No Outsiders: Researching approaches to sexualities equality in primary schools
From the official site of No Outsiders. Under the offical guise of stamping out bullying (which is really important and necessary, given that bullying seems to remain an endemic scourge in at least most schools), a different and insidious agenda is being advanced, and that is the deconstruction of heterosexuality. All ‘orientations’ are equal. Ironically, No Outsiders only includes the PC, now officially-accepted ones; the rest are too hot to handle and so must remain safely in their closets. But if No Outsiders is going to have integrity and be consistent, then it must include them too.
When are we going to see the discriminatory binary paradigm deconstructed and really alternative marital and sexual relationships publicly presented? Ones which are in the offing are those of a polygamous – think 19th century Mormon - nature, or those with a more post-modern twist, the polyamourists who are heterosexual or homosexual/lesbian or bisexual. The material point is that two won’t do. Parents, do you want your children to be taught to believe this ‘progressive’ ethic?
And to reiterate: I have spent countless hours listening to bullied kids and know only too well how toxic and stomach-turning the experience of being bullied is. However, let’s look at the bigger picture of bullying. Kids who are different or ‘bully-able’ get bullied. One such category is kids who are overweight. Fat kids are mercilessly bullied, and we hear heart-wrenching narratives on that score. But does the government normalise obesity so that these kids will not get bullied and thus be able to feel better about themselves?
NO OUTSIDERS: RESEARCHING APPROACHES TO SEXUALITIES EQUALITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS
‘Everyone is an insider, there are no outsiders – whatever their beliefs, whatever their colour, gender or sexuality.’ Archbishop Desmond Tutu, February 2004
Desmond Tutu’s insistence that there are no ‘outsiders’ provides us with the inspiration to work toward a society where his words are true. At the same time, these words remind us that continuing discrimination, whether in relation to ‘race’, class, gender, disability, sexuality or other features of identity, still conveys a message to ‘outsiders’ that they have no place in ‘our’ society. The ‘No Outsiders’ research project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, supported primary teachers in challenging that message within their own schools and classrooms from September 2006 to December 2008. Over the course of this time, participation extended to include nursery providers, primary teacher-advisers and primary teacher-trainers.
Ofsted and DCSF have both identified homophobic bullying (bullying based on assumptions about sexual orientation) as a key priority for all schools. Recent guidance on transphobic bullying published by the Home Office recognises that children as young as 2 years old may have a sense of being gender variant, or they might have parents who identify as transgender, which means that gender discrimination and transphobia can also have profound implications for primary aged children.
Many children will have a connection, through family or friends, to non-heterosexual relationships and transgender experience, and some will come to identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered, but the life experience of all children will be profoundly affected by the ethos of their school, and this means creating a school environment where no-one is an outsider. This might involve, for example, including non-heterosexual relationships and non-gender conformity within discussions of family, friendship, self or growing up, exploring a range of identities and relationships through literacy, art, history or drama, or including a specific focus on homophobia and transphobia within a class- or school-based initiative to tackle bullying.
This project is supported by the General Teaching Council for England, the National Union of Teachers and Schools Out. It supports the work of Education for All, Stonewall’s initiative to promote lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered equality in schools, which is supported by a broad coalition of educational bodies, including the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), the Teacher Development Agency (TDA) and the General Teaching Council for England (GTC).
The project has been widely recognised in both national and international contexts. It has been included in The Global Human Rights Education Network (HREA) Compendium of good practices in human rights education, to be released Spring 2009, and teacher-researchers were awarded the British Educational Research Association/Sage Publishers Research into Practice Award for schools and early years setting in September 2008.
The university-based research team:
Elizabeth Atkinson, Renée DePalma and Elizabeth Brace (University of Sunderland)
Deborah Youdell and Fin Cullen (Institute of Education, University of London)
Nick Givens and David Nixon (University of Exeter)
The research model: Participatory Action Research (PAR)
The No Outsiders research project was designed according to the participatory action research (PAR) model, which links practice and systematic reflection to form a powerful type of research that draws upon practitioner strengths in ways that traditional academic research has failed to recognise:
It is now widely recognised that practitioners have unique insights into practice which are simply not available to researchers who come in from outside, and that professional knowledge is, therefore, an essential component of understanding any educational practice (Somekh, 2005, p. 3).
With a common aim to address sexualities equality in primary schools, teachers set out to interrogate the processes of homophobia, gender normalisation and heteronormativity inherent in their own practice and to explore possibilities for new kinds of practice. Heteronormativity is the process by which the heterosexual becomes constructed as the norm, and everything else becomes constructed against it, as deviant. Exploring and challenging how normal-deviant, us-Other categories are socially constructed and maintained constitutes a kind of social activism that goes beyond a simplistic tolerance model of inclusion.
The team collated a resource pack including videos, posters, and books depicting gay and lesbian characters, same-sex parents and non-gender conforming protagonists. Whole-school training was provided by the project diversity trainer and the project also funded performers, artists, workshops facilitators and documentary film-makers. Collaboration was facilitated by data sharing and group discussions in both the virtual research space and through regular project meetings, and practitioner-researchers developed specific areas of investigation arising from their particular interests and interrogations of everyday practice. These included:
How can sexual orientation be addressed for children in ways that are relevant to their experience and growing understanding of personal identity, love and family diversity?
How can this work be extended across and beyond the curriculum?
Can literature and the creative and performing arts be particularly powerful in drawing upon the imagination to help broaden understandings and shift attitudes?
How does transgender equality relate to gender equality, and how might gender equality work in primary schools go beyond challenging a ‘blue for boys, pink for girls’ discourse to question gender binaries?
What kinds of preparatory work are helpful, in terms of staff and administration as well as parents and community?
How can parents’ concerns be addressed, both proactively and as they arise?
How can coalition-building be developed between marginalised groups who may not have previously seen each other as allies?
How can teachers’ own sexual identities and gender expression support or constrain sexualities equality work in the classroom?
How can sexualities equality be incorporated into the values and ethos of a Church school, and into the inclusive tenets of Islam?
How might lesbian and gay teachers act as role models for pupils?
How might queer theory inform classroom practice, as a practice of questioning ‘taken for granted assumptions…to deconstruct these sexual and gender binaries (deployed and reified through social text and grammar) that are the linchpins of heteronormativity (Letts and Sears, 1999, p. 11).
Practice at each research site was designed as part of and in response to these lines of inquiry. While all practitioner-researchers carried out planned interventions, much of the project work rested in the recognition and responses to critical incidents, which project members came to refer to as ‘No Outsiders moments’.
Some example of strategies used by project teachers
Schools participating in the No Outsiders project are using a collection of children’s books featuring non-heterosexual characters. Favourites include And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson, Peter Parnell and Henry Cole, the true story of two male penguins in Central Park zoo who bring up a penguin chick; King and King, by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, about two princes who fall in love; and Spacegirl Pukes, by Katy Watson and Vanda Carter, about a space-travelling girl with two mums who gets a tummy bug. Many of these books carry deeper messages: for example, One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads, by Johnny Valentine and Melody Sarecky, takes a wry look at the strange explanations for why people are as they are, and suggests that we should just accept them as themselves. The books are excellent for examining identity and difference in a non-threatening context, breaking down what we as adults would consider difficult issues into manageable age-appropriate narratives.
In one school, children used art and Citizenship across the whole school to explore the constraints of gender stereotypes, using an innovative children’s DVD, Tomboy, created in Canada by Karleen Pendleton-Jimenez. (Contact the distributor, Barb Taylor, at equity.greendragonpress@sympatico.ca, to purchase a copy.)
In several schools, workshops provided by Gendered Intelligence have explored ways in which gender expectations constrain everybody and the particular implications to those who consider themselves transgender or gender variant.
Several of the participating schools have carried out arts-based projects as part of their involvement in No Outsiders. In this safe context, children have volunteered information about gay family members, and felt safe to reclaim negative symbols and stereotypes as positive.
Around the country, primary teachers have explored the potential of the visual and performing arts for addressing sensitive issues around family diversity, individual identity and homophobic bullying. A drama specialist worked with some of the No Outsiders project schools to develop forum theatre workshops focusing on the issues raised by the project.
In some schools children have performed dramatised versions of project books, including King and King and And Tango Makes Three. Other have designed curriculum activities around the books, such as writing letters to characters or assuming the role of characters in role play and writing activities.
In several areas of the country, primary schools and local authorities have rewritten guidance to focus explicitly on homophobia and sexualities equality. For example, one Church school incorporated Archbishop Tutu’s statement calling for No Outsiders into the mission statement and a number of primary schools have revised their Sex and Relationship Education policies to include specific reference to same-sex relationships.
Project links with UK government initiatives and legislation
The passing of the Civil Partnership Bill (2004) has placed an onus on schools to consciously recognise families based on same-sex partnerships, and to discuss these families as confidently and regularly as they do others.
The Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations (2003) require schools to ensure that LGB staff are not subject to either direct or indirect discrimination.
The Equality Act (2006) means that schools, for example, need to ensure that the children of LGBT parents are nor discriminated against in terms of admissions and, by inference, that LGBT parents should feel as welcome as any other parents in the school.
The Single Equality Bill, announced by the Queen at the state opening of Parliament (December, 2008), will tackle disadvantage and discrimination based on race, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief, affirming sexualities and gender as key equalities areas and imposing a duty on all public bodies to proactively promote equality of opportunity for all.
Current guidance on Sex and Relationships Education includes the recognition of diversity in family relationships, as well as the need to ensure that education about relationships is relevant to all young people regardless of their emerging sexual orientation (DfEE, 2000).
The Behaviour and Attendance and SEAL strands of the Primary National Strategy suggests a proactive approach to curricular inclusion, specifically listing gender and sexual orientation as key areas (DfES, 2005).
DCSF support for LGBT History Month (launched by School’s OUT in February 2005) suggests a commitment not just to combating the effects of homophobia but to a proactive policy of inclusion for LGBT people into the curriculum.
Stand up for us, published jointly by DfES and the Department of Health (2004) illustrates how to develop a whole school approach to addressing homophobia. DCSF has included guidance on homophobic bullying in their Safe to Learn anti-bullying materials (2007). Both these documents demonstrate that homophobic bullying cannot be effectively challenged unless schools take a proactive approach to promoting sexualities equality.
Recent guidance Combating Transphobic Bullying in Schools published by the Home Office stresses that gender variant behaviour in pre-pubertal children does not necessarily, of even usually, result in gender reassignment; nevertheless, ‘…all find the experience stressful. For some the need to express gender variance in behaviour and experience is very powerful.’ (Home Office, 2008, p. 11).
Future No Outsiders plans
With the funded research period completed, project leaders and teacher-researchers will continue to compile and present findings and reflections on this ground-breaking work.
A series of articles have been written for academic and professional audiences (see bibliography on the left hand menu).
No Outsiders team members have been speaking around the country at practitioner and academic conferences and professional development events. We have also designed professional development events, using materials and resources produced during the project, for teachers and other staff working in primary settings.
A book entitled No Outsiders: Undoing homophobia in primary schools will collect the reflections of teacher-researchers, and another entitled Interrogating heteronormativity in primary schools will collect the reflections of university researchers. Both of these titles will be published by Trentham (expected 2009).
Some project members are making plans for further, related research. Watch this space for further details.
Quick Launch
About the project
Our supporters (SchoolsOUT, The NUT, The GTC, Stonewall)
Press: in the news
Announcements
Teaching resources
Curriculum, policy and guidance
Bibliography
Upcoming conferences and seminars
Organisations working for LGBT equalities
Trans and gender queer activism, support, information
Religion and LGBT
Support groups for LGBT people, families and friends
Addressing homophobia through drama and the arts
Links with other equalities work
Related Research Reports
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Upcoming Events
LGBT Youth Scotland Schools Conference 2009, Challenging Homophobia Together The Pleasance, University of Edinburgh ,
05-02-2009
Schools OUT Conference Drill Hall, just off Tottenham Court Road in London,
07-02-2009
All Wales LGBT History Month Conference Cardiff City Hall,
27-02-2009
Conference – Gender Futures: Law, Critique and the Struggle for Something More Westminster University, London,
03-04-2009
Call for Papers – Gender, Sexuality and Law, Socio Legal Studies Association Annual Conference Leicester, UK,
07-04-2009
Upcoming events…
Announcements
Call for abstracts: IVth Biennial International Sex and Relationships Education Conference 06-01-2009
Call for Papers, 9th European Sociological Association Conference 16-12-2008
Guidance on combating transphobic bullying in schools, published by the Home Office 12-12-2008
Continuing Professional Development Sessions: Exploring Gender and Transgender Identities 12-12-2008
call for papers, seminar entitled ‘Queer(ing) Voices: Comparative Approaches to Voice/Gender Articulation’ 30-10-2008
More announcements…
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