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In this article we analyze the situation of immigrant organizations during the European economic crisis. We set out to examine how, during a period of heightened economic insecurity, priorities among these multiples roles might shift when members find themselves in a particularly vulnerable situation. Data was collected in the form of 16 extended semi-structured interviews with group representatives throughout the Galician autonomous community in north-western Spain. Our data provide an empirically-based study that have led us to adapt Schrover and Vermeulen’s (2005) classification of immigrant association approaches as either defensive (responding to social exclusion) or offensive (emphasizing differences with respect to the destination society), extending this scheme to include a third approach, which our data show to be a priority even under conditions of economic insecurity: claims for intercultural relations with receiving society members with the goal of increased social cohesion and mutual understanding.

In Spain, there are few educational materials that challenge heteronormativity through educational practice. At the early childhood education level, these materials are especially scarce, with the notable exception of a book aimed at practitioners offering a planned unit on family diversity (Sanchez Sainz, 2010). Spanish teacher education programmes have done little to prepare teachers for this challenge (Escolano Lopez and Gallardo Linares 2009).

During the repressive Franco regime (1939–1975), much of Spain’s early sexual rights movement took place behind closed doors. Now Spain ranks 12th out of all 49 European countries on a scale based on laws and policies that directly impact on LGBTI people’s human rights. However, Spanish schooling still lacks an explicit policy framework for teaching gender and sexual diversity. Activist organizations have begun to develop resources and materials in the hope of filling important gaps in teacher training and institutional support. This chapter explores several lines of activism related to gender and sexual diversity, along with the impact they have had, and continue to have, in school contexts. These social movements have followed two main lines—the promotion of equality and visibility for (primarily gay and lesbian) persons, and a more radical trend based on transfeminist thinking that resists the notion of normal, extending a feminist critique of the patriarchy.

This focused case study analyses the roots of super-diversity in a place where immigration is an emerging phenomenon, Northwestern Spain (Galicia). It is characterized by a mostly rural population, an aging demographic, and a historically depressed economy. Yet the region has recently experienced a significant increase in immigration - a reversal of the region’s historically pronounced trend of emigration. To understand immigration in its early stages, this book takes a historical approach that focuses on diversities that go beyond nationality. It explores local yet international phenomena such as different patterns of return migration, transnational community and familial relationships, and niche labour markets. The book takes a broad interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on sociology, anthropology, history, sociolinguistics, literature, and education, to provide a detailed case study analysis. While the case is specific, many other geographic regions will share some of the factors the book explores. Understanding how these factors interact will provide a useful point of contrast for analysing them in a range of other international contexts.

From 2006 to 2008 UK-based primary school teachers in the No Outsiders project explored possibilities for addressing sexualities equality in their classrooms. What all teachers had in common was a resource pack that included 27 children's books exploring themes of gender and sexuality diversity either directly or indirectly (i.e. by the presence of same-sex parents or gender non-normative characters). While such books have the potential to productively trouble the heteronormative spaces of schools by the mere presence of characters who do not conform to sex/gender/sexuality expectations, some of them have also been criticized for reproducing heteronormative family structures and implicit values and failing to go beyond ‘vanilla strategies’ that feel safe in primary school settings. The experiences and reflections of the No Outsiders project members can help educators plan not only which kinds of literature to use but also how to incorporate such texts into the curriculum.

The social integration of migrant populations has been defined as an intercultural, mutually enriching process, and can be distinguished from processes of assimilation that involve a more unilateral adaptation on the part of immigrants to the norms of the host country. In Spain, this distinction has become blurred in both political and educational policy discourses. In this article the authors analyse an incident that occurred in 2011 in which an 11-year-old girl was expelled from her school for wearing a hijab, one of two such cases in Spain and the first of its kind in the autonomous community of Galicia. The initial argument as expressed in the school policy reveals an essentialist and assimilationist understanding of culture in terms of the norms of the host society: students were expected to ‘keep their heads exposed’ in class as a ‘sign of respect’. Based on press reports, policy documents and legal proceedings, the authors interrogate the discourses deployed by the school and the local educational administration officials, politicians, Muslim community representatives and the family directly involved in the case, focusing on the ways in which they reveal an overall assimilationist vision of Spanish—Muslim intercultural community relations at the level of school policy.

The stakes are high for sex education in South Africa: it has been estimated that 8.7% of young people live with HIV. Within primarily US and UK contexts, there has been much debate over the relative merits of abstinence-only and comprehensive sexual education programmes. These perspectives have largely been presented as irreconcilable, but in-depth interviews with 25 life orientation teachers across the Free State Province of South Africa reveal that teachers may attempt to reconcile aspects of the two into a hybridised perspective. They promote abstinence as the only appropriate choice for young people while recognising the value of some of the broader issues of comprehensive sexuality such as relationships and safe sex. We attempt to make meaning of this hybridisation and present two arguments: that the specific South African context challenges the idea that these two contradictory positions cannot be mixed and that they might be strategically combined to promote a comprehensive sexuality education tha...

Despite feminist understandings of the socially constructed nature of sex and gender and anthropological studies of alternative constructions, western societies tend to understand sex and gender in terms of mutually-exclusive hierarchical categories. We analyze the process by which a heteronormative sex-gender-sexuality system is constructed and legitimized to the exclusion of those whose physiology and/or behaviors do not conform to it. We provide some insights into ways in which the extraordinary diversity of sex-gender can be recognized and valued on various social planes, through activism, the production and critique of popular culture, and education.

The authors base this article on findings from two qualitative studies conducted in Galiza (northwest Spain), in the province of A Coruña: an action research project in an early childhood education classroom; and a composite of ethnographic enquiries focusing on secondary education and vocational training programmes. Both studies sought to contribute to a fundamental transformation of schooling toward a more just, integrative and democratic intercultural institution. This effort includes denouncing the processes of social exclusion operating in those contexts, which are closely related to (neo)colonial and neoliberal practices.

This article provides a vision of school disciplinary strategies as provided by childhood school memories of practicing or unemployed teachers. This narrative approach allows us to understand the school and its daily routines and rituals from an insiders' point of view, drawing upon the double perspective teachers employ when reflecting on their own experience as school children. The results of the study demonstrate a wide range of disciplinary practices coinciding with a Foucauldian disciplinary structure – a system of micro‐penalty governing time, activity, behavior, speech, the body, and sexuality. Analyzing the systemic regulation of bodies in schools can uncover institutional meanings and make them available for questioning, perhaps even negotiation. Recognizing the ways in which teachers' roles are inextricably bound with the disciplinary power relations of their institutions can help alleviate frustration and burnout and help teachers make more informed pedagogical decisions.

Concern for school-based homophobia is increasing, yet there is a tendency to focus on individual incidents of homophobic bullying rather than the cultural and institutional factors supporting them. We analyse ways in which institutional heteronormativity operates in primary schools and report results from our research in UK schools that culminated in a Participatory Action Research project in which practicing teachers explored possibilities for disrupting dominant discourses of sexuality and gender expression. We argue that policy and practice need to be reconceptualised to recognise institutional heteronormativity and to interrogate the discourses underpinning systematic forms of oppression.

This contribution explores what it means to pursue equality and social justice through equitable and just collaborative research methodologies, with a particular focus on two issues: the creation of safe spaces for research participants in the context of a ‘dangerous’ research topic, and the generation of ethically viable research consent. The data analysed is based on an extended self‐study of the ethical issues arising during the No Outsiders project, a participatory action research project investigating approaches to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equalities in English primary schools. While we had no particular difficulty securing permissions to conduct the research, our experiences throughout the two and a half year‐long project and the debates they generated have suggested that ethical issues emerge within a community as part of the research practice and are better addressed through ongoing discussion than through an external evaluation of potential risk. Further, the insistence on pr...

This research focuses on the adaptation strategies of students from an innovative elementary school run as a community of learners who have been involuntarily ‘thrown into’ competitive, credentialism‐based high schools. We apply the anthropologist John Ogbu’s comparative historico‐ecological framework of ‘minority’ to the innovative school graduates in their new school contexts. The students in our study, whom we refer to as a ‘learning‐loving minority’, were generally academically successful in their new conventional schools, yet expressed distinctly ambivalent attitudes toward conventional schooling practices. Discourse analysis revealed distinct response patterns, some paralleling those of (unsuccessful) involuntary minority students and others paralleling those of (successful) immigrant minority students described by Ogbu. We suggest that Ogbu’s comparative historico‐ecological approach can be useful for education research but should be modified to take into account the effect of the institution of co...

As the instructor of a multicultural education course for preservice teachers, I have attempted to guide my students in critiquing and reconceptualizing the deficit view of students, particularly minority students, endemic to the American school system. Yet I am faced with a dilemma: Is the fact that I believe my own students have deficit views of their future students not itself a deficit view, similar to the one I am trying to challenge? How can I escape this model of the teacher fixing the deficits of students in my own teaching? Bakhtin provides a framework within which I as a university professor can avoid the deficit trap with regard to my own students. Using a self-study methodology, this article analyzes ways in which adopting a pedagogy based on Bakhtin’s (1986, pp. 292–293; 1999) notions of dialogism and polyphony has shifted my own and my students’ participation patterns and describes some of the challenges I face in the continuous process of reflection on and redesign of my own teachin...

This article presents some of the advances in legal support for addressing homophobia and transphobia in school settings and provides a critique of schoolbased policies that focus on these phenomena as particular incidents involving bullies and victims. Defining heteronormativity as a cultural phenomenon underpinning recognisable acts of aggression, the authors describe some of the chief factors that seem to inhibit teachers from addressing sexuality and gender in primary schools. Drawing primarily on data from the No Outsiders project, where primary teachers throughout the UK have collaborated to promote lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equalities in their schools and classrooms, the authors argue that heteronormativity should be addressed by purposefully promoting the equality of LGBT people as part of a broader whole school ethos that celebrates diversity and challenges inequities of all kinds.

In this paper we describe a UK‐based participatory action research project that looks beyond the discourse of tolerance to investigate and challenge heteronormative processes in primary schools through reflective action research. This 28‐month ESRC‐funded project supports 15 primary teachers working in schools in three regions of the UK to develop action research projects that address lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality in their own schools and classrooms. In this paper we will examine how the original principles on which the project design was based have manifested themselves throughout the course of the project, drawing upon examples of classroom practice and reflective discussions among project team members. We will explore how designing intentionally for collective participation has produced spaces for people to do and think in ways that have not only gone beyond what we imagined but have also challenged and sometimes contradicted our own ways of thinking.

Wenger's portrait of Alinsu insurance claims processors as elaborated in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity remains closely associated with the community of practice model. The enduring metaphor of Alinsu has limited the scope of Wenger's theory to relatively simplistic, closed, and reproductive systems. The model has both reproductive and transformative potential, and it is the latter that has been less widely taken up and developed. In this article I consider ways in which analyzing a different instantiation, the No Outsiders participatory action research project, can reinvigorate and broaden our understandings of the community of practice model and point the way toward the possibility of learning and practice communities that are more transformative and less reproductive.

Two key concepts arising from Butler’s work are the heterosexual matrix – the conflation of sex‐gender‐sexuality which leads to the normalisation of heterosexuality – and performative reinscription – the discursive process by which the marginalised Other brings new meanings to normative identity constructions. While we have found both concepts useful, we consider the extent to which the very act of naming – or in Althusser’s words, hailing – the heterosexual matrix reifies it. Drawing on our own research on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality in primary schools, we consider disruptions (breaking what Butler describes as echo‐chains) and reinscriptions (forging new ones) as approaches to queering consent. This vision requires disorganisation rather than resistance and replaces the metaphor of the matrix as a system of externally imposed rules with an understanding of how the matrix – to the extent that it exists at all – relies on hegemony as organised consent.

The No Outsiders research consortium draws upon the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) notion of a community of practice with a shared focus on ‘researching approaches to sexualities equality in primary schools’. While the word ‘community’, for some, may carry connotations of harmony and even homogeneity, the project proposal anticipated that much of the project development would emerge from dissensus, rather than consensus. In this paper two participants, the senior researcher and a teacher‐researcher, will analyse themes that have emerged through web‐based and email discussions among participants over the course of a year focusing on negotiating these kinds of hierarchical relationships among teacher‐researchers and university researchers. Rather than providing guidelines for establishing and maintaining a democratic community of practice, we examine the complexities inherent in the process. We argue that the negotiation process itself is a crucial aspect of collaboration, and recommend resistin...

This paper interrogates the ways in which school is produced as a particular bounded place (or collection of places) where sexuality, and particularly non-heterosexuality, is carefully policed by these boundaries. Drawing upon data generated in primary schools during a nationwide action research project (No Outsiders), we focus on three very different school places: the classroom, the staff room and a school -based afterschool art club. Our analysis engages with the contingency of place-making to show that place is neither a unitary experience nor a neutral stage upon which social relations are enacted. The three vignettes analysed offer insights into the critical potential of consciously and persistently working across (apparently) boundaried spaces within and beyond schools.

This article examines the case of Laura, a 9-year-old Mexican immigrant who officially “failed to learn English” in an American school. It may be more accurate to say that schooling failed Laura, and in ways that went beyond language learning. This diagnosis of failure is criticized, along with the individualistic and essentialist assumptions about success and failure that support it. My analysis, based on a sociocultural notion of agency, suggests that Laura and her teachers uncritically shared an institutionally mediated agenda for school success, rooted in contradictory institutional demands and lack of access to each others' subjectivities. As a result, Laura unintentionally and ironically participated in her own failure construction.

Multicultural education courses in US teacher training programmes attempt to prepare (mostly and increasingly white) trainee teachers to work effectively with children from racial and ethnic backgrounds different from their own. In this article, I discuss the promise and challenge of fostering critical pedagogical dialogue in these settings, focusing on the particularly complex difficulties faced by ethnic and racial minority students who find themselves present in very small numbers. The challenge for university instructors is to create a safe dialogic space in a setting where minority voices can be both extremely valuable as well as dangerously marginalised and essentialised.

This paper focuses on the operation of heteronormativity in online and face‐to‐face dialogues about sexualities and schooling, and seeks to tease out the means through which this operation is enacted. The data arise from two linked research projects focusing on participants' perceptions and concerns about addressing issues related to sexual orientation in school contexts. Analysis of data from both sources showed that participants' narratives were embedded (often without the participants' recognition) in the heteronormative, through the inscription and reinscription of specific identity categories that fixed heterosexuality as the normative centre. Revisiting these data as a whole, we draw upon Youdell's notion of ‘wounds and reinscrptions’ and Bakhtin's notion of carnivalistic inversion to explore the virtual impossibility of imagining the homonormative. From this exercise we derive important lessons for ourselves as educators and researchers about how offering new imaginaries might enhance the possibili...

This paper analyses patterns of participation on a voluntary anonymous Web-based discussion forum, open to students and faculty in one UK university, concerning sexualities equality in schools. Analysis revealed that participants often rejected the security of anonymity and strategically embodied themselves and others (as gay, straight, parents, etc.) to provide authority and ethical grounding for certain arguments. These embodied arguments invited engagement and promoted dialogue. We found that while personal embodiments were crucial for meaningful interaction, they also brought the risk of personalizing systematic inequality and fostering a victimization discourse. In the light of this, we argue that both individual and collective perspectives are crucial for promoting sexualities equality in school.

This paper arises from an online discussion project in the United Kingdom, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, in which higher education students and staff were invited to respond to a series of statements about sexual orientation in the context of schooling. This paper suggests that the silence of relative non‐participation may have been exacerbated by other levels of silence operating within the wider social, political and educational context of the project. Analysis of data from the web forums revealed the perception of children as asexual beings, the sexualisation of homosexuality, and a tendency to separate the public and private domains. We also found some political correctness reflecting the legitimised diversity discourses operating within the university context without necessarily addressing the more uncomfortable questions behind them. Participants also imagined anxieties on the part of parents, teachers or pupils and diverted the discussion to other topics of concern, which may have served to pr...

Providing a teaching practicum where university students preparing to be teachers can interact with children from different cultures has been widely praised as an effective means to improve teachers’ cross‐cultural sensitivity and teaching effectiveness. However, some research suggests that direct experience with minority children may in fact serve to confirm racist or stereotypical perceptions, particularly in school settings. This paper describes and analyses a community‐based practicum taking place in the USA, where university students and children at a Latin American Community Center completed long‐term collaborative projects. These projects provided the active focus around which we hoped that students and children would form relationships that transcended and transformed the kinds of relationships they might form in schools, where institutional constraints help structure the roles people play and the expectations they have of each other.

Farnham, UK, Ashgate, 2009, 558 pp., £85.00 (hardback), ISBN 978‐0‐7546‐7135‐0 The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory is an extensive, interdisciplinary volume of 30 essays from a range of ...

Although South Africa is one of the most progressive countries in the world in terms of constitutional and legislative rights for LGBT individuals, education is one of many social arenas where these ideals are not carried out. Interviews with 25 practicing teachers revealed very little description of practice, but widely divergent understandings around sexual diversity that drew on various authoritative discourses, including religious teachings, educational policy, science, and the powerful human rights framework of the South African constitution. Implications for teacher education include directly engaging with these discourses and providing training, teaching materials, and practical guidelines based on existing policy.

In in-depth interviews with 25 Life Orientation teachers in South Africa, we found that teachers spontaneously drew upon notions of culture to explain and justify people's sexual beliefs and behaviours and their own role as educators. Drawing upon a Bakhtinian understanding of discourse, we apply critical semantic analysis to explore how culture is deployed as a discursive strategy. Teachers draw upon particular understandings of culture available to them in their social contexts. Furthermore, the substitution of the word 'culture' for a series of other phenomena (silence, violence and poverty) affords these phenomena a certain authority that they would otherwise not wield. We argue, first, that systems teacher education and training needs to (re)define culture as dynamic, interactive and responding to, but not determined by, socio-historical realities. Beyond this, teachers need to learn how to critically engage with cultural practices and perceptions and to be provided with some basic tools to do so, including more sophisticated understandings of cultural and training in dialogic methodologies. Teaching sexuality education in multicultural societies such as South Africa will require meaningful engagement in intercultural dialogues that may need to include voices that have traditionally been excluded from school spaces.