The power of feminist pedagogy in Australia: vagina shorts and the primary prevention of violence against women

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the challenges of using feminist pedagogies in the development of school-based interventions to address Violence Against Women in Sexuality and Relationships Education in Australia. The focus of the paper is a feminist-based classroom program developed by a group of teachers, which was piloted in three secondary schools in Melbourne. The paper uses interview data from the teachers who taught in the program as well as the students who completed it to explore the feminist discourses embedded in the key program resources. The analysis shows that the program draws heavily on liberal and radical feminist approaches, both perceived by many gender scholars as having limited understandings of gender by comparison with post-modern approaches. The data also indicate that these approaches have the potential to elicit powerful responses from students, raising their awareness of sexism, objectification and sexual safety. The paper concludes by arguing that, while many scholars see post-modern approaches as conceptually superior, they are in practice extremely difficult to operationalize and therefore of limited practical use.

KEYWORDS:

• Respectful relationships education
• feminist pedagogy
• violence against women
• feminist teachers
• sex and relationships education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Debbie Ollis is Associate Professor of Education in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University where she teaches and researches in the areas of sexuality and relationships education.

Notes

1. The feminist teachers in this study worked is an educational setting designed to improve the social and emotional skills of students to assist them to move back into mainstream schooling following a period of trauma, illness or exclusion from school. The cohorts of students are small, usually between 10 and 15 and they remain for 2 school terms.

2. In 2017, this curriculum is being implemented in all Victorian secondary schools as part of a whole school approach to RRE.

3. This activity was developed by Maree Crabbe as part of an educational resource for pre-service teacher education. See Ollis, Harrison, and Maharaj (2013).