Teaching Gender and Sexual Diversity in Aotearoa New Zealand: How Hierarchies and Surveillance Shape What is Possible

Abstract

The ways that gender and sexuality are included within secondary school teaching has implications for students’ understandings and ongoing wellbeing. In this research we interviewed nine educators who work in secondary schools in Te Wai Pounamu (the South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand) about how they approach gender and sexuality within their teaching and what informs these approaches. Foucauldian discourse analysis was used to analyse the interview data. Educators’ approaches to gender and sexuality were shaped by the subject(s) they teach, educational context, and subjectivity in relation to their own gender and sexuality. Educators were conscious of the systems of hierarchy and surveillance within education settings, which often limited their willingness to include content that explored gender and sexual diversity. These findings help inform efforts to create more inclusive school environments and suggest that educators need to feel safe including diverse discourses of gender and sexuality within their teaching.

Gender Pedagogy: A Feminist Approach to Teaching Sexist, Women Solidarity, and Power in the Patience Stone

“…The available specific instructional objective writes that the students will able to analyze the novel based on the perspective after learning the feminist theory to criticize the novel (Dyches et al, 2021;Jazadi et al, 2023;Vossoughi et al, 2021). However, concerning gender education, the specific instructional objective is then directed that the students will be able to compare the issues to the surrounding gender phenomena (Lekhsmi & Vitus, 2023) and promote teaching gender equality (Pedrajas & Nove, 2023;Gordon, 2020;Graham, 2022).…”