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‘Getting It Right’? Producing Race and Gender in the Neoliberal School Based Sexuality Education Assemblage

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The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education

Abstract

This chapter explores the im/possibilities of engaging with knowledges about race and gender in school-based sexuality education within neo-liberalism. Dilemmas from an Australian and New Zealand research project investigating contemporary knowledges about religious and cultural difference in school-based sexuality education programmes are explored. Utilising de-colonial studies, queer, and post-humanist theories, I map the operation of a colonising and normative ‘getting it right’ assemblage operating across classroom and focus group sites, and what it produces. I explore some tentative post-humanist and de-colonising pedagogical approaches for engaging with and working the knowledges about race and gender that were produced in focus groups, and suggest some (admittedly challenging) possibilities that they could hold for ‘working’ sexuality education knowledges in schools within a neoliberal era.

I feel caught in what I see as the inherent ambivalence of education, we want to educate for change but we do so by ensuring what students will become … the paradox of education lies in its treatment of freedom. Wanting desperately for students to become free, while also wanting to form and mould them. What kind of freedom is this? … How can we live better in this aporia of education?.

Todd 2011c, p. 509

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The New Zealand Kauri College project was one of four case studies undertaken in the project with sexuality education teachers and 13–14 year-old students in two schools in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria, and in two suburban schools in the North and South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ).

  2. 2.

    Derrida’s (1992) notion of aporia recognises the double-edged and contradictory nature in which divergent responsibilities can create tensions when engaging with difference

  3. 3.

    In NZ, schools are ranked from deciles 1 to 10 according to the socioeconomic status of the community from which the young people are drawn, with 1 being the lowest. Kauri College is a decile 3 school, currently experiencing white flight (Gordon, forthcoming). The (2012) demographic make-up of the school was NZ European/Pākehā (55 %), Māori (30 %), Pasifika (10 %), Asian (3 %), and other ethnicities (2 %). While the students were identified demographically in these ways, for the purposes of participating in the project, most of them felt ambivalent about personally identifying themselves as belonging to those racial groups, although for some of them, these feelings shifted slightly over the course of the study.

  4. 4.

    Preliminary individual face-to-face video-recorded interviews (1) and regular focus group interviews (2011 [2] and in 2012 [6]) were conducted with the students. Video-recorded participant observations of sexuality education units in the students’ Health classes were undertaken in 2011 (5) and in 2012 (13). Artefacts in the form of classroom resources and students’ notes and drawings were collected as data. Two sets of fieldnotes were written by the researcher in 2011 (5) and in 2012 (13). While the two-year project finished in 2012, I have extended the case study and conducted focus group interviews in 2014 (1), and 2015 (1 to date). Informed ethical consent was gained from the students and the teachers participating in the initial case study, and the follow up to it. Students have provided ongoing feedback on the findings to date. Pseudonyms have been used to protect the confidentiality of the students, teacher, and school.

  5. 5.

    In the early stages of the project, the camera largely absents the bodies of the girls (Mazzei 2007), at their request—they didn’t like it being trained on them so closely, felt distinctly uncomfortable when it was, and tended to avoid looking at it. This lessened of the course of the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Educational Studies and Leadership, College of Education, Health and Human Development, University of Canterbury, Dovedale Avenue, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Kathleen Quinlivan

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  1. Kathleen Quinlivan
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Louisa Allen

  2. School of Sociology Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Mary Lou Rasmussen

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Quinlivan, K. (2017). ‘Getting It Right’? Producing Race and Gender in the Neoliberal School Based Sexuality Education Assemblage. In: Allen, L., Rasmussen, M.L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40033-8_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40033-8_19

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