The Secondary school environment is an incubator for social construction. It both shapes, and is shaped, by present and future societal expectations. Francis Xavier once said, “give us the boy, and we’ll make the man” and it was adopted as the motto of Jesuit educators. Educational institutions play a formative role in an individual’s notion of identity. Nowhere is that influence more evident than in societal attitudes toward gender and sexuality. Educational institutions play a role in creating social silos based upon gender. This becomes codified in the secondary school environment as students are segregated through single gender schools, student uniform requirements and appearance regulation (boys with short hair, girls in skirts, etc.). We, as teachers, reinforce these societal norms (whether consciously or otherwise) through bias, tone and associated behavior. School becomes the perpetuator of hetero-normative behavior. The question is: How can we promote an inclusive society at large, when the microcosm of the school environment ascribes gender specificity to impressionable minds.
As a beginning, the PPTA (Post Primary Teachers Association) have released proposed guidelines to “make sexual identity less of a distraction at school”, The guidelines are aimed at “affirming diverse sexualities and genders in schools”(One News, May 29, 2017). We as teachers can also help break down the heteronormative social conduct that is associated with gender norming by eliminating pejorative language (ensuring students stop making statements like “don’t be gay”) and including a range of gender practices rather than simply ignoring them. (By ignoring issues of homophobia and transgender segregation, we are implicitly implying that they are aberrant practices) (Allen, 2006). The school ball is an example of the traditional heteronormative event that can have the potential to isolate students who feel as though their lifestyle is invalidated by exclusion, and yet these events can represent a great opportunity for schools to embrace a diversity of gender and sexual identities. The barriers that we minimize in the school environment are mirrored in the wider society as students exemplify the acceptance of a wider range of gender and sexual identities.
To our parent’s generation, gender norming was part of the educational process. Teaching boys to act as men, and girls to act as ladies. However, as with other outdated ideologies, this one too has been supplanted with more nuanced concepts of gender. It was always interesting in my family that gender and sexuality were never taboo subjects. One of our closest family friends has a gay son who is the same age as me, when he came out at a family function, I can still remember my father saying, “I think we are supposed to act surprised”, meaning that we had all known for a long time already and it was never a major issue for any of us, and I think that this is a microcosm of what teachers face today regarding attitudes to sexuality at school. We brace ourselves for the onslaught of traditional mores that are less and less relevant to the students we teach. Thus, as teachers, we must be mindful to remain relevant to our students in view of the decreasing emphasis of heteronormative behavior, or risk losing our relevancy in modern education.
References:
Allen, L. (2006). Keeping students on the straight and narrow: Heteronormalising practices in New Zealand secondary schools. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 41(2), 307.
“It’s about providing choice” – PPTA issues clarified guidelines for gender-safe schools. (n.d.). Retrieved June 01, 2017, from https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/its-providing-choice-ppta-issues-clarified-guidelines-gender-safe-schools
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