Session Information
07 SES 10 A, Different Pathways to Social Justice and Inclusiveness in Education
Paper Session
Contribution
The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights – i.e., sexual citizenship – has been inscribed in a political struggle against the injustice that has been victimized LGBT citizens historically (Fraser, 1997) and has been more and more legally and socially recognized around worldwide (Carneiro & Menezes, 2007). Europe has been one of these geopolitical places where that recognition has been more visible – the approbation of same-sex marriage in Ireland, in 2015, by popular vow, is an example – and the education (particularly the school education) has been one of the devices from which the promotion of respect for gender and sexual diversity have been addressed, specially through Sex Education; although it’s known that Sex Education projects sometimes tends to fail when it comes that specific issue (Allen, 2011).
Beyond political educational discourses against exclusion, structures of oppression continue to be reproduced in and by school. They mark, they violate and exclude young people with non-heteronormative genders and/or sexualities what represents, as Don Short (2009) says, a sexual injustice. The homophobic bullying, well documented by scientific literature (Rivers, 2012; UNESCO, 2012) – as a specific type of bullying that invokes a homophobic imaginary to interpolate violently young people in their gender behaviour, sometimes no mattering their “real” sexual orientation (Pascoe, 2007) – is one of these structures. Its assiduous and punctual presence in schools is one of the most common problem faced by LGBT youth (Takács, 2006) and make us questioning the modern paradigm of the democratic school as inclusive, plural, safe and fair.
At the same time, it is not possible to say that things are not getting better if we come in mind all LGBT visibility, from politics to mass media (McCormack, 2012). Homophobia tends to be more and more questioned what, by one hand, increases acceptation and, by another hand, makes emerge discourses of “political correctness” (Trappolin, Gasparini & Wintemute, 2012). By another words, our societies are exposed to – using a metaphor, once metaphors has a great heuristic value to explain reality (Gobbo, 2009) – a sexual paradox: we can’t say that nothing changed along the decades and, at the same time, definitively homophobia did not vanish at all; sometimes it only assumes other shapes. Beyond this scenery of contradiction – as Sofia Marques da Silva (2011) reminds us, contradiction is always part of educational settings –, one might ask: are young people accepting other young students with non-heteronormative genders and/or sexualities? If they so, in what conditions? In a broader sense: is Sex Education really working in schools, namely in the prevention against homophobic bullying?
That scenery of proclamation is on the basis of a PhD research about homophobic bullying with young students and teachers whose objectives are a) to understand the vision of young students and teachers about homophobic bullying and, by extensions, about non-heteronormative genders, sexualities and LGBT persons – young people, teachers, or not. This paper, in particular, focuses on their discourses bringing a diversity of voices when it comes to LGBT rights. Through their thoughts and attitudes it is possible to discuss how much inclusive or exclutory, just or unfair our education is or can be.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Allen, Louisa (2011). Young People and Sexuality Education. Rethinking Key Debates. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bloor, Michael; Franland, Jane; Thomas, Michelle & Robson, Kate (2001) Focus Groups in Social Research. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Carneiro, Nuno S., & Menezes, Isabel (2007). “From an oppressed citizenship to affirmative identities: Lesbian and gay political participation in Portugal.”, In Journal of Homosexuality, 53(3), 65-82. Cohen, Louis, Manion, Lawrence & Morrison, Keith (2007). Research Methods in Education. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (2005). Order of Things. London: Routledge. Fraser, Nancy (1997). Justice Interruptus. Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge. Gobbo, Francesca (2009) “On metaphors, everyday diversity and intercultural education: some further reflections”, In Intercultural Education, 20:4, pp. 321-332. McCormack, Mark (2012) The Declining Significance of Homophobia. How Teenage Boys are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality. New York: Oxford University Press. Pascoe, C. J. (2007). Dude, You’re a Fag. Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. California: University of California Press. Rivers, Ian (2012). Homophobic Bullying: Research and Theoretical Perspectives: Oxford University Press: Oxford. Santos, Sofia Almeida., Fonseca, Laura & Araújo, Helena Costa (2012). “Sex Education and the Views of Young People on Gender and Sexuality in Portuguese Schools.”. In Educação, Sociedade & Culturas, nº. 35, pp. 29-44. Short, Donn (2009). “Conversations in Equity and Social Justice: Constructing Safe Schools for Queer Youth”, In Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, vol.8. no.2, pp. 329 – 357. Silva, Sofia Marques. (2011). “Getting closer to the stranger: Methodological and conceptual challenges in educational contexts.”, In Tobias Werlr (Ed.), Heterogeneity: General didactics meets the stranger / Transformation of Education: European perspectives (pp. 55-64, Vol. I). Münster: Waxmann. Takács, Judit (2006). Social exclusion of young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Europe. Brussels & Amsterdam. ILGA-Europe & IGLYO. Trappolin, Luca, Gasparini, Alessandro & Wintemute, Robert (2012). Confronting Homophobia in Europe. Social and Legal Perspectives. Hart Publishing: Oxford and Portland, Oregon. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (2012). Review of Homophobic Bullying in Educational Institutions. Paris: UNESCO.
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