CFP:Moving Forward: Identities, sexting, schooled bodies, and the curriculum that frames us
murat g
Dates: May 22, 2016 - May 25, 2016
Location: Western University, Faculty of Education, London, Ontario, Canada
This international Symposium is aimed at developing and extending a dialogue to address what appears both nationally and internationally as a growing concern for youth sexualized identities. This event centres on taking up a critical dialogue that will examine the education tensions in Canada and beyond that are currently emerging as schools gradually acknowledge and develop curriculum that better reflects a changing reality of the complexity of youth identities.
In Canada and Ontario particular schools continue to introduce revised curriculum that addresses the growing sexualized realities of today’s youth. Recent revisions to the Ontario Ministry of Education Elementary Health and Physical Education (2015) curriculum has received considerable media and public attention that reflects concerns and uncertainties about the kinds of knowledge and responsibilities of educators to educate children and in what manner. This international Symposium is an opportunity for moving forward by promoting a dialogue that unpacks the concerns and issues emerging for teachers addressing the changing educational landscape in schools. As such this set of meetings is aimed at bringing together research and policy makers who are addressing issues relating to gender, health, and education.
There is a shift, an unsettling of communities across students, parents and teachers, who struggle to better understand and better explore sexual identities even in the face of public discomfort or uncertainty. Silin (1995) offers a cautionary note addressing the untouchable and unheard curriculum, arguing that “the curriculum has too often become an injunction to desist rather than an invitation to explore [children’s] life worlds” (p. 49). Rather than subscribe to or be oppressed by a public discourse that often maintains childhood innocence and heteronormativity, this event acknowledges what Epstein and Johnson (1998) describe as the “multi-layered complexities of the sexual cultures of school children and [bringing] into question some common-sense assumptions about “protection’, arguing, rather, for a stance which accords children rights---to knowledge, to control of their own lives and bodies, to support” (p. 196). This Symposium and Art Project effectively disrupts the often silenced worlds of youth sexual identities. In doing so this set of events will move the dialogue forward for a critical and deeper understanding of the curricular tensions currently evident across some school and parent communities.
Who should attend:
- Academics
- Graduate students
- Health agencies
- Researchers
- Teachers
Abstract submissions for panel discussions could address any of the following either singularly or as they overlap and intersect:
- Adolescent, youth bodies, school bodies
- Bodies and the curriculum that names and frames youth
- Body image
- Bullying
- Competing/antagonistic discourses of youth sexual identities
- Curriculum
- Dynamic dialogue
- Femininities
- Health and Physical Education
- Homophobia
- Masculinities
- Pedagogy
- Producing/disrupting/interrogating heteronormativity across youth through curricula
- Schools as site for the (re)production of sexual identities
- Sex education
- Sexting, technology and youth identities
- Sexual cultures of school children
- Sexual surveillance of youth
- Sexual violence against youth
- Sexualities
- Sexualized identities
- Students as sexual subjects
- The “myth of childhood innocence”
- Youth identities, sexed, classed, raced
- Youth subjectivities
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Louisa Allen Ph.D. Dr. Kris Wells Ph.D.
University of Auckland University of Alberta
Organized by
Dr. Michael Kehler Ph.D. Dr. Jessica Ringrose Ph.D.
Western University University of London