How Teachers Draw Upon Authoritative Discourses to Explain Their Approach to Teaching (or Not) About Sexual Diversity

• In Event: Sexuality, Society, and Pedagogy: Teaching About Sexual Diversity in the South African Context

Abstract

Our research involved in-depth interviews with 25 South African Life Orientation teachers. Life Orientation is a relatively new subject area in the South African curriculum, part of the Outcome Based Education (OBE) introduced in 1997, and is designed to take a holistic approach to the learners’ personal, social, and emotional, and physical growth (Basic Education, 2011). Our research set out to explore how teachers construct their responsibility for teaching about sexual diversity.
In order to explain the arguments teachers construct around the address of LGBT issues in the classroom, our study draws upon Russian Philologist Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of authoritative discourse. He explains that people collaboratively construct truth through dialogue, but that these dialogic interactions may invoke authoritative discourse which is seen as coming from a higher and unquestionable source of power (Bakhtin, 1981). We have chosen to focus on 4 key authoritative discourses that teachers draw upon as they construct their personal and professional positioning with respect to teaching about sexual diversity: scientific, religious, legislative, and policy.
On the whole, teachers described very little practice involving sexual diversity. Nevertheless, based on their moral convictions that were rooted in broader religious, scientific, and legal discourses, teachers formulated various approaches to teaching about homosexuality. We have organized these into 3 major categories: Therapy/Disorder, Tolerance/Misfortune, and Human Rights/Diversity, and analyze the arguments and their implications for teacher education.
We recommend inviting teachers to explore the authoritative discourses that they consider relevant to their approaches to teaching about sexual diversity. This may mean clarifying scientific discourses. Religion seems to play an important role in many teachers’ lives, which suggests that teachers must be encouraged to explicitly wrest with their own religious perspectives and plan ways to reconcile their church’s authority with their own authoritative positions as educators. Teachers seemed to find little authority in policy and curriculum materials, which suggests that educators might collaborate with LGBT groups to produce lesson plans and materials (Polders & Wells, 2004; Schools OUT n.d) and to situate their relevance within the LO Curriculum.
Our results suggest that the South African legislative discourse is a powerful, yet underutilized tool for teaching about sexual diversity. Teachers should be helped to understand the legislative framework in which they live and teach, and engage in reflection and debate about how this authority interacts with the other authoritative discourses relevant to their professional lives to guide their classroom practice.

References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Basic Education. (2011a). Grades 10 – 12 Life orientation curriculum and assessment policy statement. Republic of South Africa, Department of Basic Education.
Polders, L., & Wells, H. (2004). Overall research findings on levels of empowerment amongst LGBT people in Gauteng, South Africa. Pretoria: OUT LGBT Well-being. Retrieved from http://www.out.org.za/images/library/pdf/Hate_Crimes_Research_Findings.pdf
Schools OUT. (n.d.). The Classroom - LGBT Teaching. Retrieved November 7, 2012, from http://the-classroom.org.uk/

Authors

• Renée DePalma, Universidade da Coruña

• Dennis Francis, University of the Free State