Reading With Consent: Teaching Literature for Gender Justice

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Diverse Qualitative Approaches to Readers' and Teachers'/Candidates' Text Engagement (Table 2)

Abstract

Consent education is now a mandated component of the primary and secondary school curriculum in many countries, including Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada.This paper reports on a research project undertaken by the Literary Education Lab that explored the ways in which teachers of literature in secondary school English might contribute to consent education in the Australian context. A scoping study was conducted which included a review of relevant research addressing consent education, a mapping of the extent to which both commonly taught and contemporary adolescent literature included themes of sexual consent, along with focus groups with English teachers which investigated their experience of discussing sexual consent, and their readiness to actively contribute to consent education.

Authors

• Larissa J. McLean Davies, University of Melbourne

• Sarah E. Truman, University of Melbourne