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The role of schools in developing a sense of common British identity has taken centre stage in the face of 'racialised' accounts of violence during the twenty first century. In this paper, we argue that certain British education policy documents can be understood as "hegemonic interventions" seeking to resolve "ambiguities" surrounding constructions of British identity. We do so by examining the Department for Education (DfE) 'Fundamental British Values' (FBV) guidance within the context of its relationship to the "Prevent Duty" anti-terrorism programme as well as the 'Political impartiality in schools' guidance released by the DfE in 2022. Utilising Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and applying Laclau and Mouffe (2014/1985) conception of hegemony with Hall's (2021/2000) claim that 'Britishness' is an empty signifier, this paper argues that the ambiguities of 'Britishness' present a number of opportunities for power to be exercised and consolidated. Finally, we explore the possible implications for demands to 'decolonise the curriculum' within schools' existing duties and propose possible structural limits placed upon these demands by said duties.

Statutory requirements for compulsory Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) in the UK is generating concern among many religious communities and reigniting debates about the purpose of School Based Sexuality Education (SBSE). Among the communities voicing their dissent are members of the British Islamic community. Quranic scripture deems obligatory the teaching and learning about all aspects relevant to human sexuality, however, religion, and in particular Islam, is widely viewed as hostile to sexuality education. Whilst Muslim objection to 'progressive' agendas in SBSE (i.e., same-sex relations, gender fluidity, pleasure and desire) is generating much attention, equal attention to understanding the Islamic theological, philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of these views, is less frequently sought. The purpose of this paper is to foreground Islamic responses to some of the 'progressive' topics featuring in RSE and SBSE more broadly. Using British printed media sources and Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper aims to make sense of British Muslim parents' objections to 'progressive' sexuality education. A more concerted focus on Islamic underpinnings of these views is imperative to alleviate negative responses to Muslim positions on this subject as well as inform the ongoing dilemma of finding ways in which religious diversity be addressed in SBSE.

Drawing on Robin Alexander's theory and method of 'Dialogic Teaching', this paper engages with debates about the need to reconceptualise the teaching of sexuality education. By exploring the complexities of educating about sex and sexuality it calls for attention to be paid to the how patterns of talk may function to open up spaces for more robust pedagogies. Dialogic Teaching is presented as providing opportunities to mitigate the ideological conflict endemic to sexuality education today. Using examples of classroom conversations between a teacher and his group of students involved in a recent Australian study this paper critically analyzes one teacher's opportunities (or missed opportunities) for dialogic teaching, including opportunities for students to explore, challenge, reconsider, extend and enhance their learning of the myriad and complex issues relevant to sexuality such as negotiation and consent, pleasure and desire. As a form of pedagogical ethics, dialogic teaching offers a radical model for the future teaching of sexuality education.

For more than a decade, the international and national literature has established that sexuality education does not adequately speak to the broad range of cultural and religious diversities present in classrooms. These persistent obfuscations speak to long-standing questions around normativity, Othering and ‘inclusion’. In this paper, we turn to a recent project that asked young people from a broad range of cultural and religious backgrounds to reflect on their experience of sexuality education. Across a fascinating set of observations, the participants argued that sexuality education rests on ‘too many assumptions’, a range of assumptions that continue to mark them as Other in the classroom. More importantly, they identified a tricky problematic – on the one hand, they want more diversity represented, along with opportunities to explore their views and perspectives. One the other hand, they felt unsure about how this could occur in a safe way, without making them feel ‘on display’, misunderstood, or judged. In the face of this tricky problem, we present a series of insights not only for Australian educators, but for countries across the globe who face similar problems resulting from the obfuscations of largely normative sexuality education frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research exploring the influences of cultural experiences, future imaginations and aspirations on the formation of pedagogy among immigrant Early Childhood (EC) educators remains scarce. This collaborative autoethnography (CAE) is about the first author's pedagogical journey. Educated and trained in India as an EC educator, the stories shared in this paper offer insights into how the first author navigated and negotiated her understandings of pedagogies from padhana, a more traditional Indian focused pedagogy to 'Western' play-based pedagogy. Using photo-elicitation techniques from visual images as data and Appadurai's theoretical framework on cultural global flows, the changes and continuities of conceptions of pedagogy influenced by cultural experiences, future imaginations and aspirations are explored. The iterative process supported by CAE helped redefine understandings about pedagogies, teacher identity and EC education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article conceptualizes religion as a critical theory challenge to sexuality education. Religious views in sexuality education are often perceived as intolerant and incompatible with today's progressive and modern society. This article engages with the idea that the inclusion of religious viewpoints on sexuality will challenge the efficacy of current sexuality education in Australia and New Zealand school contexts, to create a more contemporary and inclusive learning experience that caters for all students' sexual needs and lives. Utilizing a critical theory lens, I demonstrate how religion can challenge dominant views of sexuality education, introduce alternative modes of content and delivering, promote critical thinking skills and more egalitarian ways of learning about sexuality. Drawing on data collected from Australian and New Zealand public schools, this article endeavors to reframe current discussions of the relationships between religion and sexuality education.

Young people may face conflicting and confusing messages about what it means to respond well in relation to homophobia and transphobia. Consequently, we ask--What might it mean to respond well to homophobia and transphobia? This strategy, inspired by Anika Thiem and Judith Butler, is recognition of the ambivalent conditions which structure attempts to respond well to bullying related to gender and sexuality. Such an approach is counter to educational responses that suggest a remedy in advance of the enactment of perceived bullying. Our paper draws on research conducted by the authors in four such schools, two in Australia and two in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It is a deliberate turn away from focusing on who should be held to account for homophobia and transphobia.

The broad aim of most sexuality educational programs is to improve and promote health among students (Epstein and Johnson 1998; Allen 2005; Aggleton and Campbell 2000). Various education programs aim for young people to receive preparation for their sexual lives and be educated against sexual abuse and exploitation (Carmody 2009; Bay-Cheng 2003), unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). More contemporary debates about sexuality education argue the value of endeavoring to educate students about sexual pleasure and desire, aiming to bring about attitudinal changes at the local level of social and political activity (Fields 2008; Lesko 2010). With these intentions the teaching and learning of sexuality education is positioned to be invested, not only in conveying sexual information, but also in producing a specific kind of sexual individual. In this frame, the effectiveness of the mobilization and maneuvering of this subject within schools and in the classroom is essentially based on pedagogy. A closer analysis of the intricate processes of how teachers' pedagogies regulate sexual identities and sexual behavior thus becomes paramount to better understanding effective teaching of sexuality education. This article is about the purposes and the processes of teaching comprehensive sexuality education to diverse communities. It begins with a brief exploration of current pedagogies of sexuality education in Australia and New Zealand. It then presents overlapping but often disputed understandings of sexuality education as well as critical pedagogy to demonstrate critical pedagogy's potential significance for creating comprehensive sexuality education for diverse communities. This is followed by a critical examination of the ways in which teachers' pedagogy in Australian and New Zealand schools explicitly communicates the ''critical'' oriented intent of critical pedagogy with reference to four specific areas: dialogue, critique, counter hegemony, and praxis.

This paper explores the methodological politics of researching at the intersections of sexuality, culture and religion in secondary schools. It draws on experiences during a project concerned with how to address cultural and religious diversity in sexuality education in Australia and New Zealand. The paper focuses on two methodological sticking points, one occurring inside academia and the other outside, in schools. The first coheres around the process of gaining ethics approval from multiple institutional committees and the second accesses schools for participation. These sticking points are conceptualized as effects of a set of discursive and material constraints which are idiosyncratic to school-based sexualities research. We argue that discourses of sexuality and young people are mobilized in both spaces and intersect with a social moment of "risk anxiety" in ways that shape the methodological possibilities of the research. These discourses serve to constitute sexualities research as "risky" and "controversial", an image which impedes the generation of new knowledge in the field. By rendering challenges of this research visible and discursively deconstructing the reasons for them, we refuse to dismiss school-based sexualities research as "too hard". Instead, we aim to keep this topic firmly on the educational research agenda by alerting researchers to its challenges so they may prepare for them.

This article explores the potential of queering as a mode of critique by problematising the ways in which liberal politics of race shape normative understandings of health in a high school classroom. Drawing on findings from an Australian and New Zealand (NZ) research project designed to respond to religious and cultural difference in school-based sexuality education programmes, we critically queer how the Maori concept of "hauora" is deployed in the intended and operational NZ Health curriculum to shape the raced subject. Despite the best intentions of curriculum developers and classroom teachers to utilise Maori ways of knowing to meet their obligations within a bicultural nation, we argue that the notion of "hauora" is domesticated by being aligned with normalising individualistic notions of well-being that reflect the Eurocentric neoliberal individual enterprise subject. Palatable notions of Maori epistemologies as cultural artefacts and iconography drive that "inclusion". The "cunning politic" of (bicultural) recognition legitimates Maori ways of knowing in ways which privilege whiteness--reproducing rather than disrupting networks of power and dumbing down Maori epistemologies.

Homosexuality is widely perceived among many Muslims as a "western disease", a natural outcome of the West's secularity and cultural degeneracy. In spite of the emergence of more liberal attitudes towards sexual differences in modern times, moral issues have not lost their relevance in polemical discourse against homosexuality among many Muslims. The heightened visibility of homosexuals, together with the decriminalisation of homosexuality, lie at the heart of Muslim objection; such movements towards the acceptance of homosexuality are viewed as a concerted and unified homosexual front attempting to squeeze out the hegemonic heterosexual norm. The common response among many Muslims to remedy this perceived ideological corruption is to resort to Islamic doctrine, which prohibits homosexuality and gives merit to heterosexism. This paper reports on some findings from a study by the author which examines how a group of Australian Muslim teachers deliberate on how to include studies on homosexuality as part of a wider dialogue on developing comprehensive sexuality education for Muslim youth. In their deliberations, teachers craft pedagogies which appropriate moral frameworks and expressions of embracing sexual difference. These pedagogical propositions give insight into how teachers generate epistemological, ethical and ontological approaches to critical thought about the subject. (Contains 4 notes.)

The purpose of this qualitative cross-cultural case study was to better understand how Muslim students living in Australia, Ireland, and the United States navigated racism to identify ways in which school leaders and teachers can better address the structural, historical, and socioeconomic roots of racial injustice, discrimination, and ongoing oppression. Data collection was guided by a shared interview protocol that asked questions regarding family background, personal interests, identity, and friendships with a focus on their experiences of anti-Muslim racism in secondary schools. Findings suggested that Muslim students navigated racialization by (de)constructing their Muslimness, seeking voice, navigating between inclusion and exclusion, and responding to hate. This paper contributes to the bourgeoning literature exploring anti-Muslim racialization and makes a foundational empirical cross-cultural contribution with its identification of essential practices for anti-Muslim racism in schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study that examines how a group of teachers at a Victorian Islamic College deliberated on how to develop an appropriate sexual health education curriculum for their Muslim students. Teachers found themselves challenged by the current restrictive curriculum structures, policies and practices at their school. They also found themselves struggling with embedded student cultural understandings and traditions of sexual health that contradict Islamic teachings as stated in the Qur'an and Hadith. In contemplating the possibilities of a sexual health curriculum from an Islamic perspective, teachers desired to confront longstanding political issues and hegemonic structures at their school to enable the search for a solution to a curriculum problem and construct the conditions necessary for its sustainability. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

This paper looks at the role participatory action research played in beginning curriculum conversations in sexual health for young Australian Muslims. Sexual health education has been the cause of much dissension among the local, national and international Muslim community. There is also a general lack of consensus in many Australian Islamic schools on how to teach this curriculum and by whom. In an attempt to introduce sexual health education to their Muslim students, teachers at one Victorian Islamic school participated in a study by the author that explored ways to develop an action learning model for strategic innovation in this contentious curriculum area. This paper reports on some of the findings of this study, and in particular how action research provided the means to acquire the clarity, understanding and action required when working in this curriculum area. As these teachers engaged in the action research cycles, they also engaged in reversing the cycles of hegemonic control operating at their school. (Contains 3 notes, 1 table and 2 figures.)

Statutory requirements for compulsory Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) in the UK is generating concern among many religious communities and reigniting debates about the purpose of School Based Sexuality Education (SBSE). Among the communities voicing their dissent are members of the British Islamic community. Quranic scripture deems obligatory the teaching and learning about all aspects relevant to human sexuality, however, religion, and in particular Islam, is widely viewed as hostile to sexuality education. Whilst Muslim objection to 'progressive' agendas in SBSE (i.e., same-sex relations, gender fluidity, pleasure and desire) is generating much attention, equal attention to understanding the Islamic theological, philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of these views, is less frequently sought. The purpose of this paper is to foreground Islamic responses to some of the 'progressive' topics featuring in RSE and SBSE more broadly. Using British printed media sources and Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper aims to make sense of British Muslim parents' objections to 'progressive' sexuality education. A more concerted focus on Islamic underpinnings of these views is imperative to alleviate negative responses to Muslim positions on this subject as well as inform the ongoing dilemma of finding ways in which religious diversity be addressed in SBSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article conceptualizes religion as a critical theory challenge to sexuality education. Religious views in sexuality education are often perceived as intolerant and incompatible with today’s progressive and modern society. This article engages with the idea that the inclusion of religious viewpoints on sexuality will challenge the efficacy of current sexuality education in Australia and New Zealand school contexts, to create a more contemporary and inclusive learning experience that caters for all students’ sexual needs and lives. Utilizing a critical theory lens, I demonstrate how religion can challenge dominant views of sexuality education, introduce alternative modes of content and delivering, promote critical thinking skills and more egalitarian ways of learning about sexuality. Drawing on data collected from Australian and New Zealand public schools, this article endeavors to reframe current discussions of the relationships between religion and sexuality education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people may face conflicting and confusing messages about what it means to respond well in relation to homophobia and transphobia. Consequently, we ask – What might it mean to respond well to homophobia and transphobia? This strategy, inspired by Anika Thiem and Judith Butler, is recognition of the ambivalent conditions which structure attempts to respond well to bullying related to gender and sexuality. Such an approach is counter to educational responses that suggest a remedy in advance of the enactment of perceived bullying. Our paper draws on research conducted by the authors in four such schools, two in Australia and two in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It is a deliberate turn away from focusing on who should be held to account for homophobia and transphobia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]