In this concluding chapter, I summarize the key findings of the book and consider what these contribute to existing knowledge and understandings of sexuality and education. I consider the implications of the findings for educational policy and practice, as well as assessing what the research in this book can potentially contribute to theoretical and methodological developments in the fields of sexualities and education and language and sexuality. What this chapter does not do is make definitive ‘conclusions’. Milani (Reference Milani2014) notes that ‘uncertainty’ is what crops up in many queer theoretical writings, and this includes research informed by queer linguistics. This book similarly ends on notes of ‘uncertainty’ over what the practical implications may be and how the fields to which it refers may subsequently develop. Importantly though, in keeping with a QAL approach, I do make some suggestions (with the emphasis on these being suggestions only) for how the research findings may be utilized in a practical way by schools and educators.
The research in this book has highlighted the continued importance of focusing on language when addressing sexual diversity issues in schools, and in research on sexuality and schooling. As emphasized in the Introduction and throughout, it is only through systematically analyzing linguistic practices that we can get to the heart of how gender and sexuality discourses are constructed and circulated in school spaces. The research presented in this book ultimately has an emancipatory aim of contributing towards addressing inequalities around sexual diversity in schools. In order to do this, linguistic issues cannot be continued to be ignored or downplayed when exploring sexuality and schooling.
Summary of Key Findings
What the research in this book has shown, perhaps overridingly, is that homophobia (and other gender and sexuality-based discriminatory practices) in schools now largely operates at a discursive level and is therefore very difficult to challenge. Moreover, a focus on ‘homophobia’ is, itself, exclusionary of other forms of discriminatory practices around gender and sexuality which are clearly experienced habitually by the young people who participated in this study. It is evident that research on language, sexuality and education must move beyond a focus on homophobia towards broader queer linguistic issues of gender and sexuality diversity. The context of the research suggests that sexual equality (‘triumph’) is becoming an accepted linear ‘triumph narrative’ (Leap, In press) which actually functions to occlude and obscure ongoing discriminatory practices in relation to gender and sexuality, which continue to be discursively achieved.
The research also strongly suggests that schools in both the United States and the United Kingdom are operating under a culture which discourages risk-taking on the part of educators and students. Expressions of overt gender and sexuality discrimination, but also talking explicitly about sexual diversity issues, are both considered ‘risky’ practices in schools. This means that those operating in school environments can neither openly express discriminatory ideas without punitive consequences nor they also cannot openly discuss gender and sexuality in a positive and inclusive way, also for fear of (different kinds of) punitive consequences. Fear and confusion on the part of both educators and students is a key theme emerging from the multiple data analyses conducted in this project – feelings which are surely not conducive to creating a positive school climate and learning experience.
What the application of linguistic frameworks of analysis within an overarching QAL approach also reveals are the details of how gender and sexuality discourses are enacted and achieved (and could therefore be challenged) through language. The combined ToI and appraisal analysis of the interview data in Chapters 3 and 4 (both with the young people and educators) revealed a perceived gap between school rhetoric around challenging gender and sexuality discrimination and actual practice. Participants noted that appropriate policies were in place but were not enforced, meaning that ideologies and practices in the schools were perceived to be lagging behind the policies themselves. The policies are, in effect, ‘not real’ (lacking in authenticity) if they are not being enacted. Both the young people and the educators believed that a key way of enacting the policies and translating pro-diversity rhetoric into practice is to include a range of ‘authentication strategies’ in schools. This would simultaneously counter the pervasive absences and silences which function to denaturalize LGBT+ identities in schools. Illegitimation and distinction are the highest intersubjective tactics used by the young people in their interviews, revealing that they experienced many feelings of difference and being treated differently as a direct result of their gender and sexuality identities. They also frequently reported discriminatory practices around gender and sexual diversity as being institutionally authorized in their schools. The young people provide lots of specific examples of this (i.e. students not being reprimanded for homophobic language and other behaviour) which, again, reveal that silence and inaction are identified as significant problems.
The interview analyses also reveal much attitudinal variability amongst teachers as a professional group. Both the educators and young people report inconsistent attitudes and values around gender and sexuality amongst school staff which translates into inconsistent practices. Thus, participants perceived there to be what may be termed as an ‘attitudinal rupture’ amongst teaching staff. This is realized as various dimensions of attitude such as affect (e.g. differing levels of ‘fear’ and in/security), judgement (e.g. varying levels of capacity and propriety) and appreciation (specific teachers are highly valued by young people whilst others are ascribed negative valuation which is linked to negative affect on the part of young people). The negative affect experienced by the young people is often realized as unhappiness and insecurity – these negative feelings are reported by the young people to be related to their experience of identifying as LGBT+ in school. Any positive affect was reported to be a result of the actions and behaviour of individual teachers and organizations and people outside the school itself. Markers of unhappiness and insecurity often co-occurred with the young people making negative capacity judgements of teachers in terms of their perceived ability levels in dealing with issues around gender and sexual diversity. Therefore, a perceived lack of capacity on the part of teachers was narrated as resulting in negative affect for the young people themselves. The young people’s use of negative propriety was high when evaluating the behaviour of others – as with capacity, these judgement markers mainly evaluated the behaviour of individual teachers, thus highlighting their importance for young people. It is teachers as individuals and their interactions with young people that are vitally important for enabling LGBT+ students to have a positive school experience. This is a key finding which is reflected in the suggested interventions in the following section. The markers of irrealis positive valuation give useful information about what young LGBT+ people would find helpful and valuable to increase their levels of positive affect in the school environment. Importantly, some of these overlap with the markers of irrealis and realis valuation used by the educators in Chapter 4.
In Chapter 4, the findings from the QAL-informed application of both frameworks show a high degree of similarity of experience between US and UK teachers. In both data sets, the ToI analysis reveals that illegitimation and authentication are the most frequently used tactics. The tactic of illegitimation is most commonly used to refer to the teachers’ perceived illegitimation of homophobia and bullying around gender and sexual diversity in their schools. Conversely, homophobia and other kinds of gender and sexual bullying are frequently reported as being authorized within schools. The patterns of illegitimation in the educators’ data show that they attribute illegitimation of gender and sexual diversity mainly to students’ families, and to other teachers and students. In the UK data, illegitimation is also used to refer to the perceived illegality of discussing anything to do with sexual orientation in schools, i.e. the ‘legacy of section 28’. The UK teachers also use the illegitimation tactic when discussing their perceptions of the school curricula and examination syllabuses as being highly restricted. Like the young people, the educators in the study use authentication to construct identities of LGBT+ teachers and students as ‘genuine’ and ‘out’. However, as with the young people, there were high occurrences of irrealis authentication to make suggestions about what would, hypothetically, work to authenticate LGBT+ identities in schools. The educators use denaturalization to report their perceived denaturalization of LGBT+ identities as being effected through silence and absence in the school environment. Denaturalization was also employed as a means of referring to other teachers’ perceived ‘discomfort’ about gender and sexual diversity in schools. The educators also used the tactic of denaturalization to reference oppositional practices in their schools to what they consider to be authentic learning. Distinction is used to refer to diversity amongst staff as justification for not explicitly addressing issues of gender and sexuality diversity in class (i.e. having different views).
The appraisal analysis findings also show that both the UK and US teachers do feel confident in challenging homophobic language and behaviour in some situations, as evidenced through the positive capacity markers (and some of the positive markers of affect). The appraisal analysis findings also suggest that it is often silence around sexual diversity issues, rather than overt homophobic bullying, that is identified as a bigger problem by the educators in their schools, both in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Perhaps the most important outcome of the study is that it suggests that tackling homophobic bullying in schools cannot be addressed as a single issue and that specific issues around constrained curriculum and exam requirements, in particular, need to be addressed. This suggests that training alone, although valuable, may not completely solve the problems currently faced by educators and students in relation to sexual diversity issues in UK and US schools.
The critical corpus analysis in Chapter 5 shows that all of the curriculum and guidance documents analyzed in this chapter are worded in ways which do not encourage teachers to incorporate sexual diversity issues into their teaching. This is the case both in subjects whose primary remit is to explicitly address sexuality issues (SRE/PSHE and Health Education) and in English as an example of a subject where there is no expectation that such issues will be addressed, but which may lend themselves to learning about diversity along different dimensions. The analysis reveals that there are marked absences around sexuality in the English curriculum encoded in the experiential values of the vocabulary. And linguistic presences and absences function to prioritize particular ideological positions over others. ‘Sexuality’ as a topic is one which is clearly addressed in the SRE and HEd curricula. But there is little in both documents which actively encourages teachers to incorporate positive teaching around ‘sexual diversity’. In both documents, the analysis reveals that the semantic profiles created around concepts such as ‘sexuality’ and ‘health’ are fairly restricted. Moreover, the findings show that a predominant discourse of ‘risk’ and ‘disease’ is created around sexuality and sexual behaviour. Heterosexual marriage is highlighted as ‘important’ and ascribed positive value in the UK SRE guidance document. This sits in tension with the fact that this document explicitly prohibits the ‘promotion’ of sexual orientation. The analysis also reveals that both sets of documents contain notable absences around love, consent, the possibility of bullying and sexual violence taking place between young people and meanings about sexuality which go beyond the physical and medical. Arguably, the language of the documents functions to promote feelings of fear and confusion – feelings which are already experienced by young LGBT+ people and some educators, as shown in Chapters 3 and 4.
In the analysis of SRE classes in Chapter 6, the findings of Chapter 5 were reinforced. Furthermore, the critical corpus analysis revealed the emergence of a discourse of gender that presents differential values for girls and boys which are usually negative for both. Girls are discursively constructed as having less sexual agency than boys. On the few occasions when they are afforded agency, it is to do with ensuring that any sex that takes places is ‘safe’. Unlike boys, girls have no agency in terms of initiating sexual activity or relationships whereas boys are discursively constructed as predatory and always ‘ready for sex’.
Gender itself is constructed as binary and reduced to biological sex. Within such discourses, the physicality of males is highly visible and normalized whereas female physicality is only visible through references to pregnancy which is always constructed as a negative outcome of heterosexual intercourse. Sexual pleasure is discursively construed as something to be experienced by biological males only. Sex itself emerges as a practice that is risky, dangerous and something to be avoided and ‘delayed’. Sex often has ‘unwanted’, rather than any positive, outcomes.
The student-initiated interactions in the lessons observed indicate a potential mismatch between what is taught in SRE and what students actually want to know. There are significant absences revealed through both the corpus and interactional analysis. Importantly, the teachers themselves expressed a desire for change but reported feeling restricted and disempowered. Finally, the main focus of all of the classes is on heterosexual reproduction and there is a continual reinforcement of heteronormativity. There is often an implicit, taken-for-granted assumption of heterosexuality, including in families as well as in the future sexual orientation of the students themselves. Furthermore, heterosexuality itself is represented in a restricted way. It is constructed as always monogamous and, in terms of sexual activity, enacted through vaginal intercourse only. This produces negative social, emotional and educational outcomes for all students, not just those identifying as LGBT+.
Ways Forward?
SRE will continue to play a key role in fostering an inclusive climate towards gender and sexual diversity in schools. I contend that legislative moves such as the recent introduction of compulsory SRE in schools in England will not solve these problems, principally because the language of the SRE guidance has not changed and therefore still contains the injurious discourses around sexuality identified and discussed in Chapters 5 and 6.Footnote 1
Curriculum and guidance documents could be audited by applied linguists specializing in language, gender and sexuality to ensure that certain ideological positions regarding sexuality are not prioritized, not just in the SRE curriculum but in other subject curricula such as English/English Language Arts and Science. The research presented through this book has revealed a number of habitual linguistic absences which function to occlude gender and sexuality diversity which is clearly a lived experience for many young people and those involved in their education. These exclusionary discourses around gender and sexuality need to be changed into discourses of inclusion. But, importantly, the incorporation of ‘inclusive language’ in teaching guidance documents needs to also be translated into practice and reflected in the language that is used in SRE (and other subject) lessons. Both educators and students need to believe that policies and documents will be enforced and, therefore, have a tangible influence on their school experiences. Such interventions may start to work towards removing negative heteronormativity discourses which are evidently pervasive in UK and US school environments and to replace them with ‘gender and sexuality inclusive’ discourses. This is surely a job for applied linguists to take on and has the potential to be a clear outcome of school-based QAL inquiry. Whilst work in sexualities and education refers to the possibility of introducing ‘pro-gender-diversity’ approaches in schools (e.g. Bryan, Reference Bryan2012; Meyer, Reference Meyer2010), such work has yet to focus on the linguistic dimensions of such approaches. Additionally, the following QAL-informed interventions may contribute to greater gender and sexuality inclusion in schools:
An obvious intervention is the provision of specialized training for teachers who deliver SRE (and other subjects in which gender and sexuality issues logically appear). Ollis (Reference Ollis, Rivers and Duncan2013) notes that professional learning/continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers enables them to develop knowledge, comfort and confidence in relation to the delivery of effective SRE. Importantly, Ollis argues that such training is most effective when a whole-school approach is taken, rather than targeting a small group of individual teachers with responsibility for teaching SRE. I would add to this, based on the research presented in this book, that such CPD needs to include providing educators with linguistic resources which enable them to start discursively constructing schools as spaces which are inclusive and celebratory of diversity, and in which the habitual and repeated use of pro-diversity language produces the cumulative effect of creating new ‘norms’ of gender and sexuality identities and practices.
The production of handbooks and briefing documents for school inspectorates (OFSTEDFootnote 2 in the United Kingdom and IMPACTFootnote 3 in Washington, DC) on gender and sexuality diversity and inclusion across all curriculum areas. School inspectorates in the United States and United Kingdom play an important role in determining curriculum content as well as school policies and practices. Although there is much opposition to the role of school inspectorates, the current reality is that they are central to informing what happens in schools, therefore queer applied linguists need to engage in productive dialogue with these organizations. In the United Kingdom, the current OFSTED School Inspection Handbook refers to ‘disadvantaged pupils’ but only in terms of socio-economic status (SES), special educational needs and disabilities. The handbook mentions ‘prejudice-based bullying’ but only in general terms. The only time that LGBT+ learners are mentioned is in the Common Inspection Framework which states that school inspectors should pay particular attention to the educational outcomes of ‘vulnerable groups’. But no detail is provided about how to do this, or how to identify such groups.
Linked to the point above, I would suggest that audits of SRE curriculum and delivery include a focus on the language used to teach the subject, rather than just examining the content of lessons. Specific attention could be paid to ensuring that language is not being used to exclusively promote discourses of heteronormativity.
Finally, Poteat et al. (Reference Poteat, Meerish, DiGiovanni, Scheer, Rivers and Duncan2013) stress the importance of parental support for promoting resilience amongst LGBT+-identified young people, as well as the creation of a positive school climate, school-based programmes on gender and sexual diversity and peer support. I would add to this that greater attention needs to be paid to how the resources of language can be used to create a ‘positive school climate’ in relation to gender and sexual diversity, and that all educators have a responsibility to be critically aware of the language used in schools and its potential effects on young people.
QAL and Future Research Directions
What this book has presented is a queer linguistics-based analysis of language and sexuality with real-world implications for policy and practice relating to schools. School-based language practices are overwhelmingly experienced as sites which foster and reproduce gender and sexuality-based discrimination but there is much scope for challenging and changing these practices. I hope that the book has demonstrated that a language-centered, queer linguistics framework (QAL) offers useful avenues for exploring the themes of gender and sexual diversity and inequalities in schools. Moreover, I have attempted to illustrate how the analytical tools of applied linguistics may be utilized within a QAL approach to develop existing knowledge and understanding of sexuality and education.
The data sets and analytical frameworks used in this book are by no means the only ones that may be used within a QAL approach. Indeed, a key strength of QAL and queer linguistics more generally is its flexibility and adaptability to context and purpose. And a QAL approach itself is not intended to be presented as a ‘finished product’. The queer dimension of the approach itself means that it should not be stable, but should instead be constantly evolving and always open to contestation and critical development. As an approach, QAL certainly needs more rigorous theorization of spatiality, temporality and normativity, as well as what Pennycook (Reference 200Pennycook2017) has recently termed ‘a queer approach to materiality’ whereby greater attention is paid to discursive materializations of sexualities in relation to political economies. The data in this book clearly show that schools operate within the context of political economies which influence factors including the availability of teaching resources, estate investment (e.g. building cubicle toilets and gender-diverse changing rooms), in-service teacher training, inclusive curriculum development, family liaison and extra-curricular activities. Furthermore, future projects in language, sexuality and education will take place in different times and spaces and may address different conceptualizations, understandings and experiences of sexual and gender normativity. But what they will have in common is a desire for social transformation, and a move towards greater social justice for all those involved in education.
