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Exploring Contemporary Issues in Sexuality Education with Young People pp 35–66Cite as

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Chapter 1: Queerly Affective Failure as a Site of Pedagogical Possibility in the Sexuality Education Classroom

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education ((GED))

Abstract

This chapter explores dilemmas that emerged in a research partnership to engage with gender and sexual diversity within the classroom of a Year 11 high school sexuality education teacher, the students, and I. Challenging normative pedagogical practices which privilege rationality, cognition, and neoliberal investments in success, the chapter speaks to insights to be gained from attending to affect and failure as sources of insight for teaching and learning about everyday sexuality and gender politics as they emerge in young people’s lives in the classroom. Drawing on queer and affect theory, I problematise the effects of referring instances of hetero and gender normativity outside the classroom to be dealt with through traditional school bullying procedures. Instead I suggest that framing both teacher's, student's, and researcher's ‘affective failures’ as sources of insight and possibility, provide pedagogical opportunities for engaging more queerly with the lived dynamics of sex and gender politics as they are occurring in young people’s lives, and as an integral part of sexuality education programmes in the classroom.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Gowlett and Rasmussen (2014) also argue for the affordances queer theory offers in calling a wide range of normativities, not just sexualities and genders in education into question.

  2. 2.

    The project experimented with queer and post-structural approaches to interrogate and explore hetero and gender normalcy within a high school Year 12 Health option class in a state co-educational school situated in a small satellite town near an urban centre in New Zealand. Informed ethical consent was gained from the sixteen male and ten female students and teacher. Pseudonyms have been used to protect the confidentiality of the students, teacher and school. Participants had the option to discontinue their participation in the project at any point, but none chose to do so. Five sets of qualitative data were collected over the course of the case study. Initially, face to face semi-structured tape-recorded interviews were conducted in four self-selected focus student friendship groups and one individual interview with Emma. Over the course of the project I regularly wrote participant observations and field notes, and Emma kept a research journal. In response to the extensive data I observed emerging from the students’ informal peer interactions in the classrooms, eight classroom sessions over three months in the middle of the project were audio-taped using a portable multi-directional recorder, which I positioned in different parts of the room during the classroom sessions in order to capture differing student groups’ conversations. Six follow-up face to face semi-structured tape recorded interviews were conducted at the end of the year in self-selected focus student friendship group interviews, and two follow-up individual interviews were undertaken with Emma.

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  1. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Kathleen Quinlivan

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  1. Kathleen Quinlivan
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Quinlivan, K. (2018). Chapter 1: Queerly Affective Failure as a Site of Pedagogical Possibility in the Sexuality Education Classroom. In: Exploring Contemporary Issues in Sexuality Education with Young People. Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50105-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50105-9_2

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