Schools are places of learning. We learn academic skills, but we also learn about ourselves, each other and the world. There are many unwritten rules, traditions, customs and expectations that get communicated at school. These include, among many others, representations of identities in art or literature, types of talk about identities in classrooms and verbal exchanges on the sports field.
A school’s culture is produced from the complex interactions between students, staff, policies, curriculum, spaces, ceremonies and materials. Within every school culture, students learn lessons about how to ‘fit in’, set or adjust social boundaries and even be popular by saying or doing particular things.
There is a lot of pressure to get these lessons ‘right’, because there are often social or institutional rewards. Sometimes, however, even those who get these lessons ‘right’ can feel or be restricted. Often those who do not get these lessons or performances ‘right’ are subject to violence or harassment at school and beyond. This project is interested in understanding the rewards and punishments that certain school cultures produce, maintain or disrupt – with a specific focus on gender and sexuality.
At a time where issues of youth mental health and violence against women are gaining national and international attention, this research aims to produce greater understanding of how gender and sexuality are constructed in school environments, and how violence around these can be curtailed.
This project is committed to working in partnership with schools on how they actively and passively shape meanings and policing around gender and sexuality, and how they already or can make a positive difference to their own school cultures.
In doing so, it is the first to directly include students and teachers as co-researchers to investigate how school policies, spaces and activities influence cultures of gender and sexuality. It will produce evidence from the ground up about how different school communities can disrupt gendered violence in inventive and contextually responsive ways.
Will there be school visits?
Restrictions permitting, consultations and co-researcher data analysis meetings will be held on school grounds. The core focus of this research is that it works in partnership and collaboration with participating schools, so more visits could be scheduled when required, and activities during these visits are flexible to meet the aims of the school as they emerge.
What are the benefits of participating in this project?
This project represents the opportunity for schools to meaningfully undertake examination into their cultural settings, and how these shape present and future opportunities and lives of their students. Partnering in this project will provide participant schools significant time and resources to investigate and understand the attitudes, behaviours and values of students around gender and sexuality, and how these relate to wellbeing and belonging at school.
Each participating school will be supported through context-reflective expert advice including professional development throughout the project. In addition, each school will be allocated funds to spend on resources to target identified areas for improvement, for example guest speakers for students, curriculum resources, library resources or professional development for teachers.
More broadly, this project will benefit the school and the broader educational field as it will contribute to the formulation of alternative policies around gendered violence in schools, something that affects all students and teachers directly or indirectly.
Will my school be identifiable?
Multiple measures will be used to de-identify the school in any publications and outputs from this study. The project will be conducted in line with Ethics requirements at the University of Sydney, adhering to the strictest measures around ethical conduct and anonymity.