Is it ethical to want students to become non-queerphobic as an outcome of our teaching? This question is situated within thinking about teaching for social justice. It takes an event where a student challenges a course's queer pedagogy and thinks with it to expose 'the inherent paradox of education'. This is the notion that in its desires for…

What are the limits of queer pedagogy's thought [Britzman, D. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy or stop reading straight. "Educational Theory," 45(2), 151-165]? This question is considered in relation to how queer pedagogy unfolds in a first-year university course entitled "Learning Sexualities." Examples of how queer pedagogy…

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…

This paper asks, what more can we think in relation to debates around young people's use of mobile phones at school? Rather than attempting to answer the question of whether mobile phones are "good" or "bad" for young people, this paper recasts the debate's ontological underpinnings. To do this feminist appropriations of the…

The idea that pleasure might form a part of sexuality education is no longer a "new" idea in the field of sexuality studies. In this paper we examine how originally conceived notions of pleasure have been "put to work" and theoretically "taken up" in relation to sexuality and education. It is our contention that because of the nature of discourse…

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),…

This paper revisits the missing discourse of female desire [Fine, M. 1988. Sexuality, schooling and adolescent females: The missing discourse of desire. "Harvard Educational Review" 58, no. 1: 29-53] in secondary schools. Instead of echoing previous studies that have documented how female desire is missing, this research starts from the…

Sexuality and humour share a fraught relationship at school, so that how humour might be productively employed in sexuality education constitutes a "risky" consideration. This paper explores the role of humour in sexuality education as observed in a Year 9 New Zealand health class. Adding to existing literature emphasising students' use…

The issue of whether to "come out" in class has a poignant history in the literature by gay, lesbian and bisexual educators on this topic. By comparison few heterosexuals have publicly written about whether they explicitly reveal their heterosexuality to students. This paper contributes to the enduring debate about whether to "come out" in class…

This article is concerned with how to analyse photographs produced during research on sexualities and schooling. Photo-diaries and photo-elicitation were employed in an examination of the sexual cultures of two New Zealand secondary schools. This visual methodology sought to disclose spatial and embodied dimensions of sexualities at school while…

This book innovatively re-envisions the possibilities of sexuality education. Utilizing student critiques of programs it reconfigures key debates in sexuality education including: Should pleasure be part of the curriculum? Who makes the best educators? Do students prefer single or mixed gender classes?

This paper explores "the 5 cm rule", a regulation around student contact discovered during an investigation of the sexual culture of schooling with 16-19-year-olds in New Zealand. Implemented to stem "inappropriate and unwanted" touching, it stipulates that students must maintain a physical distance of 5 cm at all times. It is…

Visual methods are often marginalized in educational research and have not been employed to collect information about sexuality at school. This paper examines the viability and effectiveness of conducting research about the "sexual cultures" of schools in New Zealand using photo-diaries and photo-elicitation. "Effectiveness" is…

This paper seeks to explore how we might understand young people's agency in sexuality research using visual methods. It is concerned with troubling the perception that power is held by the adult researcher and denied to youthful participants who simply submit to their authority. Rather than attempting to cast moments of young people's agency as…

This paper seeks to explore the relation between sexuality and pedagogy. This theoretical concern is examined with reference to two key pedagogical moments during a first-year undergraduate course about schooling and sexuality. Through critical reflection of these episodes it is argued that when sexuality is the intellectual focus of a course, the…