects. Drawing on in-depth interviews with teachers and classroom observation, the evidence highlights the presence of specific discourses about the teaching and learning of sexuality diversity. First, while many teachers argued for the inclusion of counter-normative sexualities, in their teaching and responses they privileged heterosexuality as legitimate and natural and same-sex sexualities as deviant and Other. Second, teachers’ discourses construct queer youth not only as innocent and childlike but also as hypersexual and rebellious – requiring discipline and intervention. These constructions link closely to discourses of pity and tolerance, or blame when counter-normative sexualities were expressed. Finally, despite heterosexuality being privileged in the classroom, teachers’ and pupils’ questions about gender and sexuality diversity suggest the need for a more defined and inclusive curriculum sexuality education curriculum. Findings justify concern about how counter-normative sexualities are addressed in the sexuality education classroom and advocate for improvement in teaching and learning about counter-normative sexualities in South African secondary education.     

Queering Literacy Teaching: Analyzing Gay-Themed Discourses in a Fifth-Grade Class in Brazil

Following queer theory and critical discourse analysis principles, my aims in this article are to analyze gay-themed discourses in literacy contexts and to suggest a way of queering literacy teaching. In the first part, I focus on ethnographically generated data from a class of fifth-graders in Brazil. The analysis shows that homoeroticism was openly discussed by the pupils in off-task classroom discourses and in focus-group interviews, but in on-task classroom discourses led by the teacher it was an issue that was not to be raised. As a consequence, I argue that there is a need for openly incorporating gay and lesbian themes into classroom discourses and for queering literacy teaching. This can be done by introducing a view of discourse as a social practice, which makes it possible to analyze the ways in which sexualities are discursively constructed, thereby implying that there are differently situated ways of constructing sexualities rather than a single essentialist manner. In the second part, I introduce principles for a pedagogic discourse analysis to which literacy teachers could make recourse in order to show the discursive nature of sexualities. This approach is exemplified by an analysis of the discursive construction, in a Brazilian magazine article, of a man as gay.     

Schooling sexualities and gendered bodies. Experiences of LGBT students in Icelandic upper secondary schools

In this paper, we study how Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people (LGBT) students in Icelandic upper secondary schools interpret their experience of heteronormative environment and how they respond to it. The aim is to explore how sexualities and gendered bodies are constructed through ‘schooling’. The article draws on interview data with seven LGBT students who attended five different upper secondary schools. We also use visual data collected during fieldwork at one upper secondary school and exemplify the results with a poster and a digitalised short-film, produced by the students, to substantiate what participants told us in the interviews. All of the students experienced heteronormative discourse and lack of respect and indicated that they did not feel fully accepted in school. Upon entering the classroom, the visibility of LGBTs and discussion about different performances of gender and sexuality seem to disappear, whether in terms of textbooks, course content, teaching practices and school environment. Furthermore, LGBTs and those who do not conform to the hegemonic performances of gender are often constructed as deviations from the norm, strange, and even depicted as the abjected other. This applies in particular to the informal school, which embraces the traditions, culture and social interactions among students and teachers. This othering occurs, despite relatively positive attitudes towards LGBT people in Icelandic society in general. The results signify a gap between policy and practice as regards the positioning of LBGT students, which affects their schooling and well-being.     

‘I Am the Hate that Dare Not Speak its Name’: Dealing with homophobia in secondary schools

This paper describes the outcomes of a small‐scale project involving 19 secondary schools. The project investigated how effectively issues of homophobic bullying and sexualities were addressed through secondary schools' formal policies and areas of the curriculum. Outcomes indicate that sexual orientation was mentioned in two‐thirds of Equal Opportunities policies but was not mentioned specifically in any Anti‐Bullying policies. Staff highlighted the need for training in issues surrounding sexualities, homophobic bullying and clarification of Section 28. Implications for the work of educational psychologists are discussed, including raising awareness and clarifying issues in schools as well as informing whole school development work.     

After King: Responsibility for Queer and Trans Expressions

In this article, Adam Greteman considers the murder of Lawrence/Latisha King by Brandon McInerney in February 2008. Greteman turns to this case, a decade after it occurred, because it raises a number of issues regarding our evolving understandings of genders, sexualities, and the risks of encountering such differences in the space of school in the twenty‐first century. Greteman argues that we live in a moment where queer and trans youth are coming out and becoming queer and trans earlier and, in various ways, expanding our understanding of genders and sexualities, and also illustrating the complex responsibilities that schools — in the form of teachers, administrators, and students — have toward these forms of becoming. He explores the limits of a liability model of responsibility and the need for contemplating responsibility more broadly as it encounters systemic forms of injustice (for example, transphobia, homophobia, and white supremacy) in the classroom. If queer and trans youth have more access to resources, protections, and representations in the late 2010s, how do those in schools — students, teachers, staff, and administrators — engage the tensions that can arise between queer and trans expressions and expressions opposed to queerness and transness? And how do schools continue to take up their collective responsibilities for the lives of students who are becoming in the midst of systemic injustice?     

Fish out of water: refugee and international students in mainstream Australian schools

In this paper, the authors combine Pierre Bourdieu's concept of hysteresis (the ‘fish out of water’ experience) with the discourse historical approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a theoretical and analytical framework through which they examine specific moments in the schooling experiences of one refugee student and one international student, both enrolled in post-compulsory education in Australian mainstream secondary schools. We examine specific moments – as narrated by these students during interviews – in which these students can be described as ‘fish out of water’. As such, this paper takes up the concerns of researchers who call for an examination of the lived geographies and the everyday lives of individual students in mainstream schools. We find that our students' habitus, conditioned by their previous schooling experiences in their home countries, did not match their new Australian schools, resulting in frustration with, and alienation from, their mainstream schools. However, we also note that schools, too, need to adapt and adjust their habitus to the new multicultural world, in which there are international and refugee students among their usual cohort of mainstream students.     

Sexualities of initial teacher education applicants in the Republic of Ireland: addressing the hidden dimension of diversity in teaching

While research and policy recommendations internationally have pointed to the need to diversify teaching populations with regard to ethnicity, social class background and, to a lesser extent, dis/ability, there is a paucity of research addressing sexualities as a diversity dimension in teaching. This article explores initial teacher education (ITE) applicants’ and entrants’ (N = 746) sexualities and the intersections of sexualities with other socio-demographic background variables and career motivations. The analysis suggests that the topic of sexual orientation caused high levels of discomfort among respondents and that sexual minority student teachers are underrepresented in ITE cohorts in Ireland. The socio-demographic and motivational profiles of our non-heterosexual respondents generally mirrored those of their heterosexual counterparts. Non-heterosexual respondents reported a stronger motivation to affect social change and lower levels of participation in religious services. Findings are discussed within the context of persisting cultural and institutional barriers for sexual minority (student) teachers in Irish schools and in ITE.     

Coming out as a lesbian,gay or bisexual teacher: negotiating private and professional worlds

This paper examines the ‘coming out’ decisions at work of four lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) teachers in England. It argues that such decisions are complicated by heteronormative discursive practices within schools that render LGB sexualities silent while simultaneously demanding that they are spoken. This double bind for LGB teachers as well as the professional and personal implications of choosing to come out or not to come out within the workplace is examined. The paper demonstrates that three choices dominate participants' experiences of coming out at work: to speak to no one at work about the private world, to come out to colleagues and to come out to colleagues and students. The paper posits, however, that the narrative devices deployed within coming out (at work) stories are limited by linguistic techniques that constrain the telling of sexual selves to the binary categories of straight or gay/lesbian. The possibilities for teachers whose lives and experiences interrupted the dominant heteronormative discourse are also examined.     

The camera never lies?: analysing photographs in research on sexualities and schooling

This article is concerned with how to analyse photographs produced during research on sexualities and schooling. Photo-diaries and photo-elicitation were employed in an examination of the sexual cultures of two New Zealand secondary schools. This visual methodology sought to disclose spatial and embodied dimensions of sexualities at school while centring and valuing students’ perspectives. In an attempt to answer the question ‘what does this photograph really mean’, the author experiments with a series of analytical accounts conceptualised as ‘realist’, ‘interpretivist’, ‘performative’ and ‘materialist’ approaches. These readings are interrogated for their political and ontological effects. On the basis of the project's aims of taking young people's perspectives seriously and foregrounding material reality, an argument for a ‘materialist’ reading is made.     

Behind the bike sheds: sexual geographies of schooling

This paper is concerned with extending existing understandings about the role of schools as sexualising agencies. It seeks to uncover previously undisturbed spatial and material dimensions of schooling with regards to sexualities and their implication for how young people learn about sexualities at school. In this regard, the paper asks: how do apparently mundane spatial and material schooling arrangements constitute particular sexual meanings and identities for students? A visual methodology is employed to capture schooling places that students identify as constitutive of sexual meanings and identities. How students’ embodied sexual practices negotiate and contest these spatial/material configurations is also investigated. Through this analysis, the paper makes a theoretical contribution to an understanding of space as an in process materiality. It is concluded that the spatial and material arrangements of schooling contribute to a larger schooling project concerned with muting and regulating young people’s sexual subjectivities.     

Queer pedagogy,educational practice and lesbian and gay youth

Our article explores the potential that queer paradigms and pedagogies hold for affirming sexual diversity in secondary schools. In understanding the operation of schools as heteronormalising institutions, it is possible to move beyond viewing queer youth as a disenfranchised minority group requiring reparation within an equity framework (a process that we suggest operates simultaneously to legitimate heterosexuality and to reinforce the abnormality of same-sex desire). Using research that we have undertaken with lesbian and gay youth in New Zealand secondary schools, and drawing on queer, post modern and feminist theoretical threads, we explore three (hetero) normalising processes experienced by the queer participants in their schools; the maintenance of silences, the pathologisation of (homo)sexualities, and the policing of gender boundaries. We close by exploring how several queer pedagogical features - creating venues, abnormalising the normal, dissolving the homo/hetero binary and forming alliances - could be used in order to affirm the sexual diversity of secondary school students.     

‘Sod ‘em,sod ‘em like there's no Gomorrah’: comparing sexualities education for teachers,doctors and clergy in the UK

In the context of changes in UK public discourse concerning sexualities over the last decade, this paper compares education in the field of sexualities equality, enquiring how teachers, doctors and clergy are being prepared for their professional lives. Data from a qualitative study using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews are analysed to reveal that although in many outward respects teaching and medicine reflect recent legislative and cultural changes and the church does not, in more subtle ways these three professions share a common theme of disjunction between policy and practice. There is also some evidence that certain subsections of these professions offer differential degrees of welcome to gay and lesbian individuals. Behind this empirical study lies the theoretical question of the way in which historically these professions have enmeshed together to structure a dominant heteronormativity. Evidence from this research points to some loosening of these historic ties.     

'The Trouble with Our Schools': A media construction of public discourses on Queensland schools

This paper gives an account of competing public discourses on schooling. In particular, it investigates one newspaper's coverage of the release of an educational report. The paper combines interview data with a critical discourse analysis of newspaper texts to show how media reporting of Queensland schools constructed a preferred discourse on education that represented schools as being in crisis, 'in trouble'. The analysis describes how the paper shaped popular opinion on educational policy through the construction of public discourses of crisis in education. Further, the analysis shows how this discourse positioned particular groups as the authoritative voice on standards in Queensland schools. It shows how, at a time when teacher quality was under question, the media constructed a public discourse that diminished the authority of teachers to speak about education policy, granting that authority to the newspaper's editor, who assumed the people's voice on educational issues. This analysis of the construction of public discourses about education policy gives insights into the media's place in educational policy-making. In so doing, the paper adds to the small body of literature that investigates the relationships between the media and education.     

Introduction to Section III: Deweyan Growth in Practice

At present, the structures, practice, and discourse of schooling are anchored to a “commercial spirit” that understands students, educators, and parents as economic operators trading competitively in human capital and to a discourse of failure that is disabling those who seek to understand and enact John Dewey's notion of education as democratic practice. Here Barbara Stengel illustrates both the commercial spirit in public schools and the discourse of school failure across two geopolitical settings: Shanghai, China, and urban U.S. schools. She argues that framing the educational enterprise in terms of economic success and failure makes it difficult for educators to address Dewey's vision of democracy and education substantively. Stengel concludes with an acknowledgment that, regardless of putative political commitments, these two public school systems are schooling — though not often educating — the same neoliberal subject, but that Dewey's vision of democracy and education nonetheless remains critical and compelling.     

校际均衡:环境、话语与制度的分析

校际均衡是教育均衡发展问题研究中的一个重要方面。教育资源的适当稀缺决定了校际失衡与利益争夺的背景,也使得如何实现分配正义成为校际均衡研究中的主题。在经历政治话语、经济话语规束之后,我国校际均衡问题的研究逐渐转向制度的话语阶段,并在政府主导的情况下着力进行相应的制度建设。