This paper draws upon widely circulated didactic materials pertaining to gender equity produced for Australian secondary schools at two distinct points in time in order to consider historically and discursively how issues of concern shift, and how learning and teaching are differently framed by curriculum, disciplinary knowledge and pedagogical artefacts. It considers whether it is possible to identify ‘subject didactics’ for teaching and learning about gender equity, specifically gender-based violence (Ligozat, Amade-Escot, & Östman, 2015). It addresses both the micropractices of classrooms, as envisaged in lesson plans, resources, and handouts and wider frames of feminist theories, policies and politics. In attending to curricular interventions around gender equity and understandings of gendered violence, the paper illuminates how a persistent issue in Australian society is approached in materials produced for use in schools. It intersects with Taylor’s attention to both Bildung (2016, 3) as ‘developing, shaping, self-formation and inner cultivation’ and feminist utopian thinking (Taylor, this symposium), in that such interventions aim to reshape educational subjects (students and teachers), and imagine futures where gendered violence recedes as a societal and intimate problem. Thus the paper begins to consider what kinds of citizen-subjects are being formed through curriculum, and how social movements such as feminism impact on curriculum (Yates, 2016). The paper suggests that close comparative readings of educational materials at two pivotal points in time reveal significant shifts in curriculum location, disciplinary knowledge, learning and teaching, theoretical understandings, and particular framings of young people and teachers (Yates, 2009). The professional learning kit directed at whole school change No Fear: A Kit addressing Gender-based Violence (1995) was produced at what is arguably the peak moment of attention to gender equity in education, where a pedagogical assemblage of resources, experts, governments and policy reached into schools around the country (Gannon, 2016). Two decades later, at a time when gender equity policies have almost disappeared, the contemporary resource kit Respectful Relationships: Stepping out against gender-based violence (Ollis, 2016, for Victorian Government), despite what could be seen as a narrower remit with its focus on PDHPE Syllabus, has become enmeshed in a conservative political and media backlash, indicating how high the stakes have become. The presentation discusses how these two kits draw attention to gender-based violence as a mode of ‘knowing and being’. In doing so, it pedagogically mobilises and repositions school education as contributing to a more just and equitable society.

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