Gender Relations and the Production of Difference in School-based Sexuality and HIV/AIDS Education in Australia

HIV/AIDS discourses have not only made people aware of HIV as a disease entity but have opened up new ways of thinking and talking about sex and sexuality. This article draws on findings from an evaluation of a pilot sexuality education programme, conducted in secondary schools in Victoria (Australia), to examine gender relations and the production of difference. Participating schools were required to incorporate teaching and learning experiences which normalised and affirmed sexual diversity and explored issues around HIV-related discrimination and homophobia. Two examples, gender, power and menstruation and heterosexism and homophobia, are used to analyse the language and practices students engage in as part of the process of achieving a (hetero)sexual identity. It is argued that HIV/AIDS education and sexuality education, more broadly defined, presents a particular challenge to dominant forms of masculinity and that programmes need to address gender, power and heterosexuality and its discontents if they are to have a positive impact on HIV-related discrimination and homophobia.     

Globalization and science education: The implications of science in the new economy

Science has seen considerable change in recent decades with the emergence of a new economic and sociopolitical contract between science, the nation, state, and private commercial interests. Generally regarded as having been precipitated by globalization, these changes in the sciences are beginning to be documented by a range of commentators. Clearly, science's changing forms hold profound implications for the development of science education. As there is little science education scholarship exploring the implications sciences' altering forms, this paper attempts to investigate the relationship at more depth. Detailing this relationship is important because it can help formulate new questions, and methods for their investigation, relevant to the work of science education in the newly global world. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 617–633, 2008     

‘Powerful knowledge’ curriculum theories and the case of physics

A stream of debate (including a previous special issue of this journal (25(1) 2014)) has made claims not just for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ as the framing underpinning of the school curriculum, but that subjects associated with disciplinary and disciplined knowledge forms have a particular power and that these characteristics are important to preserve in curriculum frameworks. This paper draws on a major Australian research project studying school and university physics in the context of these arguments to revisit the issue of the ‘discipline’ of physics and the curriculum logics for physics. Given that disciplines are social in origin and changing and expanding over time, can school curriculum be logically derived from the discipline to which they relate? Are questions about student engagement only questions about pedagogy and not curriculum? Does a focus on disciplinary knowledge mean that the role of school in forming identities and values is avoidable as a significant feature of what the curriculum does? The findings from the project are used both to illustrate and test these questions, and to challenge some over-simple assumptions about the verticality of this form of knowledge for education purposes.