What if?: becoming response-able with the making and mattering of a new relationships and sexuality education curriculum

Abstract

This paper maps the development of a response-able (Barad 2007), creative professional learning programme for in-service teachers of an unfolding relationships and sexuality education (RSE) curriculum in Wales (UK) where the authors are uniquely and deeply entangled. We chart crucial aspects of the ethical, political and creative praxis informing this journey and explore how the post-qualitative concepts of darta and dartaphacts (Renold 2018), through creative audits facilitated by teachers that surfaced what students know and wonder about RSE, challenge assumptions about ‘what matters’ in RSE for children and young people. We diffractively analyse teachers’ experiences of conducting creative audits across three post-qualitative vignettes and a poem. These dartaphacts-in-the-making offer glimpses at the boundless potential of making student voice matter, which we argue can spark and sustain a co-produced curriculum that comes from and stays close to ‘what matters’.

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