Providing spaces for children's culture becomes an issue when it conflicts with or threatens to reverse the notion of 'legitimate' culture. Here, legitimate culture refers to the dominant values of the official curriculum and teachers' cultural values. This article, which stems from an ethnographically oriented pilot study, explores the experience…

In this article, a teacher educator and a New York City elementary public school teacher share insights from a yearlong collaboration whereby they worked together to interrupt normative pedagogical practices regarding gender, sexuality, and interrelated identities within the context of a second-grade classroom. Bridging the typical disconnect…

How might Life Skills be conceptualised in the Foundation Phase of schooling when a tradition of feminist literature has revealed the regulation, denial and the silencing of both gender and sexuality in early childhood? This article presents one Grade 2 teacher's perspective of addressing sexuality education in an impoverished township primary…

This study had three goals: (a) assessing the predictive association of externalizing and internalizing behaviors during childhood with sexual onset during early adolescence; (b) examining the interactive link of externalizing and internalizing behaviors with early sexual onset; and (c) investigating the moderating effect of gender in this…

Responses to AIDS have often neglected children. Drawing on a qualitative study of young children aged 7-9 years, this paper draws attention to their understandings of HIV and AIDS. It is argued that young children are able to give meaning to the disease in ways that link to their social contexts, where gender inequalities and sexual violence are…

Drawing on data derived from two socially contrasting primary schools in Durban, this paper focuses on how gender and sexuality feature in the teaching and discussion of HIV/AIDS. A detailed analysis of two "life-skills" lessons in the two schools shows that, despite the social differences between the schools, discussions of gender and…

Drawing from data collected during interviews with grade 2 teachers who work in a black working-class township school, this paper explores the meanings that teachers attach to HIV and AIDS education. It is argued that the relationship of many teachers to the subject of HIV and AIDS is inscribed within regulatory forces based on the notion of…