Teachers’ representations of genders and sexualities in primary school: the power of curriculum and an institutional ideological code

Texts such as curriculum and policy documents work in complex ways to coordinate teachers’ work and approaches to diverse genders and sexualities. Although it might be assumed that official, mandated curricula determine teachers’ curriculum choices, little is known about the extent of textual influences on how teachers represent genders and sexualities in primary schooling. This institutional ethnographic study investigated how the Australian national curriculum coordinated teachers’ curriculum decisions in one Australian primary school. Drawing on the work of Dorothy E. Smith, we found that teachers and school leaders use multiple institutional texts to guide curriculum choices. Although diverse genders and sexualities are visible in the Australian Curriculum (minimally so), we found curriculum and related policy texts were shaped by an ideological code that conceals diverse sexualities and genders. We argue that dominant hetero-cis-normative practices embedded in chains of texts remain powerful, shaping representations of genders and sexualities in primary schooling.


Introduction
An investigation into the power of texts within the institution of schooling, in relation to gender and sexual diversity (GSD) is brought to light in this paper. In particular, the article examines how an official curriculum is taken up in chains of 1 3 related policy texts, unleashing actions that determine how primary school teachers approach gender and sexual diversity. 1 Primary school teachers respond to GSD with a range of pedagogical approaches and through a variety of scenarios which form part of their everyday work, including their interactions with curriculum (van Leent & Ryan, 2016).
Building on an understanding that teachers are uncertain about responding to curriculum when GSD arises (van Leent, 2017), this paper investigates how texts, curriculum texts in particular, are taken up by primary teachers in their everyday decision-making, with a focus on what this means for how genders and sexualities are re/presented by teachers. We have adopted Dorothy E. Smith's critical feminist sociological approach, institutional ethnography, because its focus on texts, institutions and power (Smith, 2005) aligns directly with the research question: how do texts coordinate primary school teachers' everyday work (their daily lived experiences) in how they construct, represent and or challenge discourses of genders and sexualities? The intention of this paper is to question normalised ideals about genders and sexualities. The analyses explore some of the complexities of the relationships between texts (such as policy documents and curricula), and teacher's work regarding genders and sexualities within the Australian schooling system. In analysing how policy and curriculum documents are taken up in schools, we explain how dominant hetero-cis-normative (Worthen, 2016) practices are embedded in texts that coordinate teachers' curriculum decision-making. Because a multitude of texts are activated by teachers as part of their everyday work, these texts have a powerful effect in shaping the representation of genders and sexualities in primary schools.
We commence with an overview of the representations of GSD in primary schools. We then explain the theoretical contributions of Smith that informed our analysis. We then present a number of key findings from our data analysis. First, we consider how a mandated curriculum operates as a ruling text that exerts power over decision-making, including how teachers approach GSD within their teaching. Second, we explain how an official text such as a national curriculum enters into the work of teachers, via a range of texts including school-based curriculum documents and departmental policies, and how these construct teachers' social realities; and how ways of representing and constructing knowledge about genders and sexualities in primary schools are coordinated by texts. Institutional texts authorise particular courses of action and ways of knowing over others, subsuming alternate forms of knowledge and actions. We were interested in the "intersections and complementarities" (Smith, 2005, p. 63) of teachers' accounts of how texts coordinate their work on genders and sexualities in the primary school context. Our data illustrates how this raft of texts (and teachers' activation of texts), imbued with a hetero-cis-normative ideological code, shapes teachers' curriculum choices. That is, teachers perform, reconstruct and reproduce gendered and sexualised knowledge at the local level of schools and classrooms as a result of engagement or interaction with this range of institutional texts. As we will explain, teacher's approach towards curriculum is grounded in hetero-cis-normativity and gender binarism, as well as the discursive construction of childhood as a time of innocence. These findings help to explain how GSD can continue to be rendered invisible in primary school classrooms, despite a national curriculum that makes space for teachers to teach and talk about diversity.

Background: representations of genders and sexualities in primary schools
Primary school teachers typically hold ideals about the innocent nature of childhood that means while they acknowledge that genders and sexualities are very complex, implicit knowledge conveyed in schools about genders and sexualities often goes unquestioned (Robinson, 2013). Twenty years of research has confirmed that young people of elementary school age, at least, are aware of constructs of genders and sexualities, including notions of hetero-cis-normativity, diverse genders and sexualities (Epstein, 1997;Renold, 2005;Robinson, 2013). Researchers in the field of genders and sexualities in education continue to advocate for comprehensive relationships and sexuality education 2 for young people, including: policy development, inclusive and comprehensive curriculum, pre-service training for teachers and collaborative ways of working between communities and schools (Bonjour & van der Vlugt, 2018;Robinson et al., 2017). Many children and young people are currently aware of legislative changes on issues such as same-sex adoption or same-sex marriage via social media and or through political debate. Yet, as we will discuss in this paper, teachers and young people continue to experience schooling, particularly primary schooling, as a place where hetero-cis-normative perspectives on genders and sexualities are difficult to shift.
The result of this situation is that many children and their families continue to experience primary schooling as a place where their everyday lives and realities are not represented (Jeffries, 2021). These children and their families can experience difficulty building a sense of belonging, which ultimately diminishes the likelihood of receiving equitable educational experiences. Despite state and nationally funded programs such as Safe Schools (program completed), which were designed to address gender-based discrimination in Australian schools (Carden, 2019), children continue to be harassed and bullied based on gender and sexuality norms, and that much of this bullying continues to occur in schools. Evidence for this is in a recent Australian Human Rights Commission's report (2017) which demonstrated that 80% of bullying of young people who do not express gender and sexuality norms were reported to have happened at school. Another study provided evidence that gender variant and sexually diverse young people continue to suicide and or attempt suicide at rates much higher than their gender conforming, heterosexual peers (Robinson et al., 2014). The social norms that reflect constructions of genders and sexualities 1 3 in schools impact the lives of young people and their families. This research is interested in understanding how institutional texts that coordinate primary school teachers' work to re/present such constructions are implicated in these everyday actualities.

Theoretical framework
In this paper, we draw on the theoretical contributions of Dorothy E. Smith, whose 'sociology for the people', institutional ethnography, aims to reveal how things in everyday life come to be as they are. Institutional ethnographic investigations typically begin by exploring a 'problematic', or disjuncture between the problems of the everyday and externally organised social relations (Smith, 1987). While more traditional ethnographic research examines everyday activities and the ordering of the social world, institutional ethnography is distinct in that it seeks to discover the problematic of the everyday world, and then reveal how everyday life is orchestrated by a set of social relations produced from beyond the local (Smith, 2005, p. 103). That is, while an "orthodox ethnographic gaze of looking within a bounded setting or group" (Doherty, 2015, p. 349) provides its own set of methodological affordances, institutional ethnography adds an opportunity to "look up and into" (Smith, 2006, p. 5) the operation of power relations that are accomplished via institutional processes and texts. In this research, the disjuncture became evident in the author's previous research (van Leent, 2017) where teachers talked about their responses to scenarios involving diverse genders and sexualities. As described above, they frequently invoked institutional texts, describing them as informing their curriculum decisions, and relations in their classrooms. Therefore, given that the Australian curriculum requires teachers to 'cater for' (ACARA, ) GSD, this research seeks to understand more about how the curriculum was being taken up, and why many hetero-cis-normative discourses and practices continued to circulate.
The teachers who took part in this research provided the entry point for the research. Following Smith, our analytic focus was not on individual teachers; but rather, on the institution of education, and revealing how institutional texts mediate the curriculum decisions teachers make about GSD. Smith (1990) describes that understanding institutional texts in action is important, because they are read at particular moments in time by real people in real places. The institutional ethnographer works from the social in people's experience to discover its presence, and to understand how everyday relations are organised. By exploring the actualities of teachers' lives, and tracing their everyday doings to institutional texts, it becomes possible to explicate or map that organisation beyond the local everyday experiences of individuals (Smith, 2005). Epistemologically, the teacher as the subject, is viewed as having a particular world view in which their standpoint is particularly valuable as only a person in that position can have and share the knowledge (Smith, 2005). Here, we are able to trace the texts that co-ordinate teachers' work and understand more about how the institution of education constructs genders and sexualities.
The subject position of 'teacher' is integral to the theoretical approach in which this study values the subject position within an institutional discourse of education. Smith's sociological approach grew out of a desire to position research participants (or informants) as subjects (rather than objects) of inquiry because in her estimation, earlier sociological thinking had: Already posited a subject situated outside a local and actual experience … [People] are readily made the objects of sociological study precisely because they have not been its subjects. Beneath the apparent gender neutrality of the impersonal or absent subject of an objective sociology is the reality of the [straight] masculine author of the texts of its tradition (Smith, 1987, p. 109).
In this paper, the standpoint of the teacher is the point d'appui for exploring how the institutional ordering of genders and sexualities are represented, and how these orchestrate social relations. Informed by Smith's theoretical position, the aim of this research was to understand how texts-in-use coordinate the social construction of genders and sexualities through an intersection of texts and institutional discourses flowing through the everyday lives of teachers. We note that term 'text' is used to describe a broad understanding of the concept of texts to include: books, policy, procedures, posters, newsletters, curriculum, and whole school planning documents and others as they arise .
Mapping texts (and chains of texts) that are taken up in the everyday work of teachers in relation to how the representation of GSD, the institutional ethnographer is able to extract and elevate deep, social orders embedded in institutions (Smith, 2005). Smith's analytic approach is materialist, in that it explores how textual realities are produced in institutional texts, and how these mediate everyday work and life.
Institutional texts such as curriculum documents are designed to enter into readers' lives and to organise their responses and activities, for example by mediating how a group of teachers at a school will decide which novels they will read to their classes, and how they will structure their lessons around these novels. Smith argues that while official texts (such as a national curriculum) have a significant impact on the work that people do (Smith, 2005), they "don't achieve the capacity to regulate just by their existence… the text has no force until it is activated" (Smith, 2005, p. 81-2). Texts (such as a national curriculum) are designed to govern the work of teachers, but can only do so when they are read, interpreted and acted upon. Often, it is possible to follow the subsequent sequences of action through institutions by following textual chains. Frontline workers such as teachers are often saturated with texts that authorise particular courses of action within "institutional frames" (Smith & Turner, 2014, p. 10). Lesson plans, for instance might refer to myriad texts that coordinate teachers' curriculum choices in action. For example, a school principal who reads an email from a curriculum authority about a curriculum update may write about the update in a weekly staff bulletin; a teacher reading the principal's update might produce a lesson plan that they share with their colleagues who teach the same year level. In this way, these sequences of action, text, action (Smith, 2006) are central to how textual chains orchestrate and control work in multiple settings. As professionals, educators are "trained to read and write in institutionally recognizable ways" (Pence, in Campbell & Gregor, 2002, p. 70). Work is thus shaped by dominant ideological discourses and views that are so common, they begin to be seen "as natural, as the way things are done and-and in some odd way-as the only way they could be done" (Pence, in Campbell & Gregor, 2002, p. 70).
Understanding how these textual sequences unfold reveals how power is coordinated through text-reader conversations. Because texts such as curriculum documents are standardised, they can "suppress divergent perspectives… and establish a shared and enforceable common ground, a virtual reality standardized across multiple settings" (Smith, 2007, p. 176). Ahmed (2011) draws on Engel's notion of 'false consciousness' to explain how people's acceptance or rejection of traditional and normative ideals (for instance, as evident in texts) coincide with their own interests. While teachers may have a sense that hetero-cis-normative discourses and categories may cause harm to a diversity of students, families, colleagues, or selves, institutional texts call upon them to act in particular ways that ignore these embodied experiences and local knowledges. Smith (1999) proposes that an exploration of 'ideological codes' is one way of discovering how some ideals (such as that sexualities and gender are biologically based rather than socially constructed) acquire objectified status. Nichols (2019) writes, "Over time and use [ideological explanations and ideological codes] gain an objectified status, which makes them appear as though they exist in their own right, and, as such, their active production from the actualities of people's intellectual work is concealed" (p. 14). Ideologies such as heteronormativity and cisnormativity are typically taken up in texts and shared language patterns, and provide a lens for interpreting life. Nichols (2019) goes on to explain that "the more the ideological (re)presentation of a social relation is used, the greater its effect on our interpretation of the actual conditions of our lives" (p. 14). As heteronormative and cisnormative norms are embedded in institutional texts (and in how they are read), they come to mediate social relations, and change consciousness, in what Smith (1990) describes as an ideological circle. Smith (1999) describes that complex and coordinated relations of rule may appear to be "occupying no particular place", but will be evident in the numerous texts that organise our lives-from popular culture to the mass media, and organisations such as businesses, bureaucracies and schools. In Smith's estimation, it is ideologies that "constitute [texts'] internal organisation… they regulate intertextuality…. And interpret texts at sites of their reading" (p. 157). In this way, texts such as a mandated national curriculum, education department policies, school level unit planning, media reports about diverse genders and sexualities and so forth have an ideological and conceptual coherence that "produces an internally consistent picture of the world" (p. 157). Smith calls these schemata an "ideological code" (p. 158).
In this research, genders and sexualities are understood as socially constructed. Foucault's understandings of the nature of genders and sexualities are useful for understanding sexual discourses (Foucault, 1976(Foucault, /2009). These understandings provide a framework for analysing the institutional discourses and ideological codes at work, and how these contribute to broader hegemonic socialised constructions about genders and sexualities. The analytic approach of examining how texts are taken up, the textual chains that are apparent, and how these are imbued with the ideologies (in this case, hetero and cis normativity) of a privileged group, can reveal how these dominant discourses and institutional practices are reproduced, despite evidence of diversity with the Australian Curriculum itself (Ezer et al., 2019). Although texts such as curriculum documents do not prescribe or dictate the minutiae of how teachers work, they do "coordinate consciousness at a distance" (Smith, 2007, p. 178) because they provide a framework for understanding the local, organising responses and foregrounding of particular interests and perspectives. By listening carefully to the accounts of people, and examining how texts are activated, institutional ethnography affords an opportunity to uncover taken-for-granted dominant discursive practices and ideological circuits.

Methods
Following an institutional ethnographic method of investigation, the research drew on two data sets: interviews with educators from one primary school, and texts including national and state educational policy documents, and localised school policies. The school is a large metropolitan school on the east coast of Australia. Individual interviews with primary school educators including teachers (who had taught a range of year levels), the principal, the head of curriculum, and the leader of learning support in the contexts were conducted by the author. Interviews were approximately 30-60 min in duration and audio recorded for later transcription. Notes were taken in a researcher diary directly following each of the interviews including information about the texts mentioned, the focus of the educators' work as it related to genders and sexualities and some general description about the nature of the interview. Interviews were transcribed verbatim. Particular details were noted such as emphasised intonation, pauses longer than three seconds and noises such has laughter, sighs or coughing.
The main tools for analysis for the institutional ethnographer are mapping, indexing and writing accounts (Rankin, 2017). Transcripts were read against the audio of the interview to check for accuracy. The lead researcher engaged in indexing and descriptive tasks for each of the transcripts. Indexing assembles all mentions of specific work actions and texts into one place. For instance, if a participant mentions the Australian Curriculum, this data would be indexed to the Australian Curriculum. Words and phrases which indicated teacher's work, particular texts, or concepts of genders and sexualities were highlighted.
Upon further analysis, a mapping exercise of each interview was conducted in which the interaction between the texts and the teacher's work was extracted. Visual maps were created for each of the interviews which showed a visual representation of the texts which "describes the features of the social practices and their respective material forms and relationships" (Rankin, 2017, p. 5). The institutional texts named by the teachers were analysed for representations of genders and sexualities; an iterative process with the goal being to look for threads that connected the interview data analysis (indexing, mapping and describing) (Rankin, 2017). The lead researcher collected and read the texts including the Australian Curriculum: English, Health and Physical Education, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS); state policy documents such as employee code of ethics, school policy documents, and children's literature. The documents were analysed to identify how genders and sexualities were constructed. The analysis attended to the relationship between the ruling texts of the institutions and the coordination of teachers' work.
These analysis processes engaged our interest in how the teachers' experiences show how various texts shape their work, influencing what they do. Whilst indexing, describing teachers' standpoint and analysing the institutional texts looking for evidence as to how they work, it became apparent that while hetero-cis-normative discourses persevered, a disjuncture emerged between teachers' knowledge of what was written in the documents and what was actually contained in the documents. Here, the notion of texts as active and occurring is relevant. We noted in our analysis that a reading of the text often resulted in the production of a new text, for example, a school leader summarised curriculum intent and developed lessons and units of work that were presented to teachers at a staff meeting. This new, consecutive text mediates relations between the school leaders and teachers at the staff meeting and becomes part of teachers' work processes. Teachers may then interpret and further edit the text they received at the staff meeting, using it to further guide their curriculum choices. In this case, we were interested in how genders and sexualities were constructed in the texts that coordinated the everyday work of the primary teachers we talked with, in regard to how they make curriculum decisions regarding diverse genders and sexualities.

Findings and discussion
The following findings and discussion explore curriculum and policy as texts that coordinate teachers' work in their constructions of genders and sexualities. The documents are mapped from creation to when and how teachers interact with them. Each is then analysed for constructions related to genders, and or to sexualities with extracts from teachers' described experiences. Both policy and curriculum documents are analysed for constructions of genders and sexualities, and disjunctures are explicated.

Curriculum as ruling text: the nuance of in/visibility
The Australian curriculum is an institutional text intended to exert influence over teachers' work. As the teachers who participated in this research indicated, they are not only bound by the curriculum, but they also make use of the curriculum to justify the content choices they make as part of their teaching. We noted a broad pattern in our analysis, in which teachers indicated that curriculum mediated how they represented genders and sexualities in two different ways. First, teachers invoked the curriculum to explain an understanding that any re/presentations of gender had to be authorised by the curriculum. Second, there was a view that diverse re/presentations of gender were not possible because the curriculum does not mention genders at all. These views fit within broader ideological views that teachers held; gender was recognised and represented by teachers as hetero-cis-normative: boy/girl, man/ woman, mother/father, son/daughter, and so on.
Sexualities, from the teachers' standpoint, and authorized by the curriculum, was interpreted as heteronormative: heterosexuality was perceived as 'non-existent', not relevant for the primary school context, and diverse sexualities were by extension seen to be not relevant. Interestingly, there was a view that discussion of 'diverse families' could be divorced from a discussion of GSD. The Foundation Year Australian Curriculum (ACARA, ), for example, requires that students look at "their personal and family histories and the places they and their families live in and belong to." Yet, for teachers, diversity of personal and family histories did not extend to diverse sexualities. Rather, sexualities were often interpreted with the presumption that 'sexuality' means 'sexual acts'. One teacher, for instance, described how samesex families are not the same as 'diverse sexualities' and another teacher described, when reflecting on 'sex education' curriculum, how students ask questions about 'boys and girls and interest in one another… But [this had] nothing to do with actual sex or sexuality'. Teachers described sexualities as only being included in the curriculum in the upper years of primary school, or not until secondary school with a 'problem' focus: managing periods, pubic hair, boy/girlfriends, for example. Here, we begin to see evidence of the overriding ideological code that orders teachers' descriptions: teachers' talk about diverse sexualities as being defined as relating to sexual acts is made possible by using heterosexual-parented families as the prevailing norm (Murdock, 1949). We were also aware that many of these discourses, evidenced when educators describe the disassociation of parental relationships which define 'family' and 'sex acts', aligned with a dominant view of childhood as a time of innocence (Postman, 1982). The rise of conceptions of children as precious and innocent coincided with an increase in the nuclear family as the dominant form of social organisation during the eighteenth century (Aries, 1962). This hetero-cis-normative view made way for a growing preoccupation with the manners, etiquette and behaviour of children among middle and upper classes.
One of Smith's contributions is the acknowledgement of how texts rule over time and place-the act of reading is an occurrence that happens as real people in places engage with and respond to texts. While it is widely recognised that a national curriculum can coordinate how knowledge is constructed and taught in vastly different schools, it can have an ongoing effect in orchestrating courses of action over considerable periods of time. For instance, one teacher described how they used the curriculum to justify teaching about gender stereotypes in literature studies from an 'old curriculum'. Curriculum leaders also relied on previous curriculum iterations to inform their planning and teaching. There seemed to be little emphasis on reading and developing knowledge of changing current curriculum.

Curriculum pathways into the classroom
Curriculum has various pathways into the classroom, but in Australia, teachers typically work individually, in teams, or with leaders of curriculum to develop school-based curriculum plans or unit plans. That is, the curriculum is activated by individual teachers, or teams of teachers, in a sequence of text-action-text chains (Smith, 2006) where further texts are produced (such as unit plans and year level curriculum plans). Unit plans are typically used by teachers across a year level to develop teaching and learning episodes with their respective classes.
Some of the teachers interviewed referred to the Australian Curriculum directly. However, teachers more frequently discussed curriculum at the local level. By this we mean that teachers discussed curriculum resources produced at the state level, or within local school sites. Teachers explained that they used these texts as the basis for their classroom planning. Rather than referring to the national curriculum itself, some teachers' work was mediated by school unit plans. These had been produced by teacher-colleagues who were assumed to have written the plans of work according to national curriculum requirements. Some teachers also relied on curriculum leadership teams to provide curriculum expertise. In both cases, the importance of text-action-text sequences becomes apparent, as numbers of teachers drew more extensively on texts that had been produced by others as a (presumed) consequence of a prior reading of the curriculum itself. For example, one teacher described how a unit plan was created by a Head of Curriculum, and that the teacher made use of this document, but did not directly consult the national curriculum. Other teachers reported teaching units of work which had been developed by a person with perceived expertise in the curriculum and contained consequent repeated heterosexist representations of genders and sexualities.

Curriculum as ruling text: constructing gender binaries
Curriculum documents also coordinated teachers work in the representations of genders-interpreted as binary genders only. Given that teachers talked about the chains of texts that flowed into their work, organising their curriculum choices, it is perhaps unsurprising that teachers were not familiar with the national curriculum itself. In this case, the teacher justifies their work on teaching children about gender, gender stereotypes based on girl/boy norms, as directly from the curriculum despite the fact that the word 'stereotypes' does not appear until grade 5 and 6. One example is when a teacher revealed that they taught boy/girl 'gender stereotypes' in year 2 (grade 2-approximately 6.5-7.5 years old) as part of a fairytale literature unit of work derived from The Australian Curriculum: English (AC: E). The teacher identifies the word 'stereotypes' specifically as the word that 'triggers' the justification for the unit of work on gender stereotypes (boy/girl stereotypes) in a grade 2 unit of work, but upon review of the AC: E, the word 'stereotype' appears in the grade 5 and 6 year level overview. There is no descriptor or elaboration which directly suggests gender stereotypes should be a focus during literature studies on fairytales. This example provides an instance of how the official text of the curriculum is interpreted and how it coordinates teachers' work at the local level.
As  points out, readers in institutions are trained, in that they are not simply 'reading', but instead are looking for particular orders, and making sense of what has been authorised, and what has not. As Callahan and Nicholas (2019) explain, discourses such as gender binarism tend to be "reinforced through subtle, but omnirelevant, invocations of gender" (p. 705). In this case, what is authorised is not only the teaching a particular genre of text (fairy tales), but also a discussion on stereotypes, perhaps based on the broader ideological code that organises the curriculum as a text. As described above, binaries around both sexualities and gender were apparent in teachers' readings of the curriculum.

Textual chains mediating teachers' approaches to gender and sexual diversity
Tracing textual chains, and how these are imbued with a particular ideological code is important in understanding how teachers make decisions about the re/presentation of GSD. One teacher described that the literature recommended by the state curriculum authority lacked representations of GSD. In their words, there could be 'better choices in what they present', particularly in relation to boy/girl stereotypes. The teacher noted a difference between what they believed was authorised in the English curriculum (teaching gender stereotypes and equality for girls/women), and the state curriculum text list. This teacher recognised that the suggested readings for students was dominated by numerous texts with stereotypically heterosexual boy/girl characters, however felt somewhat constrained by institutional textual-mandates.
The teacher noted several books such as The Twits and Rowan of Rin, describing the lead characters as, 'so male stereotyped, even though they're both horrible, and Mrs Twit is so female stereotyped, you know she's doing the cooking, um and he's in the shed and that sort of thing. Rowan of Rin is a boy going on an adventure. Why can't a girl go on an adventure?' Similarly, it might be noted that the characters here are represented as heterosexual, for instance, the teacher's reading of this list did not extend to wonder why Mrs Twit might not have been married to a female character. The teacher noted these textual choices as something of a problem; a point of resistance to heteronormativity and gender norms in the curriculum (Sumara & Davis, 1999). They were concerned that other teachers might be perpetuating normalised binary gender stereotypes through the use of those texts directly through the recommendations from the curriculum resources. For this teacher, these options form part of an ideological circle in which traditional binary views of gender and sexuality continue to circulate as abstracted forms of consciousness. The activation of curriculum by those who created the student reading list can be seen here, although the ideological work related to genders and sexualities is concealed. Work in schools is thus shaped by dominant ideological discourses that circulate in a web of texts, and are so common, they begin to be seen as natural, even when they are not apparent in the mandated curriculum document itself.

Why are some aspects of the curriculum invisible to teachers?
Teachers' talk revealed that the taken-for-granted ideological circuit that makes people with diverse genders and sexualities invisible in curriculum is embedded in a range of texts that flow into schools. One teacher described how 'same-sex families' are not 'explicitly in the curriculum' and therefore, not relevant. Yet, while 'same-sex families' is not directly referenced in the Australian Curriculum: History (which includes studying family history), 'same-sex' is identified explicitly in the Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum. This text requires the inclusion of diversity in relation to sexes, genders and sexualities throughout the primary school curriculum and into the secondary school curriculum: As with other areas of student diversity, it is crucial to acknowledge and affirm diversity in relation to sexuality and gender in Health and Physical Education. Inclusive Health and Physical Education programs which affirm sexuality and gender diversity acknowledge the impact of diversity on students' social worlds, acknowledge and respond to the needs of all students, and provide more meaningful and relevant learning opportunities for all students. The Australian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education (F-10) is designed to allow schools flexibility to meet the learning needs of all young people, particularly in the health focus area of relationships and sexuality. All school communities have a responsibility when implementing the Health and Physical Education curriculum to ensure that teaching is inclusive and relevant to the lived experiences of all students. This is particularly important when teaching about reproduction and sexual health, to ensure that the needs of all students are met, including students who may be same-sex attracted, gender diverse or intersex. (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2010-present).
While the AC: HPE identifies genders and sexualities to be 'read' with diversity in mind, other aspects of the curriculum might be 'read' with a hetero-cis-normative lens because diverse genders and sexualities are not referenced or stated in other aspects of the curriculum such as the HASS (Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) curriculum. The HASS curriculum states: "considering a range of family structures (for example, nuclear families, one child families, large families, single parent families, extended families, blended (step) families, adoptive parent families and grandparent families)" (ACARA, 2014a(ACARA, , 2014b. The phrase "range of family structures" informs the teacher, that families include a range of configurations. However, because same-sex families are not listed in this somewhat extensive list of examples, these kinds of families are silenced and hidden. Instead, a dominant hetero-cisnormative ideological code, alongside the view that primary school aged children's innocence precludes discussion of GSD, is incorporated in textual chains, and in the thinking of those who read the curriculum (teachers and curriculum experts). Together, these texts and the underlying ideological code exerts influence over what happens in the classroom. Here we see how the curriculum provides a ruling structure that organises and mediates localised curriculum implementation in which genders and sexualities are normalised as heterosexual either through omission, through the narrowness and scope of the reference to 'same-sex' in the HPE curriculum area.
The largely unquestioned hetero-cis-normative discourses underpinning the curriculum and ideological circuits are evident in teacher's interactions with curriculum, and their subsequent representations of genders and sexualities. While teacher's interactions with curriculum are complex, iterative and varied, it is possible to see at the local level that teacher's work doesn't appear to be about investigating, questioning or challenging the curriculum and how it is activated. This finding is in line with previous studies, for example Wingrave's (2018) research in which eight early years' educators expressed the view that the early years of schooling should be a "haven, exempt from playing any role in the children's development of gender" (p. 601).
Nor is there evidence that associated texts that are produced as the curriculum is activated within the institution are challenged. Instead, the curriculum is positioned as an authoritative text that teachers must adhere to, that is respected as robust, impenetrable, all-knowing. Although the Australian Curriculum itself has examples in which hetero-cis-normativity is interrupted, and gender and sexuality diversity are acknowledged and visible, it has yet to make a significant impact in primary school teachers' work because it is just one authoritative text that governs a multitude of others. As Griffith and Smith (2014) note, regulatory texts are "hitched up into relations extending beyond those that have been brought into focus" (p. 342). It is clear that numerous texts are produced by teachers, school leaders, curriculum authorities and so forth as the Australian Curriculum is read and acted upon. From local school unit planning to lists of recommended readings, these texts are unleashed by the curriculum as a ruling text, and are imbued with hetero and cis normative ideals, making the Australian Curriculum part of an ideological circuit that mediates teachers' decision-making. In this way, teachers' perceptions and work at the local level, render the Australian Curriculum hetero-cis-normative.

The hetero-cis-normative ideological code at work
Teachers' work in how they represent genders and sexualities as coordinated and shaped by curriculum is largely hetero-cis-normative; genders and sexualities are presented as a cis gendered binary (boy/girl) and sexuality as heterosexual. These findings are in line with ongoing research that points to the heterosexist and cisgendered nature of schooling (e.g., Hickey & Mooney, 2018). A more inclusive curriculum which considers a range of sexes, genders and sexualities as 'normal' might include analysing gender stereotypes beyond male/female as part of the English curriculum, or representations of same-sex families as an example of 'range of family structures' in HASS. We acknowledge that the examples, whilst an attempt to interrogate norms, perpetuate new norms. The suggestion is not that particular identities should dominate, but that the curriculum might, at least, reach beyond heterosexist norms and consider sex, gender and sexual diversity more broadly. While curriculum might explicitly include diverse genders and sexualities in relation to relationships and sexuality education in the health and physical education learning area, teachers and curriculum leaders do not appear to have received new curriculum training, or training in pedagogical approaches that might encourage them to consider how they might make diverse genders and sexualities visible in their classrooms.
We concur with Meyer and Keenan (2018) that a more extensive official text, in this case curriculum is not 'inherently' better. As our research has shown, it cannot be assumed that teachers engage with the minutiae of the official curriculum. A more detailed curriculum that attempts to further define teachers' curriculum choices runs the risk of "creating restrictions and unanticipated barriers for nonbinary students, and others whose identities and forms of self-expression do not fit neatly into a dichotomous male/female gender binary" (p. 744). Our analysis has shown how official texts, and the ways they are activated in schools, have a part to play in reproducing hetero-cis-normative ideological code.
The final matter we wish to consider is government policy on the writing of curriculum guideline policy. As Connelly and Connelly (2012) describe, curriculum reviews are often characterised as conservative, prudential, cyclic and measured; but able to be disrupted by broader public discourses. The political and public furore over the showing of the film Gayby Baby in schools (Jeffries, 2019) is a case in point. Connelly and Connelly (2012) point out that curriculum implementation can therefore be understood as a highly politicised process; "an extension of [associated] political/public discourses".
For these reasons, we argue that engaging in productive conversations and professional development with curriculum writers, and those who activate curriculum-from school principals and subject experts to classroom teachers-may be a better approach. As Keddie and Ollis (2019) described in their paper that considered a school-based response to ending gender-based violence, "the 'institutionalised obstacles' the teachers [were attempting to dismantle… were] predominately cultural" (p. 543). For Meyer and Keenan (2018), this means being "clear and broad about the spirit in which [official texts are] meant to be interpreted and applied" (p. 744). This approach, alongside an official curriculum that authorises visibility of diverse genders and sexualities, may be one way of reframing the ideological code that determines 'what counts' and 'who can be seen' in primary schooling.
In her adapted 2018 AARE presidential address, Professor Annette Woods (2021) asks the education researcher to consider, "are we there yet?" through her reflections on education and social justice. Woods writes that: … Questions asked by educational researchers interested in social justice education and schooling must include questions related to how schools, educators and community members, and children and young people might collaborate to prepare everyone to engage positive lives in these difficult and constantly changing, 'fast' economies (p. 3).
We concur with Woods and argue that what is needed to break down dominant views among primary school teachers is substantive and robust conversation, that takes account of GSD. While we might not "be there yet", the Australian Curriculum provides the opportunity for heterosexist discourses to be challenged; and for GSD curriculum choices and discourses to be normalised within primary school education. As Woods notes, "the task is ongoing" (p. 42).

Conclusion
Curriculum and policy are institutional texts designed as mechanisms to organise teachers' approach to the knowledge that is delivered in schools. As Apple (2013) writes, it is "naïve to think of the school curriculum as neutral knowledge. Rather, what counts as legitimate knowledge is the result of complex power relations and struggles between class, race, gender, and religious groups. Thus, education and power are an indissoluble couplet" (p. 170). The Australian Curriculum has made some inroads into producing a curriculum that makes space for teachers to include diverse genders and sexualities. Yet, our analysis has shown that primary school teachers have been reluctant to do so, drawing on a web of institutional texts that are underpinned by a hetero-cis-normative ideological code.
Although the re-inscription of hetero-cis-normativity was evident in our data, we note that there were also points of resistance. While some evidence of contradictory discourses emerged both within official texts, and through the talk of a small number of teachers, hetero-cis-normative binarism, is reproduced through both institutional and individual expression. On the one hand, curriculum and policy documents are overwhelmingly hetero-cis-normative even though there are points of disjuncture in which non-hetero-cis-normative discourses arise. On the other, the pathways of these texts and how they are activated by teachers reveals another layer of institutional power in which particular versions of gender and sexuality are reproduced as they travel from destination to destination. Together these textual mediated relations work together to suppress any points of resistance.
Texts coordinate teachers to work to represent genders and sexualities as boy/ girl binary gender norms and heterosexual norms with minimal representations of human sex, gender and sexuality diversity. The implications for society at large rest with not only the underrepresentation of diverse genders and sexualities, but the nonrecognition of how the power of heterosexism is constructed through teachers' everyday work. By not including diverse sexes, genders and sexualities, concepts of gender and sexuality are not represented as a normal aspect of human variation. The implications for children impact on their sense of belonging, their learning outcomes, retention/attendance rates, and their mental health and wellbeing including bullying, harassment and more significantly their lives. Diverse sexes, genders and sexualities, as coordinated by curriculum and policy, are represented minimally and hetero-cis-normativity dominates teachers' work and how they represent genders and sexualities in primary schools.
Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions. This work was supported by Queensland University of Technology as an Early Career Research Award.

Declarations
Ethics approval Ethics approval granted by Queensland University of Technology. Ethics approval number: 1600001012.
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