‘Teacher, will you marry me?’ Integrating teachers' stories and self-reflective texts for exploring sexuality discourses in school settings

Abstract

This work is based on data collected for a research project aiming to critically investigate issues of primary school sex and relationships education. Teachers are important stakeholders of any educational process, especially when the focus is on sensitive and controversial issues such as the provision of sex education. The aim here is to present an aspect of the complex relationships that can be formed within an educational setting and discuss implications for the members involved. Particularly, in this article I use teachers' stories to examine pupil–teacher flirting situations. Teachers placed those incidents in a sexuality discourse framework; at the same time, however, they adopted different strategies to neutralise and de-sexualise the experience. The use of silence or humour, the assumption of a maternal role, and the redirection of the discourse of desire were seen as strategies to deal with those incidents in class. One of the stories that inform this work, however, was provided by the teacher/researcher. Therefore, this work also addresses issues of doing research on ‘familiar ground’. As I additionally argue here, exploring those unconscious processes that influence our research practises and probably our texts, as well as integrating those outcomes of self-study as part of the research design, might be enriching to our research.

Notes

^1. As a method, memory work implies collection of data by writing down the earliest memory of a particular event or episode in a detailed manner in the third person without explanatory or biographical comments (Onyx and Small 2001).