Bio
Alexis Martin is a secondary school educator and M.Ed. candidate in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science from the University of Western Ontario and a Bachelor of Education from OISE. Her interest in sexual health education is greatly informed by her own work as an educator of students with Developmental Disabilities. More specifically, her academic and professional interests include issues related to sexuality, curriculum, disability, access and inclusion.
Alexis Martin
Abstract
Sexuality Education and Adolescents with Developmental Disabilities
This presentation examines the current reality of sexual health education for students with Developmental Disabilities in Ontario. Sexual health education needs to be a fundamental component of a holistic high school experience for all students. The roles and responsibilities of educators, as well as the challenges and barriers they face, will be explored in this workshop. The goal of this presentation is to further the dialogue of inclusion, with respect to persons with Developmental Disabilities, within Ontario’s health education policy and curriculum.
Bio
Martha Newbigging is a multi-disciplinary artist with practices in illustration, comics and animation. They have illustrated over a dozen children’s books and their animations have been screened internationally. They teach illustration as faculty in the School of Creative Arts and Animation at Seneca College, Toronto. They have a BFA from OCAD University, a Bachelor of Education from York University, and recently completed a Masters of Environmental Studies from York University. Their research explores queer sexuality in childhood and youth through self-narrative comics and considers the implications for participatory, arts-based research and critical pedagogy.
Martha Newbigging
Abstract
Drawing comics: A methodology to materialize queer presence in childhood
My presentation focuses on a series of autobiographical comics that show traces of queerness in my own childhood. The result of a research-creation investigation, drawing autobiographical comics enables making sense of queer ways of being in childhood and youth who have been discounted, ignored, or suppressed. Drawing comics is used as a method to approach “the ghostly gay child [that] is only ever recognized after [the] growing [up] has happened, after words and names and labels have replaced an inarticulate but felt presence”. Cartoonist Lynda Barry suggests that we use paper as a place, rather than a thing, to get at a certain state of mind that is very good for us. This paper she speaks of, a place for drawing our memories as comics, may illuminate the sideways growth, or the oblique angle, of queerness in childhood, and consequently illuminate missing dimensions of conventional sexual diversity curriculum.
Bio
Kate Reid is a professional singer-songwriter and recording artist (www.katereid.net) and is pursuing doctoral studies in the department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at OISE. She holds a B.Ed and an MA from The University of British Columbia, where she explored how queer genealogies and kinships are constituted through songs, songwriting, and performance. Currently, she is curious about how collaborative songwriting might be used as a tool to encourage critical thought, self-reflection, and inquiry, and how it might open up possibilities for civic engagement, particularly with gender and sexual variant youth. Kate is working with Dr. Tara Goldstein’s research team on Dr. Goldstein’s project entitled, LGBTQ Families Speak Out, where she is composing songs based on interview data and Dr. Goldstein’s verbatim monologue scripts. Kate has five albums under her belt: Kate Reid (EP, 2005), Comin’ Alive (2006), I’m Just Warming Up (2009), Doing it for the Chicks (2011) and Queer Across Canada (2013), and performs at live music venues, folk and music festivals, Pride festivals, conferences, and in people’s living rooms. She also combines musical activism with teaching by facilitating workshops and giving concerts in secondary schools, post-secondary institutions, for educators and community service providers.
Kate Reid
Abstract
Singing a Queer Archive: Composing Songs Collaboratively with Sexual and Gender Variant Youth
I am interested in how collaborative songwriting might open up possibilities for LGBTQ2S (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer-twospirit) youth to engage in self-expression and meaning-making related to their identities, desires, relational experiences, and socio-political views. I am curious about how LGBTQ2S youth might contribute to a queer archive by tracing, documenting, and locating themselves and their ways of living, loving, learning, and relating in the world in song. Methodologically speaking, I propose collaborative songwriting as a methodology, that is, as a “a place to begin inquiry” (Gallagher, 2011, p. 53). Further, songs are teaching tools that can educate others about people's lived experiences, and the act of songwriting and its products—songs—are pedagogies that inform audiences, invite emotional responses, provoke questioning and thought, and disrupt hegemonic thinking about genders and sexualities. As such, I am interested in the kinds of curricular interventions songwriting and performance of songs might make in traditional educational spaces (ie. schools) and public educational spaces (ie. beyond the confines of schools). In my presentation, I will present a brief literature review, the beginnings of my theoretical framework, and my proposed methodological approach.
Bio
Franco is an educator and activist who has worked in universities, high schools, and with community groups for several years focusing on anti-oppression and queer pedagogy. Before moving to Ontario, Franco coordinated education programs at the University of Alberta in gender-based violence prevention, queer and trans pedagogies, and in HIV/AIDS youth education. Franco was a high school teacher with Edmonton Public School Board and has published professional teacher resources and academic research relating to social justice, queerness, and drama in education. Franco holds a B.Ed (Hons) from the University of Alberta in Secondary Education, and is currently completing his MA at OISE in Curriculum Studies and Teacher Development, with a collaborative program in Sexual Diversity Studies. His research interests are in anti-oppression learning (for students and teachers), transformative learning, and arts education. He is also a Toronto-based slam poet.
Franco Saccucci
Abstract
Transforming schools through queer performance pedagogy
Working at the intersection of queer pedagogy and drama education, this paper will inquire upon the pedagogical affects that performance, in particular queer performance, has on (re)creating educational spaces that are dominated by a cisheterosexist culture. I will draw on curriculum theory (Perry & Rogers, 2011), urban geography and sociology (Massey, 2013), and queer youth in theatre research (Iverson & Seher, 2014) to discuss the transformative power that performance holds in (re)creating educational spaces(such as locker rooms and bathrooms) to be more sexually-inclusive spaces. My central argument will explore how performance (including both participating and witnessing performance) can aid in the development of creating sexually-inclusive spaces. Further, I will argue that an attention to space and performance is crucial when understanding how education responds to and polices sexuality in school settings. This paper explores research that argues that through performance, a place-based sexuality education can be achieved.
Bio
Rebecca Starkman is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum Studies and Teacher Development at OISE/UofT. Her research explores the experiences of faith-affiliated girls in both formal and informal spaces in Toronto-area public high schools. She is keen to participate in this workshop because it offers a venue to discuss the strong reaction on the part of religious groups to the new Health and Physical Education curriculum in Ontario public schools. Further, the workshop offers an accessible and supportive place to disseminate preliminary findings from her doctoral research.
Rebecca Starkman
Abstract
Navigating gendered religious accommodation: Examining religious groups' reactions to Sex Ed
The Ontario Ministry of Education predicted that by 2017, one-fifth of public school students would be members of diverse faith groups including Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Buddhism. Research shows that there are strong gender differences in religious practices, and that girls demonstrate a higher religious observance than boys. Girls of minority religions attending Ontario’s public schools often face experiences of marginalization, exclusion, and tension. This paper focuses on the province-wide maelstrom in 2015 over the new provincial Health and Physical Education curriculum, which led parents of numerous faith groups to boycott their children’s classes. I map the objections of religious groups to the new curriculum, highlighting gender dimensions to these objections. I then consider questions about the ways that attempts to accommodate religious parents’ concerns about sex education reinforce religious girls’ experiences of exclusion and marginalization in the school environment.
Bio
Sarah Switzer is a community-based educator, community artist and doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Inspired by a decade of working at the intersections of community arts, education and HIV and harm reduction, her doctoral work uses participatory visual methods and community-based participatory research approach to explore conceptions of (community) engagement and participation in different organizational sites providing HIV programming, service provision, or care. More broadly, her work explores HIV and harm reduction, pedagogy, popular education, participatory visual methods and critical theory. In addition to a number of community reports and bulletins, her academic work has appeared in Social Science and Medicine, Critical Approaches to Harm Reduction: Conflict, Institutionalization, Co-optation, De-politicization and Direct Action; Creating social change through creativity: Anti-oppressive arts-based research methodologies (in press); and Ethics in participatory research for health and social well-being (forthcoming).
Sarah Switzer
Abstract
Moving beyond Arnstein: Participation and Pedagogy in Sexual Health and HIV programming
Recently, scholars have begun to critically unpack how discourses of participation are employed in HIV community-based participatory research (CBPR) and sexuality education projects. This paper will present an overview of dominant models for thinking through public participation, and raise critical questions on the limitations of these models in the context of community-based sexual health or HIV programming, especially when working towards social justice. Critiques will explore: How might neoliberal and colonial narratives inform dominant participation models? How might these models ignore the vital role of pedagogy, or the co-constructed nature of participatory projects? What is the role of non-participation and self-determination in thinking through participation? Drawing on preliminary findings from a CBPR project on engagement and participation in the HIV, harm reduction and sexual health sector, the paper concludes by showcasing how community members’ conceptualizations of participation and engagement might propose new ways of imagining being, living, and learning together.
Bio
Shannon Salisbury is a PhD candidate in the department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto). A parent of teens, classroom teacher, and former social worker, Shannon has spent several years working in the areas of sexual and reproductive health and sexual violence on the front lines as an educator and counsellor, as well as at the policy level. She began curating a consent-based education resource as a teacher candidate when she realized classroom teachers needed more support in addressing issues of rape culture, sexual violence, and consent with their students. She can be found blogging far too rarely at www.creatingconsentculture.org.
Shannon Salisbury
Abstract
Shifting Focus: Centering Students in Conversations about Sexual Consent and Body Autonomy
I am interested in how rape culture manifests in, is reinforced by, and is resisted in public school environments. I am particularly interested in how students themselves experience this manifestation, reinforcement, and resistance. Can classroom teachers address sexual consent explicitly (as is now mandated by the 2015 revisions to Ontario’s Health and Physical Education curriculum) in an institutional context which, by definition, requires student compliance? Rather than focus on the hows and whys of teacher practice, I will present a rationale for centering adolescent student experience in my research by using a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) model of data generation.
Bio
Shira Taylor is a performer, director, producer, and doctoral candidate in Social and Behavioural Health Sciences at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto (BSc. Psychology & MSc. Epidemiology, Queen’s University). For her dissertation, she is exploring the use of theatre for sex education among youth in priority neighborhoods. This exploration led her to found “SExT: Sex Education by Theatre,” a theatre performance and workshop program and devise the play “SExT” with youth from Toronto’s Thorncliffe/Flemingdon Park. SExT has been performed to rave reviews at two of Canada’s largest theatre festivals, and most recently to high school students from across the GTA in partnership with Ophea. More at our website: www.sexeducationbytheatre.com and on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram: @SExTEdShow. Shira works with Indigenous youth in the Northwest Territories as an evaluation consultant and facilitator with the arts-based, trauma-informed sex ed program FOXY/SMASH. She is a CIHR Social Research Centre in HIV Prevention Trainee, a research coordinator at SickKids on the cross-Canada Art for Social Change (ASC!) project, and recipient of the 2016 TD Michaëlle Jean Bursary, awarded to a young person who has demonstrated excellence in using the arts to address issues of concern in Canada.
Shira Taylor
Abstract
SExT: Sex Education by Theatre
An up-to-date and comprehensive curriculum, while essential, is still only one ingredient when it comes to effective sex education. I developed SExT: Sex Education as part of my doctoral thesis in response to gaps in the literature exploring creative, interactive, and culturally-inclusive ways of implementing sex education curricula. Theatre provides an apt pedagogical approach to sex education in light of its unique capacity to engage youth on complex issues on both a cognitive and affective level. SExT approaches sex education through a culturally-inclusive, arts-based, youth-driven lens, empowering young people from a community where sexuality is a cultural taboo to take centre stage. Over the past three years, I have facilitated a creation process providing a safer space for youth from Toronto’s Flemingdon and Thorncliffe Park to develop as artists and use theatre to address sex education topics they have identified as most relevant to their lives. These communities are high immigrant receiving neighborhoods that experience a number of social and structural challenges. They were the recent hub of protests opposing sex education reform in the wake of the first Ontario curriculum update since 1998. In this presentation, I will summarize the process and key findings of the SExT Project and relate them to gaps in the literature on sexuality education in the context of the 2015 curriculum update.
Bio
j wallace skelton is a trans person, the parent of a gender independent kid, and an education professional who for over 12 years has been primarily supporting Gender Independent, and Trans and Non-binary (GIaNT) children and youth in schools. Yes, I have skin in the game. j’s academic work is exploring with GIaNT children how they would like to create more gender inclusive and celebratory schools. j is the author of three children’s books, two picture books that include gender creative characters, and Transphobia: Deal With It and Be a Gender Transcender, for middle school students. j’s academic work has appeared in Trans Studies Quarterly, and a number of book chapters.
j wallace skelton
Abstract
Letting GIaNTs Speak for Themselves
Gender Independent and Trans and Non-binary (GIaNT) children are increasingly being acknowledged as present in school communities. Existing research into supporting GIaNT children in school environments has been distinctly created by adults. Even adults who ascribe to the gender affirming model of care, look to parents, teachers, therapists and academics to describe the children and what supports them or limits them at school. Disability studies has shown that even adults that claim to care and love children, may not represent the children’s best interests. Borrowing from child studies, and recognizing children as independent rights holders, I am interested in designing research that positions GIaNT children as co-researchers. In my presentation I will explore the existing research on GIaNT children in schools, how the failure to see them as independent rights holders has created a less than ethical understanding of their needs and how to better support them, and propose how more ethical research with GIaNT children might be conducted.
Bio
Jamayca Whalen was raised in British Columbia and recently completed a BSc in Psychology and Education at the University of Toronto. Her experiences as a queer, mixed-race woman inform her educational philosophy and enrich her work as a pedagogical consultant. Over the past few years, she has designed and taught units to school groups on topics such as hip hop culture, slam poetry and activism, reconciliation, as well as gender and sexuality. Jamayca plans to pursue a career in education or curriculum studies so that she may continue to be involved in the ongoing work of educational reform.
Jamayca Whalen
Abstract
The End of Innocence: Repositioning Students as Informed Learners in Sex Education
In the debate surrounding Ontario’s revised Health and Physical Education Curriculum, children are typically portrayed as innocent and ignorant beings who are devoid of sexuality, despite anecdotal and empirical evidence indicating otherwise (Blaise & Taylor, 2012). Shlasko (2005) reframes ignorance as an a priori knowledge of what society deems normal, as opposed to an absence of knowledge. Thus, if students are assumed to be naïve about matters of sexuality, their biases will remain unexamined and heteronormative discourses will be reinforced. Shlasko challenges educators to queer the sex education curriculum by shifting the emphasis from providing students with facts about sexual and reproductive health to collaboratively deconstructing and analyzing students’ pre-existing knowledge. In this presentation, I outline a model for achieving this by framing each lesson with questions and activities that invite students to reflect on the source and implications of various sexuality discourses, and ultimately gives students the agency to explore the many dimensions of human sexuality from a critical perspective.
Bio
I am in the final year of my PhD in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, in the UK. Previously, I completed a MRes in Social Work (University of Bristol), an MSc in Health, Population and Society (London School of Economics and Political Science), and a BA in Communication (Simon Fraser University). Originally from Ontario, I am planning post-doctoral research that compares educational leadership for sexuality education in the UK and in Ontario. I am committed to advancing sexual and reproductive rights, as an advocate and researcher, and worked to this end for several years in international development organizations.
Rachel Wilder
Abstract
Decision-making about sexuality education in English primary schools: How epistemology in education constrains and controls
Sexuality education is uniquely emotive, embodied and personal among school subjects. It is obtuse and uncomfortable in a school system where ‘knowledge’ refers to facts that are objective and knowable, and where a performative-utilitarian rationality guides the way things are done. In my doctoral research, I explored how three primary schools in England made decisions around sexuality education. In England, sexuality education will not be statutory until 2019, so until then individual schools have extraordinary autonomy on what sexuality education they offer. Utilising philosopher John MacMurray’s (1965) typology of knowledge in education, including technical knowledge, emotional knowledge and knowledge about community, I show how decision-making practices around sexuality education are dominated by an instrumental understanding of knowledge in education. In all but a few instances, school decision makers marginalized or silenced their understanding about the role of education in teaching children to live together in community and in fostering emotional development.
Bio
Jessica Wright is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, in the Department of Social Justice Education. Their doctoral research centres on an inquiry into the concept of consent, which includes an analysis of the appearance of sexual consent in Ontario’s 2015-revised sexuality education curriculum, informed by the voices of youth who are survivors of trauma. Wright is an interdisciplinary scholar and activist situated at the intersections of critical disability, critical race, queer, and feminist studies. They organize with the University of Toronto chapter of Silence Is Violence, an experientially-led student collective that advocates for survivors of sexual violence on campus through public education, research, and peer support. Wright has also taught various grades as well as seminars and workshops on wellness and empowerment, consent, sexual violence and resistance.
Jessica Wright
Abstract
Ontario’s Sexual Consent Education and the Missing Discourse of Trauma
Recognizing that notions of trauma are contested and subjective, this presentation investigates how trauma factors into negotiations of sexual consent, particularly pertaining to the experiences of youth who have gone through trauma and who have received Ontario’s new consent education. While much critical disability research has explored the debates on informed sexual consent with those who are deemed incompetent legally and ethically, less research has focused on how mental anguish resulting from emotional trauma impacts sexual relations and experiences of consensual negotiation. This presentation adds to critical work on sexual consent by highlighting the need for a relational model of consent in Ontario’s curriculum. What is made unimaginable when sexual relations are presumed to be between two individuals who are each “healthy,” “unified,” and profoundly self-knowing modern subjects? In a socio-political climate that can seem increasingly traumatic and maddening, I seek to contribute to research that expands ways of “knowing” about consent and the self through the perspectives of those with histories of trauma.
Bio
Afraa Yusuf is a certified Ontario Elementary and Secondary teacher specializing in Law and Social Sciences. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Law & Society and a Bachelor of Education from York University. She is currently pursuing her Master’s in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Educational Leadership and Policy. Her current research interests include ethical issues in education, sexual education and social justice, politics and education, and the philosophy of education. With her background in teaching diverse and controversial subjects, including sexual health education in both public and Catholic schools in Ontario, she will be writing her thesis on the conflicting rights of parents and children in Ontario’s revised Sexual Education Curriculum. This conference will provide her the opportunity to engage and network with faculty members and peers who have experience teaching and researching sexuality education.
Afraa Yusuf
Abstract
The rights of a child and a parent: A qualitative analysis of parental perceptions of children’s rights to participate in Ontario’s sexual education curriculum
In discussions of the legal context of the Ontario sexual education curriculum, it is important to ask whether parental rights can overpower a child’s right to education. This new mandated curriculum has resulted in parents across the province invoking their parental right to opt their children out of classes and withdrawing them from school during this period. My thesis research will focus on parents who have withdrawn their children from sexual education classes, and the conflicts of rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms regarding the constantly evolving relationship between two key stakeholders: the parent and the child. The purpose of this qualitative study is to better understand parents’ perceptions of sexual education taught in elementary schools, in particular Grades 1–5, and children’s rights to education. The findings of this study will be presented at the workshop.
Bio
Jamie Zancai is a second year MA student in the Social Justice Education Department and a graduate of the Masters of Teaching program at UT/OISE. Currently, he works as an elementary teacher with the York Region District School Board (YRDSB) and as a Trip Director with Westcoast Connections/360 Student Travel. Prior to rejoining the OISE community in 2016, Jamie worked as a Grade 5 teacher at the Canadian International School in Ho Chi Minh City.
Jamie Zancai
Abstract
Bridging the Gap & Creating Dialogue - Introducing Gender, Sexual Diversity and the LGBTQ Community into the Elementary Classroom
Since the introduction of the 2015 Ontario Health and Physical Education curriculum, there has been a complete disregard of professional development for teachers within Ontario public school boards. Research show that not only are schools are heteronormative institutions, which are often silent arounds topics concerning gender and sexual diversity (GSD), but also that teachers are often apprehensive teaching topics related to GSD and utilize informal-risk benefit analyses when deciding what is safe to discuss within their school setting. My thesis research will focus on teaching strategies and techniques that support elementary educators bring topics related to GSD and about the LGBTQ community into their classroom and what existing forms of support are available to teachers in school boards across the province.