Abstract
This chapter engages with debates about addressing cultural and religious diversity in sexuality education. It argues Sharon Todd’s concept of radical plurality offers a reconfiguration of the pedagogical encounter for sexuality education students, by disrupting a view of cultural and religious diversity as a set of identity characteristics which inevitably engender classroom conflicts. Instead, the idea of a radical plurality sets a different pedagogical scene. It means encountering the pedagogical space of education beyond instrumental terms and as an unpredictable site, ‘where we cannot know … what the future holds and what subjects will unfold in its midst—subjects both unique and different, in relation’ (Todd, Stud Philos Educ 30: 511, 2010). As a new form of pedagogical ethics, it may constitute a radical proposition for the future of sexuality education.
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Notes
- 1.
Hereafter Aotearoa-NZ.
- 2.
Maori are the indigenous people of Aotearoa-NZ.
- 3.
In Aotearoa-NZ, Pakeha refers to non-Maori people of European descent.
- 4.
That these ideas are ‘new’ is contested. As Hoskins and Jones (2013) argue, perceptions of the world as an entangled continuity of the human–natural have always been part of traditional Maori thought in the Aotearoa-NZ context.
- 5.
In Aotearoa-NZ, ‘decile rankings’ indicate the extent to which a school draws its students from low socioeconomic communities, with decile 1 schools containing the highest proportion of these students and decile 10 the lowest (verbatim Ministry of Education 2009).
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Allen, L., Quinlivan, K. (2017). A Radical Plurality: Re-thinking Cultural and Religious Diversity in Sexuality Education. 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_9
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