‘The whole truth’: student perspectives on how Canadian teachers should teach about gender-based violence

ABSTRACT

This article centres on students’ experiences and recommendations regarding how Canadian secondary schools can enhance the critical consciousness of young people about gender-based violence (GBV). We describe findings from three participatory art-based workshops with adolescents in Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. When asked what they wanted teachers to know when teaching about GBV issues, participants expressed the importance of strong teacher-student and student-student relationships, approaching GBV education in ways that addresses its scope, root causes, and impact on survivors, imparting practical knowledge for GBV prevention, response, and resistance, and providing students opportunities for agency and leadership. Findings were situated within a feminist intersectional lens and indicated that adolescent girls continue to live with GBV, experiencing harassment, discrimination, and discomfort and that, for Indigenous girls, experiences of GBV were compounded by racist and colonial violence experienced in and out of school. These experiences of violence contradicted the safe and caring learning environments that participants called for.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• gender-based violence
• feminist pedagogy
• participatory visual methods
• student voice

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we gratefully acknowledge the participation and engagement of the youth participants of this study and their group leaders, Morris Green, Jennifer Altenberg, Allison Sephton, and Laura Riggs, who made this research possible. We also acknowledge the contributions of Allison Holloway and Yasmeen Shahzadeh, who were enormously helpful during data collection and initial analysis, and Dr. Claudia Mitchell, whose guidance and advice have blessed this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Red Dress Day is an annual event held by the REDress Project in memory of the lives of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls across Canada.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship [756-2018-0576] and a SSHRC Insight Development Grant [430-2019-0223].