The Teaching of Sexual and Gender Diversity Issues to Pre-service Teachers at the University of KwaZulu-Natal: Lessons from Student Exam Responses

Abstract

This paper uses Kumashiro’s (2002) anti -oppressive education theory to explore the type of education offered in a module on sexual and gender diversity at a South African School of Education. This is done through analysing the responses of students in one exam question, focussed on sexual diversity, in a compulsory final year module offered to 661 pre-service teachers at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Focussed on human rights education, ethics and teacher professionalism, the module is designed to assist pre-service teachers in the promotion of social justice in the classroom. The analysis not only shows a heightened awareness of same-sex terminology and issues among students, it also highlights the possibilities that antioppressive pedagogy offers to teacher educators in teaching for diversity and social change. Further, the analysis also demonstrates that while useful in heightening awareness among students and enabling change, anti-oppressive pedagogies should pay more attention to the interrogation of students’ own sexualities in order to trouble the ‘asexual teacher discourse’. Such teaching would require the creation of safe environments for students through the creation of smaller classes as well as offering more time on teaching related material. The paper offers possible implications for further work in this area.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.