From GSCS SIG Symposium: Exploring sexuality and gender diversity throughout school communities: Students, parents and educators
Where schools do a good job at celebrating diverse students, they create a better experience for everyone. However, the confluence of the papers from our Gender, Sexualities and Cultural Studies SIG session showed that this outcome is rare. When we planned this symposium we did so with the aim of holistically mapping the problems that emerge when schools and the institutions that influence them persist in a narrative of sameness- and to do this, we collectively presented four papers that related to the experiences of students, parents and educators, and the policing of gender and sexuality norms that they encountered at and around schools. In doing so, the panel demonstrated that schools continue to act as regulatory institutions that shape individual’s experiences of their gender and sexuality, often negatively.
Jackie Ullman’s research with more than 2300 gender and sexuality diverse students offered clear, empirical evidence that verbal and physical harassment that targeted gender and sexuality diversity in schools is still common, with more than half of the participants indicating that they heard homophobic language more than several times per week, and more than half of these saying that teachers ‘never’ or ‘hardly ever’ intervened in this. Indeed, 10% of participants indicated that teachers actively participated in this kind of marginalising language. Ullman’s research also found that teachers sometimes participated in victim-blaming, suggesting that students could avoid the violence that they were encountering if they only “could try to act more normal”. While these findings show the deep problems faced by gender and sexuality diverse young people at school, they also indicate that students do better at school when teachers are positive in the everyday about these identities- and this includes higher attendance, sense of connectedness, greater academic performance and increased self-concept. Unfortunately, the political context in NSW, including proposed legislation that may prohibit curricular performances such as these, could create a commitment to diminishing these outcomes.
Beyond the experiences of students, Tania Ferfolja and Victoria Rawlings each explored the experiences of parents that encountered the homo-cis-normative institution of the school. Ferfolja’s paper demonstrated the contemporary pressures and scrutiny that gender and sexuality diverse people are encountering, particularly in New South Wales. In her research with Jackie Ullman, Ferfolja captured how this scrutiny played out in the lives of parents of gender and sexuality diverse children, as they encountered schools that were often hostile or exclusionary to these identities. They found that these parents had to undertake time consuming and emotionally taxing labour to prepare their children for potential discrimination at school, monitor their safety, seek external support, educate educators, and agitate school leadership when problems arose. Emails, meetings, phone calls, and letters to schools were a common feature across the parent experience in this study, and were an outcome of a lack of trust in the schooling system broadly. In response to these contacts, parents indicated that they received advice that their children should oppress or deny their sexuality or gender identity at school in order to better fit in, demonstrating the strength of the institutional commitment to cis-heteronormativity.
Victoria Rawlings also explored the experiences of parents, though did not focus on students that were gender and sexuality diverse. Instead, her study included any parent that indicated that their child had encountered gendered violence at school. This included students that had been subjected to homophobia due to having same-sex parents, and those that encountered sexual harassment and misogyny. Her findings showed once more that parents expended significant labour in contacting schools about these events, and that this parental responsibility was borne from schools resisting the consideration of gender and/ or sexuality motivations behind violence- even when these experiences were encountered by multiple students.
Finally, Emily Gray explored the experiences of queer educators, who, within the normative confines of schools, are sometimes required to conceal their sexuality or gender identities. Her work emphasised the ways that normative assumptions about heterosexuality and (cis)gender dominate all aspects of school life, and are keenly felt by LGBTIQ+ educators. Whether someone can live near a school, whether they can disclose parts of their life when asked by students, whether their partners can attend events with them, and whether they can intervene in staff discussions about gender and sexuality are only some of the decisions faced by these teachers. This creates a struggle and constant renegotiation of teachers’ private and professional worlds.
In all these papers, the current political context in Australia and especially in New South Wales emerged as a significant challenge for teachers and schools to navigate when considering students’ wellbeing and school culture. Presenters noted that the moves in NSW to prevent discussions of or allowances for gender diverse young people, if successful, could have years or even decades of implications for school communities, and further entrench the already deep disadvantage faced by this group. In addition, the current media landscape continues to target teachers and schools that seek to redress this disadvantage through confronting harmful practices in their schools. As we continue to explore what conditions are possible in this climate, we also urge colleagues in education to push against these shifts, and in doing so, strive for greater inclusion and equity in and around schools.
From left to right: Tania Ferfolja is associate professor in the School of Education at Western Sydney University, Australia, a member of the Centre for Educational Research and a member of the NSW arm of the national Australia Forum for Sexuality, Education and Health. Her research centres on equity in education with a focus on gender and sexuality diversities in curricula, policy, pedagogy, schooling and employment practices in Australia and internationally. Emily Gray is a lecturer in Education Studies at RMIT’s School of Education. Her interests within both research and teaching are interdisciplinary and include sociology, cultural studies and education. She is particularly interested in questions of gender and sexuality and with how understandings these identity categories are lived by individuals and experienced within social institutions. Victoria Rawlings is a lecturer at the University of Sydney and her research focuses on the intersections between gender, sexuality, youth and social structures. Her PhD investigated the connections between gender, social structures and ‘bullying’ in two high schools in NSW. . in 2021, sge was awarded an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship to conduct research in partnership with school communities around cultures of gender and sexuality. This research aims to understand how schools can positively and proactively include all students. Jacqueline Ullman is an associate professor of Adolescent Development, Behaviour and Wellbeing at Western Sydney University, where she teaches in the areas of educational psychology, sociology of education, research design and research methods for preservice secondary teachers and educators looking to pursue continued education. Her primary research focus is in the area of diversity of genders and sexualities and associated inclusive educational practices. She is the AARE 2021 winner of the Raewyn Connell award.
