Event Details

'Corridor Cultures: Transforming school cultures of gender and sexuality in partnership with students, teachers, and school leaders'. Dr Victoria Rawlings, University of Sydney. Free online seminar. Hosted by Educational Research, Lancaster University.

Abstract

Gender and sexuality in schools, especially the recognition of their expansiveness and diversity, have been the focus of many media and moral panics in Australia and around the world. These panics have often placed educational institutions in the cross hairs of public anger or distrust in relation to public policy or shifting norms. Below the surface of these broad discursive and political reckonings is the individual school, where school leaders, teachers, students, parents, and the broader community work to make sense of identities, knowledge, and power at a local level. Historically, schools have not always done this work well. We know that for queer students, the surveillance and policing of gender and sexuality diversity has resulted in their poorer social, mental, educational, and physical health outcomes. In addition, troubles of sexual harassment and assault that stem from fixed and reductive gender norms are also rife within schools around the globe. How then, might schools engage with the necessarily intentional work of transforming their school cultures of gender and sexuality? What might it look like to examine both the formal and informal curricula of gender and sexuality in partnership with schools within a tumultuous global politic? This presentation focuses on a multi-year research project that partnered with three Australian schools to explore and improve their school cultures of gender and sexuality. Working with student and teacher co-researchers, the research design used both qualitative and qualitative methods to ponder hard questions and sit with uncomfortable truths about how norms and associated violence of gender and sexuality are re/produced in schools through institutional praxis and contextual influences.