Introduction

I’ve witnessed firsthand some of the culture and behaviours that circulate through schools, and I think that to progress we need to change attitudes around women, gender, and sexuality in schools. I can understand the origin of these behaviours as well as why they arise and how we might possibly change them (Year 10 student, Hillcrest School)

Sometimes I think about the little things that are used to define us. The little differences that some people don’t even notice. But I do. I noticed when I walked into the boys change rooms… and I realised that there was a… lock on the door. Every athlete in the female program knows that there is a code that we have to enter to get into our change rooms. We all just assumed it’d be the same for the boys, so why is it different?... What makes us different? Are they condoning bad behaviour? Or simply accepting our grim reality? (Year 11 Student, Tramway School)

To invite young people to participate alongside academics as co-researchers is not a novel practice, but nor is it common. Though children and young people have long been the subject/s of research, participation protocols almost always position researchers (adults) as powerful experts, directing the study of a significantly different population to themselves. The cost of these initiatives to research integrity, impact and rigour has been increasingly captured over the last several decades. Academics have begun to acknowledge that scholar-centred positionality is not politically nor socially neutral, and that its sustenance impacts the potential for research to impact beyond the walls of the academy (Flexner et al., 2021).

‘Doing research’ naturally positions the investigator as the driver or conductor, and participants as those being researched, though contemporary practices have commenced an undoing of this hierarchy through a re-imagining of these roles. In public health initiatives, for example, methods of Community-Based Participatory Research or Patient and Public Involvement (Langhout & Thomas, 2010) have been used to enable members of the researched community to participate in each step of the research process, from defining the research topic to disseminating the results (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2008). Agentic inclusions of community members are justified by results; studies that galvanise participants in the research process benefits from culturally contextual input that is necessary to represent the complex worlds of researched communities (Rawlings & McDermott, 2021). This is particularly crucial for individuals and groups that have been minoritised through social, cultural, or political mechanisms such as First Nations peoples (Clapham et al., 2021; Thorpe et al., 2021). As a knowledge-making or affirming process, research can function to reproduce power inequities through misusing theoretical frameworks or misunderstanding cultural or contextual elements (Flexner et al., 2021). Australian research, for example, informed by legacies of British colonialism, has previously cast damaging and incorrect tropes around First Nations Peoples that aimed to diminish and control Aboriginal lives (Riley, 2021). Genuine consultation with community members can disrupt these destructive practices when reflective, respectful and dialogic approaches are embedded in research praxis.

Though research has broadly shifted to a more equitable footing for researchers and participants, certain constellations of research questions, participants and socio-political contexts produce greater challenges for conducting research alongside community members than others. Structural productions of power and inequities facilitate research participation of some more than others. One such group traditionally constructed as less capable or valuable to contribute to research leadership is children and young people (Jacquez et al., 2013) due to their construction as inferior, dependant and/ or vulnerable (Velardo & Drummond, 2017). While this ‘common-sense’ construction of their abilities and capacities might be considered as particularly pertinent when considered against the rigours of academic research, the exclusion of children and youth as researchers cannot be attributed wholly to scholars. Other institutions and processes that govern research processes directly and indirectly also play a substantial role in positioning these potential contributors on the margins.

This paper aims to detail some of these forces and articulate a rationale for Community-Led Research (CLR) in response to them, particularly as it relates to youth communities and research on gender, sexuality and schooling. In doing so, this paper will demonstrate the power of youth contributions to this kind of research. As such, the following sections detail some of the contextual (institutional, political, historical and legislative) features of the constellations of youth, gender, sex and sexuality that function to position youth as necessary outsiders to research. Following this, I detail CLR as a methodological response to these challenges as utilised in a project with two schooling communities over a substantial period. By lingering on the words of student co-researchers and ethnographic reflections from the first year of this three-year research project, this paper demonstrates the readiness, knowledge, and language that young people have to contribute to research around gender, sexuality and research within their school communities, and relatedly, their potential to contribute to meaningful investigation and reflection on their schools’ cultural worlds. I also reflect on some of the pertinent challenges, both ethical and procedural, that have emerged in the project in these early stages. While teachers are also crucial in the co-researching process, and highly influential agents in school communities, this article focuses on students to give weight to the nexus of youth, gender and sexuality in the current research and political context.

While research that is undertaken in partnership with communities may take the form of a co-authored paper, the aims of this paper sit more closely with defining and justifying the architecture of the methodology. As such, I present this paper from the singular lead researcher perspective, recording some of the challenges and opportunities that other researchers taking up a co-research approach might encounter. In the future, I look forward to publishing alongside student and teacher co-researchers.

Ethics committees and the construction of youth as ‘at risk’

A key institution that all researchers must engage with when considering involving young people as participants or co-researchers is that of the ethics committee. Well-founded historical commitments of ethics committees to protect research participants have now been demonstrated to be particularly harmful to scholarly work with young people around ‘difficult’ knowledge (Ollis et al., 2019; Robinson, 2008). Specifically, these committees have track records of blocking, substantially delaying or altering commitments to working with young people in the name of protection around topics defined as risky or difficult (Johnson et al., 2020). Determining what knowledge is ‘difficult’ is based both on the constructions of subjects who might encounter it and its distance or proximity to their constructed realities. Certain knowledge can be constructed as problematic to certain bodies or minds, certain discourse as dangerous or problematic to categories of identities. Matters of sex, gender and sexuality have been historically held at a distance from children and young people, and as such, research that invites them to participate in dialogue about these topics is often automatically classed as ‘high risk’ by ethics committees, and subsequently, researchers encounter far greater challenges to undertake this work. This artificial distancing between the subjectivities of young people and sex, gender and sexuality are deeply informed by traditions of viewing children and young people’s knowledge of them as the responsibility of the family (Robinson, 2008), and as children and young people as being naturally separate from queerness (Greteman, 2018).

Of course, young people are anything but removed from the lived and felt encounters with meanings around sex, gender and sexuality. As Gilbert and colleagues have noted, stories of gender and sexuality are personal, relational, shared and rich in the lives of young people. They represent desire, belonging, yearning, pleasure and possibility, alongside more commonly represented research narratives of exclusion and shame (Gilbert et al., 2018). Young people commonly undertake intimate and social negotiations of gender, sex and sexuality that are constituted through economic, psychological, erotic and political landscapes, yet too often these stories remain uncaptured in research (Stiegler, in press). As such, the complexity of their social, gendered and sexualised worlds as well as how they navigate these in innumerable ways is often neglected from contemporary research.

Youth, schooling, sexuality and gender: political and institutional drivers of separation

Beyond ethics committees, other political and social mechanisms further undermine the potential for children and youth to take part in critical discussions about gender and sexuality. Arguably, there is no site where these are more contested than the school. Where various populations and cross-sections of people study, socialise and explore their worlds, but where these people are always young, messages about gender and sexuality are heavily scrutinised, politicised and regulated in the school (Epstein, 2000; Epstein & Johnson, 1998; Gonick & Conrads, 2022; Mac an Ghaill, 1994). Opportunities to conduct research in these spaces are scarce due to the complexities not only of ethical apprehensions but also of varying political opposition across time (Ferfolja & Ullman, 2020). In the last five years, for example, legislative movements in the United States have repeatedly and insistently sought to demarcate gender and sexuality diversity as necessarily separate from children and young people through bills like ‘Don’t say gay’ (Florida) (Kline et al., 2022) or school book bans that censor themes centred on race, history, sexuality and gender affecting students and teachers most prominently in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah and South Carolina (Meehan & Friedman, 2023). These attacks are not limited to environments that only young people occupy, instead signalling far broader attacks on sexuality and gender diversity across contemporary society. A conservative lobbyist recently suggested that gender diversity should be ‘eradicated from public life entirely’ (Wade & Reis, 2023), a statement with notes of genocidal intent. At the time of writing, the American Civil Liberties Union is tracking more than 470 bills that target the rights of LGBTIQ + people across the United States (American Civil Liberties Union, 2023).

While accruing less global media coverage, Australia has had no shortage of political contestations coupled with high-media coverage and associated public debate about gender and sexuality across the last decade. The Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey (also known as the marriage equality plebiscite) invited every registered voter to vote in a non-binding postal survey about whether marriage law should be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry, a process that resulted in public debate about the legitimacy of queer lives (Wallace et al., 2021). This was both preceded and followed by debates about the Safe Schools program which provided teacher training to support students who were gender and sexuality diverse and, following a sustained media campaign to drive a moral panic, was subsequently defunded (Rawlings & Loveday, 2021). More recently, the NSW parliament funded a public inquiry and report into a proposed ‘Parental Rights Bill’ (Portfolio Committee No. 3 – Education, 2021), which if passed would have undermined the rights of gender-diverse students and their families through a range of measures including, but not limited to preventing discussions of gender diversity in the classroom; forcing schools to disclose any information about gender diversity shared at school to parents; refusing the rights of students to change names, pronouns or uniform choices without parental permission; and restricting sport participation to align with sex assigned at birth. This bill emerged from what Ferfolja and Ullman have termed a ‘culture of limitation’ which ‘subjugates diverse peoples and renders precarious the hard-won gains towards equity, particularly by sexuality and gender-diverse communities and their allies’ (Ferfolja & Ullman, 2020, p. 3). Such polemic and hyperbolic public ‘debates’ and subsequent moral panics around the existence, recognition, inclusion and celebration of gender and sexuality diverse people in society are an outcome of this culture (Ferfolja & Ullman, 2020), fuelled by conservative politicians, religious lobby groups, and right-wing, mainstream media who use the topic to create headlines (Baird & Reynolds, 2021; Ferfolja & Ullman, 2020; Rawlings & Loveday, 2021).

A result of these discursive positionings of young people is not only a common-sense recognition of their distance from sexuality and education, but also a necessarily limited theorisation of school violence. As there is a lack of discursive sticking between gender and sexuality, schooling and young people, it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about vectors of violence within this constellation of identities and issues. Scholars who are committed to improving the social and cultural conditions of children and young people in relation to gendered violence have often conducted this work within the institutionally palatable frames of ‘bullying’, which remains the most dominant framing of school violence for governments, politicians and policymakers (Lohmeyer & Threadgold, 2023; Rawlings, 2021). This framing relies on overly prescriptive criteria to designate acts as ‘intentional’, ‘repetitive’ and the actors having an ‘imbalance of power’ (Kofoed & Staksrud, 2019; Walton, 2011). Over the last two decades, there has been an ongoing and persistent call from poststructural researchers to critically dismantle and re-constitute the bullying ‘discourse’ in order to take account of power and oppression (Rawlings, 2017, 2019; Ringrose & Renold, 2010; Schott, 2014). An expansive recognition of violence resists the call to quantify bullying as always and only consisting of the three elements, and instead compels a recognition of the oppressive power in the related systems of patriarchy, white supremacy, cisnormativity and heteronormativity. It also, importantly, resists the typecasting and pathos associated with the ‘bully’, ‘victim’, ‘mean girl’ and ‘tough, violent boy’; gendered assignations that have created complex and damaging outcomes for young people in assessments of school violence (Bouchard et al., 2018; Carrera-Fernández et al., 2016; Forsberg, 2017, 2021; Ringrose & Renold, 2010).

The variety of social and institutional drivers that frame gender, sexuality, youth and violence in research, public discourse and politics have therefore traditionally marginalised the voices and experiences of young people. By separating young people from formal talk and research about gender, sex and sexuality, there is a substantive cost to the workings of schools, the lives of young people and quality of research. An insistence on the necessity of their separation merely hides the reality of their complex and constant intersection rather than eradicating it. By suggesting that gender and sexuality (particularly gender and sexuality that fall outside of strict, hetero- and cisnormative binaries) are not matters that feature in the lives of young people and are instead dangerous incursions, proponents of these discourses reduce the capability for generating and sharing knowledge. Research initiatives that take on this difficult task have the potential to resist and disrupt ongoing efforts to sterilise young people with heteronormative, cisnormative, and asexual ascriptions and to demonstrate the richness of gender and sexuality in their lives. In doing so, studies that integrate young people in each stage of the research present opportunities for broader legitimation of youth subjectivity, agency and power-making, and undoing the bonds between gender and sexuality and ‘difficult’ knowledge.

Methodology: the corridor cultures approach to Community-Led Research

The project that I write about here, currently called ‘Corridor Cultures’, aims to investigate and positively influence school cultures of gender and sexuality. Very broadly, the project investigates how norms and constructed meanings of gender and sexuality circulate and are disrupted in school communities, both through institutional machinations and through the broader social and cultural contexts that constitute those who interact with these spaces. This research is mixed method, including the use of a whole-school questionnaire at the start and conclusion of the project (approximately 18 months apart), focus groups with students and teachers, and ethnographic research throughout. At Hillcrest and Tramway, the two schools that constitute this article, so far more than 2000 students have taken part in the whole-school questionnaires, and more than 40 students have taken part in 8 focus groups. As such, substantial qualitative and quantitative data have been generated through the project, and these data are co-analysed by co-researchers at key times. Crucially, co-researchers do not compare data nor see data that are from the other school—instead, they focus particularly on their own school and act as site experts. This strategy thwarts many co-researcher (and school executive) instincts to compare which school is doing ‘better’, a reductive question when comparing two different institutions. The project also commits to resourcing areas of need for the school that come through in data. For example, if a participant school demonstrates that teachers rarely step in when homophobic or transphobic language is used around them, the project can resource professional development sessions to empower teachers to do this.

Community-based researchers are a crucial component of this project and include both teachers and students (between three and five of each at three partner schools). Throughout the project engagement, these co-researchers inform the types of questions asked by the project and how they might be asked (adjusting questionnaire items, devising focus group questions); initiate and participate in ethnographic research; assist in the analysis of data; and design and execute other activities that emerge in the rather flexible and open research design. CLR as a methodology was chosen for this project in response to former iterations of bullying research and their shortfalls detailed to some extent above. These have historically tended towards ubiquitous solutions for a range of different schooling communities, regardless of differences in geographic location, or the social, cultural, racial, religious, or economic configurations of the school and its community. As a response, the methodology that constitutes Corridor Cultures was devised in line with more recent poststructural research, affirming that gendered violence is not static but dynamic, manifesting differently according to the complex configurations of each community and shifting across time and space. Taking this approach affirms that while there may be some similarities between schools, each faces different behaviours, motivations, and enactments of violence and therefore requires different solutions (Horton, 2011; Sundaram, 2014). Working closely with students and teachers as co-researchers embeds their lived expertise and knowledge of their specific school contexts into scholarship and both short- and long-term solutions. It also, importantly, affirms that young people can and should be active participants in talking about contemporary realities of gender and sexuality in their schooling lives and beyond. This approach emphasises that utilising active, informed, and informing agents interrupts dominant research discourses and addresses absences in discussion (Groundwater-Smith et al., 2015). In turn, the often hidden knowledge of cultural practices and their catalysts emerge, and the research approach can be continually adjusted to better encapsulate the language and culture of the school and community in question (Graham et al., 2017).

While Community-Led Research methodologies are explicably scarce in the field of youth studies around gender and sexuality, there are good examples of youth informing research outside of schools in fields of sexual and reproductive health (Yang & MacEntee, 2015), relationships and sexuality education, gender equity (Closson et al., 2023), gender-based violence (Varjavandi, 2017) and self-harm and suicide as they relate to sexuality and gender minority status (Jones, 2011; Rawlings & McDermott, 2021). Youth-led participatory research programs in which young people are trained to identify major concerns in their communities, conduct research to understand the nature of the problems and take leadership in influencing policies and decisions to enhance the conditions in which they and their peers live, have been found to be particularly effective (Bulanda et al., 2013). Expanding recruitment, informing methods to be more respectful and responsive to communities and increasing the beneficence of research through informing research dissemination and impact activities are just some of the benefits of utilising CLR. However, in the space of schools where young people’s rights and lives are hotly contested under discursive regimes of ‘protection’, ‘wokeness’ and references to teachers as radical conspirators (Ferfolja & Ullman, 2020, p. 82), the potential for research to invite school students to contribute to research around gender and sexuality is significantly curtailed. Helpfully, where it is possible, CLR dilutes potential nefarious aspersions about researchers and universities ‘agendas’ through its demonstration of the embeddedness of communities, making it a methodology that may offer compelling rebuttal to conservative scepticism.

Ethics approval for this project was obtained from the University of Sydney HREC following a significant period of correspondence and clarifications. This approval is contingent on modifications being made when alterations to methods take place, which represents one of the time challenges of CLR, but also the responsiveness and willingness for ethics committees to support this form of research. Unfortunately, government school ethics committees did not provide approval for this project to go ahead in public schools, perhaps unsurprising in this ‘culture of limitation’ (Ferfolja & Ullman, 2020). As such, independent schools were approached to participate. Hillcrest and TramwayFootnote 1 were two of the schools that agreed to take part, each with principals that gave the final approval following significant consultation and review of the project’s aims and procedures.

Recruitment and workshops

In Corridor Cultures, co-researchers participate in a range of activities through the two-to-three-year fieldwork phase. All students at participating schools (in New South Wales and Victoria) in Years 7–12 were informed about the project, questionnaire and co-researcher opportunities at the project commencement. Within this, communication was an invitation to submit an expression of interest to become a co-researcher via an embedded link. Using the Qualtrics platform, this required basic information such as year level, name and contact information. The expression of interest also invited responses to two questions, one that asked why the applicant wished to work as a co-researcher and another about how they might describe themselves. Respondents were able to submit their responses and/or additional detail in whatever form they liked. Some stayed with traditional text entries, and others submitted photos, videos or audio files. Others still submitted projects or class work including poetry and posters.

At Hillcrest School, a boys’ school of around 1000 students, more than 80 students submitted co-researcher applications, while at Tramway School, a co-educational school of around 2000 students just over 60 students submitted the same. This level of interest was welcome but unanticipated and created substantial difficulties in determining a final group. The aim was to select a diverse yet harmonious group- something not easily done from (largely) short form written applications. Attempting to understand why applicants had chosen to participate was a core part of determining the group, though challenging due to the variety of reasons articulated, for example subject (‘I am interested in psychology’ featured from multiple applicants) or skill focuses (suggesting they enjoyed ‘looking at and analysing results and tables’). Others still told personal stories of themselves, their friends or family who had transitioned their gender either socially, medically or both, and how various institutions had responded. Optimism and passion also commonly featured in articulations of hopes for their loved ones, for students in the future year groups and for their broader school community. Many, for example, included aspirations for the research that came from their own insights, as well as reflections on their potential to help drive the research. Hamish, a Year 10 student at Hillcrest and eventual co-researcher, wrote:

I would like to be a co-researcher in the Corridor Cultures project as I want to help change Hillcrest’s Culture. I have been in the school since year 5 and have noticed the dominant "Mans" culture. While there are many great aspects to being a student at Hillcrest I think there is definitely more that can be done to make people more accepting of others.

One way I believe this could be done is through the survey and getting a better understanding of why people view differences negatively. I am confident with numbers and statistics and can be an asset to the research project when looking at data.

Co-researching in this project was conceptualised as ideally promoting dialogue between different perspectives; however, it was also crucial to ensure that co-researchers could participate in interchange that did not entertain or promote subjugating discourses of oppression. Balancing these two commitments was a promise of the methodology, so after obtaining consent from students and parents, early workshops focused on research team building and an examination of the project’s theoretical grounding through exploring the research questions and project aims. In addition, we reviewed the ethical components of the study, agreeing that sessions would be audio-recorded, that I and they could make ethnographic notes, and that they might intermittently contribute written reflections, photographs or other materials that they reviewed as relevant, as well as their right to review their participation and withdraw at any time. We continue to regularly ‘check in’ about participation, with broad discussions of how it feels as a co-researcher.

Co-researchers reviewed the questionnaire early in these meetings, providing an opportunity to imagine what kind of data might be possible to obtain from quantitative and subsequent qualitative data collection activities. They also devised focus group questions from the quantitative data and collaboratively analysed the qualitative data. Overall, in the first year of the study, student co-researchers each contributed around 20–30 h of time to the project, usually scheduled outside of class time, but sometimes, with the school’s help and parental permission in place, during class time. Scheduling meetings was often challenging due to extracurricular commitments or assessments and would be impossible without the enthusiasm and assistance offered by school personnel. To tangibly acknowledge their invaluable expertise and contributions to the research, student co-researchers were each paid $20 per hour of their work through gift cards, an aspect of this project that all were thrilled about. The practice of remunerating co-researchers is becoming more common in approaches to CLR in recognition of their substantial input into projects.

The final groups at Hillcrest and Tramway consisted of five students from between years 8 and 11, though both schools had students from all year groups apply. At Hillcrest, no students identified themselves as queer within the group settings, but at Tramway, the group included a transgender student and a bisexual student. At Tramway, the vast majority of applications were from girls, but rather than sustaining this proportion in the final group, I selected three girls and two boys. This was important for several reasons, but especially to include researchers that had encountered masculinity and femininity from within the experience of being constituted as male. Where possible, I also prioritised racialised applicants and those that indicated other intersectionalities in their applications, though at both schools little diversity emerged in written reflections or in the broader population—a feature of their status as selective by class and wealth.

Findings and discussion: the unexpected research turns when travelling with co-researchers

Establishing a generative co-researcher group requires an environment where researchers can offer feedback, ask questions, raise critiques, share stories and indeed, where they can have fun. While traditional research may have aims of neutrality, co-researching around gender and sexuality with young people necessitates vulnerability, and it is only from this that it can produce overt fun, pride, sadness, regret and other emotional or affective outcomes (Wright et al., 2021). To ensure that this is possible, a crucial component of CLR especially with young people is the explicit building of relationships between those carrying out research together. These relationships can be messy and challenging but must have trust at their centre to allow researchers to share their genuine contributions (Reis et al., 2017).

At both Hillcrest and Tramway, building group spaces where vulnerability and sharing are possible has generated substantial benefits, with suggestions and efforts to adjust and adapt the research strategy that I did not anticipate. One of the challenges of co-researching is adjusting the agenda at short notice, considering and supporting co-researcher suggestions despite their novelty and divergence from regular programming or intended agendas. At Hillcrest, for example, on reviewing the questionnaire, students indicated that there were going to be many students who would ‘take the piss’ and respond to questions with ‘joke’ or mischievous responses. In this moment, they tested their power relationship with me, assessing how much power and control I might be willing to cede. They were ready for me to be upset by their assertions that my work might not be taken seriously, or even that they were using unacceptable language (in ‘taking the piss’), both moments that might test the balance of our relationship and my level of control (Purdy & Spears, 2020). To respond, I openly expressed interest and thanks, then inquired into their thoughts further, using some of their language to reflect my acceptance of their potential transgression. Interpreting these actions as permission (which they were), and understanding their compatriots more than I did, they articulated that they wished to decrease invalid responses through building a sense of importance of the research in the student body. To encourage their classmates to ‘take it seriously’, they suggested that we build in an explicit invitation to do so from someone with expansive social capital, their school captain. Working with staff, we arranged a time for the school captain to address the school in a video. The co-researchers chose the location and aesthetics and we worked together to write a script. The school captain was enthusiastic to contribute and once I had travelled to the school with my holiday camera and plugged in a lapel microphone, he starred in his school blazer, talking about how important the research was and encouraging all students to answer honestly. In his conclusion, he invited the co-researchers into the shot, with the last, unscripted line of his dialogue belting a motivational call to action: ‘Get around these boys. These are the kings’. It was not lost on me how important this moment was for the co-researchers, all younger, suddenly validated and publicly celebrated for their work in gender and sexuality justice by a student leader that they deeply admired. This was concurrently important for the study, offering immediate cultural work and positive messaging to promote critical dialogue about gender and sexuality in the student community. As shown in the school assembly the following week (post-edit), the video was the first moment that the students had been publicly identified as co-researchers, coupled with a student that many deeply respected. While it’s impossible to know how many mischievous responses this prevented, there were incredibly low numbers of invalid responses in the questionnaire, with only around 20 of 800 overtly ‘taking the piss’. Judging from the broader data at Hillcrest that demonstrated significant discomfort around gender and sexuality diversity and dialogue, this intervention designed by co-researchers is likely to have promoted greater engagement for student participants.

Co-researcher efforts were not restricted to recruitment. At both Hillcrest and Tramway, student co-researchers requested to facilitate focus groups with other students. Recognising the challenges of facilitating quality focus groups, I was initially resistant. I took a moment to ask why they thought it would work for the project, and they advised me (in a careful and sensitive way), that the focus groups would work best with ‘younger’ facilitators. I invited them to write down what they thought the benefits and challenges of co-researcher focus group facilitation might be:

… students feel more comfortable amongst other students to speak freely than they do with teachers or adults. In addition, the focus groups can be run more effectively as the co-researcher group offers the perspective of the students and would be able to ask the questions in the tone and wording that would most appeal to students. Another reason would be that students are often mistrusting or less receptive to strangers. (Julian, Hillcrest School)

Julian’s words clearly indicated my position as researcher-stranger, an outsider who doesn’t walk in the hallways of Hillcrest, nor wear its uniform, or embody the formal and informal rules of the space. He recognised the strength of the student co-researchers as insiders, enabling interactions with other students that I might not be able to elicit. This represented the constitution of me as the adult/ lead researcher as I acted in their experience of the project. While we did not hold any explicit conversations about my power or its difference to theirs, these moments illuminated me as the outsider to them (which I always would be). In conjunction with moments like the ‘taking the piss’ conversation, this power arrangement could be discursively questioned at any time, and mutually reconstituted through the interactions that followed. Utilising a CLR approach, therefore, requires researchers to constantly imagine how and when to empower co-researchers, which is of course a function of the embedded inequality in the project. Accordingly, Julian’s reflection also referred to the challenges of student co-researcher roles as focus group facilitators, and the potential for partnership with me as an outsider:

We aren’t fully qualified like Vic is. We may accidentally shift the questions meaning. Peoples personal thoughts on members of the coresearcher team may make them feel less comfortable.

Making space for the co-researchers to reflect on the possibilities and challenges of their facilitation and encountering these expansive responses demonstrated their abilities for undertaking research, and as such, I provided them with some training on focus group facilitation. This provision was a function of our power inequality, but a moment for student empowerment. Following the training, each co-researcher worked in a pair or trio, facilitating at least two focus groups alongside me. This process represented not only their hopes for undertaking research, but their efforts and understanding of the expertise and experience needed to do so. One of the focus groups was particularly emotional, with student participants expressing deep concerns about Hillcrest, confronting anecdotes, and substantial affect about their encounters with gender and sexuality norms at school. One participant expressed that he was surprised that he had survived his time at Hillcrest due to the problematic and often violent behaviours towards him as a perceptibly queer person, a contribution that the co-researchers found shocking and upsetting. Hamish and Julian were the facilitators of that group and we sat together for around twenty minutes after its conclusion, then invited the other co-researchers to join us to debrief further. As the six of us sat together, they reflected on what that experience had meant to them. There was quite a bit of silence, but also some shared reflections on how many of the feelings expressed by the group were often unspeakable in the broader life and friendships of the co-researchers. Sitting together and sharing their feelings, the co-researchers talked about how difficult the experiences of some students were, and how these difficulties and traumas were often hidden but always a result of a problematic socio-cultural assemblage, contributed to by casual homophobia, transphobia, racism and antisemitism. They shared their immediate denial at the focus group utterance which was fuelled by their optimism about their school community, but then a quick transformation to recognition and sadness. The facilitation of the focus group was a crucial moment in vulnerability and cultural pedagogy that opened up new conversations between the student co-researchers about gender, sexuality, race, culture and inequality within their own lives and across the student body. It also catalysed new conversations about their own privilege in the school community, and the ways in which the homophobia and transphobia that circulated in the school would fall more heavily on queer students. These were revelations for the co-researchers, and I was privileged to sit alongside them as they recognised the ways that power circulated around them.

While these events were transformative, moments like these are those that ethics committees, researchers, educators and parents may be concerned about or resistant to enabling in CLR. As a methodology that is less predictable, more collaborative, and more flexible, CLR opens opportunities for unplanned research encounters that empower co-researchers and invite them into new perspectives and worlds. Working with this unknowability is fundamental to the CLR approach (Purdy & Spears, 2020), though it also exposes researchers to critical moments and requires expansive repertoires of planning and responses to manage. CLR may open young people to potentially distressing conversations, realisations and traumas, as well as difficult configurations of social meanings, potentially coupled with social discipline. In spaces like Hillcrest, which data indicated to sustain and produce substantial moments of homophobia, gender policing and misogyny, it could be potentially dangerous for students who opt in to participate in a project like this. This was coupled with their will and decision to ‘go public’ as co-researchers, filming a video that was watched by all at the school and potentially exposing them to social policing. These possibilities never sit easily with me as a researcher, and there are times that I found myself wondering whether I might need to step in and protect those in the group. What might it mean that their involvement in the project might lead to these young people being subjected to violence? Could this be warranted or justified by the project’s broader aim to discuss and address gendered violence in their school? Or might it reduce their choice and agency to participate in these discussions. These very real concerns were sometimes addressed by the co-researchers in our debriefs and workshops together. As we sat together after the focus group, Julian spoke up: ‘My friends keep asking me, “why are you doing that project?”, but this is the best thing I’ve ever done at school’. From a young man deeply embedded in the sporting life of the school, seemingly comfortable within a group of friends, this was a stunning admission. Hamish, too, wrote to me a few days later about the experience:

I was quite disturbed after the focus group on Friday but I talked to Jules about it a bit and after settling into my normal routine I feel much better about it. I think it was an invaluable experience and my only regret would be I didn't ask as many questions as Jules (help guide the conversation more). I was thankful that I got to be a part of this particular group and it has helped me realise the importance of the project.

For Hamish, the disturbance goes hand in hand with the ‘invaluable experience’ of being in the focus group and participating in the discussion. Indeed, all student co-researchers at Hillcrest were affectively influenced by focus groups, indicated by their persistent, continuing recommendation for school initiatives to include opportunities for ‘real chat’—small group conversations about difficult topics like gender, class, sexuality, race, disability and religion. This recommendation has been actively shaped by their encounters in focus groups, demonstrating how deeply they value the opportunity to share experiences that matter, feelings, thoughts and hopes with their peers.

While ethics committees may often be focused on the risk to young people, there is no doubt that there are also substantial rewards that emerge from co-researching, including a sense of purpose around contributing to the work. This was clear from the beginning at Tramway when I sat down with the students who I had selected to be part of the co-researcher group for the first time. ‘How are things? How is school?’, I asked. Dominic, a bisexual Year 9 student, quickly replied, ‘this is the thing I’ve been excited about for the last three months. I can’t wait to work on this’. Looking back on his expression of interest, I understood why:

I am a 14-year-old bisexual cisgender male. I have grown up in an orthodox Christian household, thus I am knowledgeable about religious views on queer identities. In my time, I have been subject to discrimination in school and outside school and can provide valuable insights into the stigma around LGBTQIA + topics. I am a strong advocate for queer rights and acceptance in education and society. I have personally experienced and observed the lack of care and respect for queer students and I wish to change the corridor cultures of Tramway to alter students' negative views and behaviours based on gender and sexuality. In an ever-changing world, I want to make a difference in the lives of the next generation of Tramway students and build more inclusive values.

Dominic, like many other student co-researchers, recognises his potential not only as a researcher, but also as an advocate, friend and change-maker. Co-researching for him is a tangible role that reflects this pride and commitment, representing cogent, positive outcomes that he will contribute to. Indeed, change-making featured in most co-researcher expressions of interest, with many students indicating that they saw problems around their school that related to gender and sexuality and wanted to be part of solutions. At Hillcrest, another moment of fulfilment and further hope came from the youngest of the co-researchers, William (Year 8), when he took time to articulate his experience of working on the project in a meeting with senior school leaders.

When I started this project, I was excited, not to say I’m not now. But I was excited to start something that could help the school and that I was given an opportunity to make positive change. Originally, I joined because I was thinking about [making] the school a better place for my little sister and her friends. However now it has become so much more than that. Over the last year we have been meeting once or twice a term in school to go over data results or have a yarn about how things are going in school and what we are noticing about the overall culture we are experiencing on a day-to-day basis. I think everyone would agree that when now I say the project we have been working on has become much more than what we originally thought and our overall goals from the study have broadened significantly to accommodate for the new issues that we have discovered. We are excited to show you all what we have been working on and we hope that this broadens your insight to what goes on in school.

Through the year, I had watched William and his colleagues begin to share aspects of their lives both at school and beyond that they advised they ‘couldn’t talk about at school’. Some of them shared their love of cooking, and that when they had tried to share this at school, they had been called gay by their peers (including their friends) so had ceased to openly converse about it any further. Long conversations about the types of cuisines that they enjoyed cooking and eating followed, peppered with discussions of great restaurants and travel. These are, of course, privileged conversations, enabled through wealth and class, yet formerly tempered by strict gender and sexuality norms. In the co-researcher setting, however, there was a momentary critical reflection that sustained new ways of sociability and new possibilities for community. For me, the fears for the social repercussions that might be at play outside of that context were somewhat allayed by the power, freedom and ease of the talk within it, all aspects that were possible due to the subject of research and the methodological approach.

Conclusion

While there have been many disciplinary, political, historical and cultural efforts to separate young people from dialogue about gender and sexuality, especially within schools, the co-researchers in this project demonstrate that these are not always disconnected, and that while alluring to do so for reasons of preventing violence, they should not be. Instead, the co-researchers in this study show that these divides are always artificial and that there is little function in their worlds other than to reduce dialogue, discourse and interrogation. As Adam Greteman has observed, ‘projected onto youth are national fantasies; the hopes and fears of what they will become as they grow up; growing up to become the next generation of entrepreneurs, politicians, and leaders who follow the previous paths set out before them’ (Greteman, 2018, 67). Too often these paths project homophobic or transphobic anxieties, coupled with the ‘surveillance by parents, priests and pedagogues’ (Greteman, 2018, 67). These scripts for development and the disciplinary gaze have formerly restricted the potential inclusion of youth in research which actively interrogates the very structures that constrain them. This paper demonstrates that these young people are already operating with or alongside queerness and are already demonstrating the capacity, tenacity, generosity and creativity needed to imagine what might be possible in schools. Simply but powerfully, they ‘want to make a difference’. Building co-researching opportunities into research on gender, sexuality and schooling will continue to challenge schools, parents, ethics committees and researchers as it does me; however, the contributions of youth co-researchers will also continue to generate meaningful truth and responsiveness in research design, data collection, reporting and hopefully also into their lived worlds.