Debbie Ollis

‘I haven't changed bigots but …’: reflections on the impact of teacher professional learning in sexuality education

This paper reports on aspects of an Australian study into the factors and conditions that make it possible for secondary school health education teachers to include and affirm gender and sexual diversity in their teaching. The study examined the impact of a two-day intervention designed to prepare teachers to use a major new government-funded teaching and learning resource called Talking Sexual Health. The study found that whilst there was a range of personal and structural barriers inhibiting change, professional development and access to teaching and learning resources could indeed impact positively on teachers’ willingness and ability to include and affirm diverse sexualities in their health education programs.

‘I felt like I was watching porn’: the reality of preparing pre-service teachers to teach about sexual pleasure

Abstract Overwhelmingly, school-based sexuality education programmes focus on the prevention of infection, pregnancy and abuse, with little if any attention given to positive views of sexuality and rarely the inclusion of sex positive issues such as pleasure, intimacy and desire. This paper explores the experience of teaching about pleasure to pre-service health and physical education teachers as part of compulsory studies in a unit on sexuality education designed to prepare them to teach sexuality education in secondary schools. Drawing on the aims, theoretical framework, content and pedagogical structure of the unit, and data collected from 42, third-year pre-service teachers (PST) in Australia via surveys and student assessment, the paper provides some practical examples of what teaching about pleasure might look like in practice. It argues that with adequate preparation, a framework to celebrate sex and sexuality, a gender lens to examine normative discourses, and the opportunity for reflection, PST can develop the confidence, skill and willingness to include pedagogies of pleasure in their school-based work.

Lessons in building capacity in sexuality education using the health promoting school framework: From planning to implementation

Purpose – The health promoting school model is rarely implemented in relation to sexuality education. This paper reports on data collected as part of a five-year project designed to implement a health promoting and whole school approach to sexuality education in a five campus year 1-12 college in regional Victoria, Australia. Using a community engagement focus involving local and regional stakeholders and with a strong research into practice component, the project is primarily concerned with questions of capacity building, impact and sustainability as part of whole school change. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach – Using an action research design, data were collected from parents, students, teachers and key community stakeholders using a mixed methods approach involving surveys, interviews, document analysis and participant observation. Findings – Sexuality education has become a key school policy and has been implemented from years 1 to 9. Teachers and key support staff ha...

The power of feminist pedagogy in Australia: vagina shorts and the primary prevention of violence against women

ABSTRACT This paper examines the challenges of using feminist pedagogies in the development of school-based interventions to address Violence Against Women in Sexuality and Relationships Education in Australia. The focus of the paper is a feminist-based classroom program developed by a group of teachers, which was piloted in three secondary schools in Melbourne. The paper uses interview data from the teachers who taught in the program as well as the students who completed it to explore the feminist discourses embedded in the key program resources. The analysis shows that the program draws heavily on liberal and radical feminist approaches, both perceived by many gender scholars as having limited understandings of gender by comparison with post-modern approaches. The data also indicate that these approaches have the potential to elicit powerful responses from students, raising their awareness of sexism, objectification and sexual safety. The paper concludes by arguing that, while many scholars see post-modern approaches as conceptually superior, they are in practice extremely difficult to operationalize and therefore of limited practical use.

Where Does Violence Against Women and Girls Work Fit In? Exploring Spaces For Challenging Violence Within a Sex-Positive Framework in Schools

A growing body of research has highlighted that violence against young women and girls is a widespread problem (Burton et al., 1998; Barter et al., 2009; Maxwell and Aggleton, 2014a). Part of the reason it is so endemic and difficult to challenge is that violence in relationships is often normalised and justified by both young men and women (McCarry, 2010; Sundaram, 2013; Barter et al., 2015). Although issues of violence against women and girls have long been recognised and a wide range of intervention programmes funded globally (see Parkes, 2015, for instance), commitment to such work with young people has been intermittent and poorly funded in England (Maxwell, 2014b). In this chapter, we therefore wish to critically reect on debates surrounding the role of violence against women and girls (VAWG) prevention work in schools and, more specifically, examine how best to integrate it into the sex and relationships education curriculum (SRE). We focus on England and Australia here as this is where our recent work has been. In Australia, there have been ongoing eorts to integrate violence prevention work into school curricula at a state- and national-level, and we will draw on some examples to illustrate ways forward for VAWG prevention work in schools more broadly.

The Challenges, Contradictions and Possibilities of Teaching About Pornography in Sex and Relationships Education (SRE): The Australian Context

Pornography is an intensely personal, private and political issue: one capable of dividing sex and relationships educators. Over the past 20 years in Australia, there has been enormous progress in inclusive practices, acknowledgement of sexual activity and improvement in the provision of resources to support sex and relationships education (SRE) in schools. These positive changes have happened alongside an increasing concern about the high levels of violence against women (VAW). Increasingly, authors are pointing to the broader structural aspects of gender relations and inequality as implicated in the cause and the solution. Gender-based entitlements, power, objectification and status are now recognised as playing an instrumental role in the dynamics of VAW (Russo and Pirlott, 2006; Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth), 2014).

Incidental Moments: The Paradox of Belonging in Educational Spaces

Too often sex-gender-sexuality intersects with pedagogy and shapes the belonging of young people in ways that teachers do not see. This chapter shows how the unexpected presence of a jumping mat in a middle-class, middle-school, co-ed drama class leads the teacher to devise an impromptu, incidental activity that exposes the embodied nature of belonging in the pedagogical space of the classroom. It reveals that normative notions of sex-gender-sexuality and belonging are embedded and inherent in schooling practices and structures, privilege certain types of sex-sexuality-gendered belonging over others and influence the way teachers view and treat young people. The chapter exposes how this constellation of conflating conditions works to constitute young people as students who belong/do not belong and are successful/unsuccessful in any pedagogical moment.

“Change in schools it’s more like sort of turning an oil tanker”: Creating readiness for Health Promoting Schools

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to add to the evidence of best practice in the implementation of the Health Promoting Schools (HPS) framework by examining the process of creating readiness for change in a large international school in South-East Asia. Using a settings-based approach and guided by readiness for change theory the data collected reflects which factors were most influential in the decision of the leadership team (LT) to adopt a comprehensive HPS model. It follows the process of creating readiness in the early stages of adopting a HPS approach and captures the critical factors effecting leader’s beliefs and support for the program. Design/methodology/approach – This research is a case study of a large pre-K-12 international school in South-East Asia with over 1,800 students. A mixed methods qualitative approach is used including semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The participants are the 12 members of the LT. Findings – Readiness for change was established in the LT who a...