Context/ background

Gender is becoming a volatile, slippery category, un-pin-downable for some young people, a descriptor that seems increasingly inclined to escape beyond assumptions of binary, categorical gender associated with masculinity/ femininity; boy/girl, male/ female with their concomitant expectations, limitations, and privileges.  When young people are given opportunities to move beyond discourse to explore gender through non-verbal means, shimmering affects, materials, atmospherics, embodied capacities and potentialities begin to interfere with straightforward explanations of gender. And yet, at the same time that some young people are pushing beyond the bounds of gender, old and new patterns of gendered violence and exclusions continue to impact educational experiences of many.

Gender has recently been target of poltical attention in Australia, with particular concern expressed by conservative politicians and media. This has led to direct interference and blocking of research pertaining to gender and schooling. However, our research with historical policy actors indicates that even at the zenith of gender equity policy, political obstructionism was a common feature of gender equity work for policy actors and others seeking to create change. 

Research Questions

This paper reports on a component of the "Gender Majers: Changing Gender Equity Policies and Prac'ces in Australian Secondary Schooling" (ARCD) research conducted with ACT school students/teachers, NSW recent school graduates and historical policy actors who worked on GE policies in the past. (This paper focuses on the first two cohorts). Our key research questions are:  

1. How is gender articulated, experienced and understood by young people, teachers, school executives and policy makers?
2. How has gender-related policy for schools changed over time since 1990s? 
3. How can gender-related equity policy be reframed and refreshed for contenporary schooling?

This paper responds to Qs 1& 3).

Conceptual farmework

The focus on gender will contribute to international research in gender, sexualities and schooling. To reconsider gender as an organising category of social life, whilst acknowledging its theoretical destabilisation, demands conceptual elasticity, and new theoretical frameworks offer a route through this theoretical impasse. Such frameworks require meticulous attention to empirical contexts, which include, but do not privilege, the accounts of human participants, and that include, but are not limited to, rational explanations. They demand tracings of constitutive flows and relations of discourses, practices, feelings, things, bodies and relations in order to map how bodies are positioned in relation to each other and other bodies, including non-human ‘bodies’ such as bodies of knowledge, media and technologies, and including in reseach events such as focus groups and interviews. Thus our work draws on feminist poststructuralisms, queer theories and new materialisms in order to focus on gender as a continuous ‘becoming’ that operates within, but is not limited to, existing material, discursive and relational practices. 

This paper weaves through the accounts of gender and secondary schooling that young people and their teachers in ACT, and recent school leavers in NSW shared with researchers in the Gender Matters research project. It lingers with contradictions, failures and glimmers of inclusive localised practices where young people advocate for and begin to create gender safe and inclusive schools for all genders. 

Our research entailed empirical data collection at the Western Sydney University and in three ACT Colleges, and with a small group of students in a NSW school. We pivoted between face-to-face and online research procedures as the COVID-19 pandemic proceeded. We undertook focus groups with current school students (n=38), and recent school leavers who were current university students (n=60). We undertook interviews with current school teachers and school executive staff (n=20). University students and school students were also invited to participate in arts-based workshops where they further explored and created artefacts pertaining to their understandings of gender.

Our emerging findings suggest that gender justice needs to be open to, value and include young people of all genders, and to facilitate their leadership in this space. Student led and student voice initiatives are important to young people. School reform around gender issues needs to be research led rather than driven by knee-jerk to conservative pushback. Gender safe and inclusive schooling needs to be intersectorial & intersectional, and is facilitated by interlocking & mutually supportive policy frameworks that provide support schools where they need it. We also suggest that gender justice is facilitated when teachers are critical thinkers and critically reflective, and therefore able to ask questions such as: ‘Who is advantaged when I work this way? Who’s disadvantaged or not seen or heard in the curriculum or in pedagogy?’ Importantly, schools are authorising environments for change to happen.

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