Wendy Cumming-Potvin

The Bloomsbury Handbook of LGBTQIA+ Inclusion in Educational Contexts brings together international contributions in scholarship and coverage, mapping the discipline through theoretical explorations, personal narratives and empirical studies. The handbook focuses on themes that examines Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer issues including: inclusion in action, engaging teaching spaces, social justice standpoints, student/teacher agency, preservice teacher education, criticality in educative spaces and children and agency. The book provides a crucial lens into educational contexts that fuel or hinder human flourishing, the power of learning spaces and institutional educative standpoints and teaching approaches. Cultural, social and economic injustices that perpetuate cycles of disadvantage and oppressive narratives are explored using different theoretical frameworks that underpin equitable and inclusive educative landscapes.

Stepping into this chapter is to place yourself into a world of queering, creativity, fun, joy, and hope. Here we enact dialogic queering through critical dialoguing as four interdisciplinary academics via our drag personae to help dismantle cis/heteronormativity using an innovative and playful approach. Throughout the process, we dive into our inner drag selves to explore drag pedagogy and its implications for students, parents, and educators. The chapter invites readers to reject standard notions of academic writing and traditional curriculum, embracing the disruption of this norm-resistant approach to educational research, pedagogy, curriculum, and schooling. In this chapter, our drag personae spill the tea on drag pedagogy (Keenan et al., 2023; Keenan & Hot Mess, 2020) as an unconventional educative approach through a focus on play as queer praxis, teaching through aesthetic transformation, inviting strategic defiance, camping it up and embracing shame, and from empathy to embodied kinship.

In a world that is predominantly shaped by cis-/heteronormative binaries and patriarchal hegemonies, LGBTQIA+ communities are under regular attack in life, studies, and at work. The high suicide rate among queer teens due to bullying in school, homophobic slurs and aggressions in sport, trans/dragphobic protests against Drag Storytime, and alt-right extremist bans on same-sex parenting books and materials in libraries, speak volumes about the dark sides in our society (see Austin & Graffam, 2023; Given & Polkinghorne, 2024; Hill et al., 2021; Ullman, 2021; Youth Pride Network, 2023). Despite the passing of marriage equality in 2017, discrimination, hatred, and marginalisation are still rampant in Australian society, and particularly in educational settings (Betts & Bennett, 2023; Cumming-Potvin, 2023; Ullman, 2021).

Mainstream media has a long tradition of depicting sexual violence through stereotypes and misrepresentation. However, digital technology has recently highlighted alternate narratives that feature the stories of survivors of sexual violence. Although some scholars have welcomed digital narratives as facilitating activism that combats sexual violence through social media, for others, the online world is peppered with sexual abuse, sexism, and negative consequences for feminist activists. Underpinned by intersectional feminist theory, this chapter adopts the premise that sexual violence is an alarming narrative in many countries, including Australia. For migrant, refugee, bisexual, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, or transgender and gender diverse people, the risks of being attacked through sexual violence, online and offline, are exacerbated. Examining a highly mediatized case, the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins in Australia’s Parliament House, this chapter unpacks the politics of complaint towards postdigital feminist inquiry. The discourse is guided by reflections about: Who is allowed to complain, how does a complaint generate a digital narrative or transform into a messy, postdigital narrative? The chapter concludes by looking to the future of sharing narratives of sexual violence in contexts where politics, law, and social activism collide with the power of technology corporations.

Mainstream media has a long tradition of depicting sexual violence through stereotypes and misrepresentation. However, digital technology has recently highlighted alternate narratives that feature the stories of survivors of sexual violence. Although some scholars have welcomed digital narratives as facilitating activism that combats sexual violence through social media, for others, the online world is peppered with sexual abuse, sexism, and negative consequences for feminist activists. Underpinned by intersectional feminist theory, this chapter adopts the premise that sexual violence is an alarming narrative in many countries, including Australia. For migrant, refugee, bisexual, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, or transgender and gender diverse people, the risks of being attacked through sexual violence, online and offline, are exacerbated. Examining a highly mediatized case, the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins in Australia’s Parliament House, this chapter unpacks the politics of complaint towards postdigital feminist inquiry. The discourse is guided by reflections about: Who is allowed to complain, how does a complaint generate a digital narrative or transform into a messy, postdigital narrative? The chapter concludes by looking to the future of sharing narratives of sexual violence in contexts where politics, law, and social activism collide with the power of technology corporations.

Introduction
It is currently estimated that there are over 7,000 languages in the world and that between 35 per cent and 40 per cent of children are forced to begin formal education in a language that is not their first language (Eberhard et al., 2022; UNESCO, 2016). In the former colonies of the Global South, the languages of education are often the languages of former imperial hegemons, in spite of the preponderance of Indigenous languages already extant in these nations. Often the majority of the population within former colonies associate education with prosperity and, therefore, the language of education is viewed as a means to a better future and employment, especially if the language is English (Graddol, 1997, 2006; Phillipson, 2017; Yeh, 2016). The overall effect of the disparity between home language and the language of education, together with the curriculum that is promoted in schools, is a contested area (Mickan & Wallace, 2020; Pennycook & Makoni, 2019). How are classroom language choices determined in multilingual, postcolonial contexts? Using the context of the postcolonial Oceanic nation of Vanuatu and a narrative historical model, this chapter considers the impact of education in a hegemonic imposed language. The chapter first examines the context of Vanuatu. Secondly, a review of the relevant literature provides historical understanding of the role of English. Thirdly, a discussion of the language choices faced by educators in postcolonial contexts permits an understanding of the symbiotic relationship between languages, knowledges and cultural literacies.

In this paper, our purpose is to investigate policy informing texts and discourses referencing transgender equality and gender diversity in the Western Australian education system. Drawing on scholarship from transgender, queer and policy studies, we highlight the interplay of progressive and conservative forces affecting the Western Australian education system’s commitment to supporting transgender and gender non-binary students. Based on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) project, the paper constructs a Western Australian case study, which threads together the critical examination of policy informing texts, qualitative interview data and media discourses surrounding public narratives, such as the Safe School Coalition Australia’s attempt to implement a school program, which builds awareness about gender and sexual diversity. Emerging through the material, discursive and spatial elements of locales and networks, our case study has the potential to deepen knowledge regarding the heuristic capacity of employing policyscape as an analytic category. In this vein, we draw attention to the possibilities and challenges for re-conceptualizing gender and providing trans-affirmative school spaces that promote equality.

In this paper, we investigate primary school teachers’ reflections on addressing the topic of same-sex families and relationships in their classrooms. Informed by queer theoretical and Foucauldian analytic approaches, we examine teachers’ potential use of texts, such as picture storybooks, which introduce representations of same-sex relationships and desire. By employing a case-study approach, our aim is to provide insights into the pedagogical decisions and the heteronormative conditions under which three teachers in the Australian context attempt to deal with the topic of same-sex families/relationships. Attention is drawn to the regulatory surveillance of the parental gaze and the silencing and marginalization of sexual identity issues in order to illuminate the ways in which the micro politics of teaching about queer families and relationships are inextricably linked to broader macro processes governing the institutionalizing influences of heteronormativity, heterosexism and homonegativity. Implications for teacher education are outlined.