Queer youth and critical sexuality education pedagogies within networked publics: implications for school-based practice

ABSTRACT

There is a body of international literature demonstrating queer young people’s dissatisfaction with their school-based sexuality education. Seeking relevant information and social support, queer young people frequently report turning to the internet. Though this is well-documented in the literature, little research has specifically examined young people’s embeddedness in social media sites – or networked publics – as a legitimate form of sexuality education pedagogy. Drawing on narrative data on the sexuality education experiences of trans, non-binary and gender diverse Australians aged 18–26, this article uses the perspectives of Paulo Freire and bell hooks to theorise and compare the sexuality education pedagogies in the classroom and within queer networked publics. While school-based approaches are often limited to banking pedagogies that communicate prescriptive and normative ‘facts’ about sex, gender and health, online pedagogies represent a much greater potential for peer teaching and learning that is comprehensive, queer-affirming, and arguably impossible to replicate at school. This paper teases out the implications of this argument for school-based sexuality education pedagogies that grapple with expectations to be comprehensive in addressing diversity and digital literacy, and it maps out possibilities for formal and informal sexuality education to complement each other in a more holistic way.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexuality education
• critical pedagogy
• queer youth
• social media
• health and physical education

Introduction

For decades, researchers and educators internationally have criticised school-based sexuality education for its inability to cater to the needs of young people or resonate with their lived experiences of sexuality. This criticism is especially potent in the literature on the needs and desires of queer youth, whose perspectives rarely feature in formal curricula or in classroom discussions (Hill et al., 2021; Kosciw et al., 2022). It is not surprising, then, that queer young people show a preference for the internet as a source of information. However, the information available to young people online is often framed as untrustworthy, and their internet use as potentially risky or harmful (Albury & Byron, 2014; Albury & Crawford, 2012; Dobson & Ringrose, 2016; Shannon, 2022). This is a sharp contrast to young people’s common characterisation of digital publics as comparatively positive opportunities for education, freedom and joy. What, if anything, should this mean for school-based sexuality education? This article begins to unpack some of these tensions, drawing on the literature on networked publics and queer youth, and primary qualitative data collected via an online survey and semi-structured interviews with queer Australians aged 18–25 on their experiences of formal and informal sexuality education. Ethics approval to conduct this research was granted by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Newcastle (H-2015–0393), and as per the conditions of this approval, informed consent was sought from all participants.

Data collection took place in a period of significant moral panic concerning sexuality education, despite it being a mandatory aspect of the Australian health and physical education curriculum. At the time, a non-government organisation called Safe Schools Coalition was under sustained attack concerning anti-bullying materials it developed for schools to address homophobia and transphobia, which were deliberately mischaracterised as ‘radical’, ‘Marxist’ sexuality education by conservative media and political figures (see reflections by Ward, 2019). The participants, recruited via social media or through university student groups, experienced (or were supposed to have experienced) sexuality education at their high school within the five years prior to their interview, concurrent with this moral panic. Though local contexts differ, there are clear parallels between the Safe Schools panic and the ‘phantasmic’ (Butler, 2024) panics about queerness and gender diversity in Europe, the UK and the US that negatively impact queer young people’s school experiences. Due to their age, participants were also among the first generations of young Australians to ‘come of age’ with social media being an otherwise natural part of life; many described having used social media sites or having played online games from a very young age. These experiences gave them well-formed perspectives on the contrast between the material that was available to them at school, and the material they accessed online.

The tensions outlined here reflect traditional theoretical debates regarding critical pedagogies; each political or pedagogical tension speaks to ways that cultural and institutional power is dispersed in defining and assigning value to knowledge, and in reenforcing the ‘correct’ way for young people to gain knowledge and understand their world. As such, this article stretches Freire’s (1970) dialogic pedagogy and hooks’ (Hooks, 1994) engaged pedagogy to reveal the ways that school-based sexuality education reproduces normative understandings of sexuality, morality, gender and the body, even in approaches broadly considered to be progressive. This article argues that dialogic engaged pedagogies are central to realising a relevant and affirming school experience for queer young people, and points to their peer learning practices in networked publics for contrast. The evidence presented suggests these digitally mediated practices are unshackled from the confines of formal instruction, curricula, or the limiting framing of young people, especially queer young people, within contemporary social media and sexuality research methodologies (see Scott et al., 2020).

This article begins by summarising the difficulties in conceptualising young people’s internet use as a legitimate and valuable form of teaching and learning. It then proceeds to a critical analysis of contemporary school-based sexuality education pedagogies, drawing parallels between Freire and hooks’ criticisms of schooling and the limited possibilities within contemporary Australian classrooms. Keeping with the critiques of Freire and hooks, the article then discusses the comparatively positive educational opportunities queer young people have found within networked publics that have bridged the gaps of understanding and care left over from their schooling. The article concludes by exploring the possibilities for finding a productive coherence between school-based sexuality education and the autonomous education that queer youth are creating for themselves online.

Queer youth, networked publics and learning

Beyond studies that examine queer young people’s social media use as a form of friendship or support, little is written specifically about how it can be understood as a source of informal sexuality education, for a few reasons. The first is that online sexuality education occurs ephemerally; young people absorb understandings of norms concerning sex, sexuality and gender less through deliberate information seeking behaviours, and more through an uptake of information, norms and viewpoints achieved through their everyday embeddedness in what Boyd (2010) has termed ‘networked publics’ (see also Fox & Ralston, 2016; Masanet & Buckingham, 2015; Shannon, 2022).

The second reason is that this occurs in a way that is largely inaccessible to adults, parents, educators or researchers; these interactions often occur anonymously and privately, and they are tightly interwoven into the everyday internet cultures of queer young people, manifested as code, vernacular and memetic communication (Cho, 2015). Building upon boyd’s work, Abidin (2021, p. 4) conceptualises ‘refracted publics’ to account for the ways that internet cultures and algorithmic platform affordances have evolved to emphasise silosociality, whereby ‘content is tailor made for specific subcommunities and rabbit-holes and may not be accessible or legible to outsiders’. Practices of ‘social steganography’ within silosocial platforms that are reliant on the encoding and decoding of contextually specific memes or queer ‘platform vernacular’ (Gibbs et al., 2015) are central to the way queer users find and learn from each other, often unintelligible to the prying eyes of outsiders, adults and authority figures.

The third reason is that internet cultures are fluid and dynamic, evolving at a pace that is much quicker than researchers, and especially policymakers, can track and respond to. Often, by the time an academic publication on a specific meme, an online social movement or a trend within a particular platform appears, the meme is ‘stale’, the movement has dimmed, and the trend has been relegated to memory. Indeed, an entire social media platform may collapse or fade into relative obscurity in the time it takes to thoroughly examine it. As Abidin (2021) points to in her characterisation of refracted publics, the fabric of internet cultures, and the social practices encouraged or made (im)possible by internet technologies and the ebb and flow of platform popularity changes significantly over time. These issues present a conundrum for contemporary research and practice in school-based sexuality education. It is difficult to conceptualise how teaching and learning is enacted online between queer young people, and, in the meantime, those young people are largely unsupported by the educational institutions that give form to their offline lives, which are too often reliant on modes of sexuality education that a growing body of research suggests are functionally obsolete.

The evidence that young people learn more meaningful lessons about living a queer life alongside similar others in networked publics than in their ‘real life’ classrooms necessarily requires us to problematise the primacy of schools in being the unquestioned gatekeeper of knowledge in matters of sexuality, gender, and civics. In doing so, researchers and educators can learn important lessons about how to best support young people – queer or not – to make autonomous, safe and fulfilling decisions in the ways they discover and live out their identities and sexualities.

School-based sexuality education as ‘banking education’

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970), Freire identifies imbalances of power at the centre of both inequity in education, and the broader societal reproduction of harmful tropes and prejudices. For Freire, the central process that enables these outcomes occurs in the classroom, where the authority to control student behaviour, ideas and thought is concentrated among teachers. The pedagogical imperative in contemporary classrooms is termed by Freire as ‘banking’; the presumed knowledgeable teacher ‘banks’ knowledge within the minds of presumed ignorant students, whose intellectual worth are entirely defined by their capacity to mirror their teachers. Banking thereby causes the uncritical reproduction of the doxa that is encoded within the way that we articulate ‘facts’ about the world we share. And so, young people leave their schooling with a set of beliefs about appropriate roles, behaviours, and the intrinsic value of different social and cultural groups that is not meaningfully diluted when compared to those of generations prior.

Freire’s alternative to banking education is a critical pedagogy of dialogics that engages students as intellectual equals and draws on lived experience, intuition, and other informal knowledges. The goal of Freirean pedagogy is to identify the ‘generative themes’ that characterise how oppressed groups name and occupy their lifeworlds, and then make productive use of these in pursuit of conscientisation and social justice. Arguably, Freire’s work was most concerned with educational participation and achievement for the working class, who are frequently excluded from academia via processes of social closure. Through this process, Freire argues that critical pedagogy can rewrite the student habitus, allowing them to identify the nature of their oppression and to develop the intellectual means to counter it.

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks builds on Freire’s work by centring the patterns of racial and gendered marginalisation that are woven into the education system, and which were missing from the analysis of Freire and his contemporaries. For hooks, a significant part of the problem was that students did not love learning, both because of constraints on their achievement, and what the academy is seen to represent – white, bourgeois cultural power. She argues that, for many marginalised peoples, academia is simply seen as something that is not for people like them. Hooks proposes an intersectional ‘engaged pedagogy’ that focuses as much on wellbeing and self-actualisation as knowledge acquisition and seeks to disrupt cultural narratives of what academia is and is not, by encouraging students to bring their histories, cultures, and personalities to classroom discourse.

In the context of school-based sexuality education, dialogic, engaged pedagogies would involve engagement with the ways that students think, feel, and live their sexual and gender identities, encouraging them to problematise the barriers to liberation for those who experience social marginalisation. We can infer from the global literature on school-based sexuality education that, at present, many contemporary approaches instead focus on health promotion, relying on banking pedagogies due to political, cultural, or curricular constraints. Where approaches do go beyond the unidirectional delivery of health promotion material, content that appeals to queer lifestyles, temporalities and desires frequently remains absent. Of course, this is not to say that there are not successful, radical approaches to sexuality education put into practice around the world that attempt to actively disrupt heteronormativity and whiteness. However, outside of specific, often urban areas, these affirming approaches do not have the same level of uptake as state-sanctioned curricula or third-party providers that are much more tentative in their scope and ambition (Barbagallo & Boon, 2012; Robinson et al., 2022; Smith et al., 2013). Importantly, the political and social context concerning gender, sexuality and youth makes many innovative sexuality education pedagogies all but impossible in schools where researchers, teachers and students are increasingly surveilled and audited by hostile political actors. This is especially true of Australia, where a wariness of attracting controversy following the moral panic surrounding the Safe Schools Coalition has arguably created a chilling effect on how gender and sexuality can be discussed at school (Gerber & Lindner, 2022).

Setting aside religio-conservative approaches to sexuality education that are transparently designed to bank strict rules dictating morally permissible sexuality, I argue that modern, ‘comprehensive’ sexuality education persists in banking normative knowledge and attitudes concerning sex, health and the body that shape young people into responsiblised, individual choice agents (Shannon, 2016). The following draws on narrative data from participants to demonstrate the ways that school-based sexuality education deploys banking pedagogies in both its delivery of information about sex and sexuality, and its subtextual communication of sexual and moral norms.

Banking the ‘facts’ about sex and reproduction

The broad case for secular approaches to sexuality education is that an empirical focus on sex and the body may offer a viable counter to unscientific or moralistic abstinence-only approaches by centring empirical ‘facts’ (Lamb, 2013), appealing to public desire for politically ‘neutral’, scientific information about sex, reproduction, and health. It is for this reason that, in many jurisdictions in the Global North, sexuality education is framed predominantly as an apparatus of public health promotion. As a result, however, sexuality education embedded in health and physical education curricula often banks specific sets of values that reify ideal bodies, behaviours and states of ‘health’. Further, such a focus does not account for the social construction of the ‘facts’ about sex and health, and neglects comparative social and cultural contexts within which those ‘facts’ are understood differently (Lamb, 2013; Rasmussen, 2010). Secular sexuality education curricula that focus predominantly on ‘facts’ will often present young people with information that is decontextualised from their everyday lives and cultures, representing the banking of a set of ‘correct’ perspectives and embodiments.

During an interview, Geneva, a transmasculine non-binary young person, aptly described their public-school sexuality education as ‘David Attenborough style’:

It was like, ‘here’s ovulation’, ‘here’s intercourse’. It was not done with any sort of connection with the real world … It was very, like, ovulation, intercourse, then life cycle of the child, the embryo forming into foetus … that sort of thing. It was very, like, David Attenborough style.

In their reflection, Geneva stressed words such as ‘ovulation’ and ‘intercourse’ to emphasise how the biological processes of sex and reproduction are depersonalised in class. It was clear that it felt much more like a nature documentary than a sexuality education class; sex and reproduction were presented to them purely as mechanical processes, divorced from any of the social or cultural meaning that is ascribed to sex and sexuality in the ‘real world’, as Geneva put it. In science and health classes such as these, there is little room to broaden the scope of inquiry beyond the banking of content prescribed in the curriculum, and students and teachers are rarely granted the space to problematise what is presented to them as rigid, indisputable fact. In this way, even sexuality education that attempts to actively address sex and sexual health, rather than ignoring it, can be anti-dialogic in nature.

A specific anti-dialogic classroom experience that was common to several participants involved schools outsourcing sexuality education to presentations by third-party organisations or audiovisual resource kits. In these situations, students were rarely involved in discussion of the content at all, particularly in the case of audiovisual resources where the other party delivering that content was a television rather than a human. Lee, a non-binary survey respondent, reflected on the way they and their classmates interpreted the lessons offered in their public high school, which only constituted watching a video resource:

[Classes] were run by teachers from the science department and mostly consisted of watching Where Do I Come From style films on a TV they wheeled in. This squeamish approach to teaching teenagers about sex ed, like the school would have preferred not to be responsible for it at all, certainly influenced how we as students responded.

From this lesson, Lee inferred that the teachers would have preferred not to have delivered any content directly to the students at all. Their criticism of this approach to sexuality education was that it reinforced the taboo and shame of sexuality and bodies at a crucial time in their development. Further, the content in video resources, when delivered in the manner Lee describes, are not specifically interpreted or communicated by a teacher at all, bypassing any form of dialogue whatsoever.

Banking sexual norms and morality

Approaches to sexuality education that are organised around the banking of ‘facts’ about sex are necessarily silent on the ways that sexuality is entangled with identity, culture, spirituality, and politics. As a result, sexuality education often only equips students with a narrow view of the spectrum of human sexuality, supposedly adherent to ‘a genderless, classless and raceless framework’ (Whitten & Sethna, 2014, p. 424) that disadvantages those young people whose identities or experiences are not reflected in Western, white heterosexuality and gender conformity. In the absence of clear, unambiguous representation of a range of cultures, sexualities and relationships, young people are left to piece together a worldview concerning sexual morality from tropes in popular culture and media, and the attitudes that circulate within their social networks – a clear example of the consequences of anti-dialogic pedagogies. This sentiment was expressed clearly by Zed, a non-binary survey respondent who felt that a lack of diversity at their rural public high school meant that their classmates were ignorant about their identity:

The lack of diversity in my school was quite horrendous, and lead to the forced normalisation of heterosexuality. Nobody knew anything about being trans besides movies or TV shows they watched, which very poorly and inaccurately represented the reality of being trans. (Zed, non-binary)

Naturally, the predominant concern of most participants was the near-total lack of content that is relevant to queer people. Only a small minority of participants reported that gay, bi, lesbian, or trans people were mentioned in class, and in many of those cases they were framed negatively. Aside from a lack of representation of diversity in gender and sexuality, contemporary anti-dialogic sexuality education pedagogies also tend to present narrow possibilities for gender expression in general. This was demonstrated in the narratives of several participants who experienced sexuality education that was segregated by assumed sex. In these lessons, students were separated and taught only content that was assumed necessary to their own bodies, preventing them from accessing a wider range of information. One such participant was Mae, an interviewee who is non-binary but was not ‘out’ at any of the public high schools they attended:

We watched a video on where babies come from, and we were then separated by sex where the girls watched a separate video about bodily changes during puberty, like getting your period. We learned about male bodily changes too, like wet dreams and boners. It was very entry level. (Mae, non-binary)

A closer reading of Mae’s experience reveals how pernicious gender norms are uncritically reproduced in segregated sexuality education. As well as reinforcing myths concerning essential gender difference regarding desire and behaviour, their reflection shows the process through which information about bodies assigned female at birth is obscured; while all students were taught about bodily changes and arousal for (cisgender) boys, only those allocated to the ‘female’ class learned about the equivalent for (cisgender) girls. The way this information was apparently considered irrelevant to everyone else, or simply kept ‘private’ to the girls’ class, emphasises underlying taboos concerning the bodies of women and girls. Geneva’s classroom was not segregated by assumed sex, however there remained a disproportionate focus observable in the content that was gendered:

We watched these cheesy videos of people under blankets humping up and down … it was laughable, not realistic. There was discussion of male masturbation, but no discussion of female masturbation. Homosexual interactions of any kind weren’t discussed. (Geneva, non-binary)

In addition to the absence of any content on diverse sexualities, Geneva’s experience again points to the obfuscation of feminine sexualities. The discussions in their classroom portrayed active desire and masturbation as normalised behaviour for boys and men; but the silence on this topic for women and girls further reinforces norms concerning the permissible expression of their sexuality. Consequently, gender roles are ‘written into the biological canon by associating them with different levels of hormones or varying chromosomal make-ups’ (Shannon, 2022, p. 64), reinforcing the essentialist myths at the core of gender violence and structural sexism.

Dialogic, engaged sexuality education pedagogies in networked publics

As outlined above, contemporary, school-based sexuality education pedagogies cannot be described as dialogic or engaged due to their preoccupation with banking normative information about sex, sexuality and the body. Particularly in the case of students whose identities or desires are socially marginalised, a true-to-life representation of sexuality may be absent from the classroom altogether, nullifying any opportunity for them to be meaningfully ‘engaged’.

It is well-established in the literature that queer youth show an affinity for networked publics because they provide access to information, social connection and free expression that may not be available to them offline. Specific platforms that have been studied for their resonance with queer communities include YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook (Hanckel et al., 2019), TikTok (Duguay, 2023) and Tumblr (Shannon, 2022). Platforms such as these can provide the socially supportive environments and the anonymity queer young people may need to seek information or ask questions, particularly where they feel this is uncomfortable, risky or impossible in a school environment, offering access to trustworthy, knowledgeable peers from around the world, who are living lives similar to theirs. The following analysis uses narrative data to demonstrate how queer young people’s participation in networked publics can be characterised as a form of dialogic, engaged sexuality education pedagogy that is conceptually and logistically beyond what was possible for them at school.

Networked publics as dialogic ‘classrooms’

Though the internet certainly provides wider access to information for queer young people than is available at school, it would be limiting to reduce sexuality education in networked publics to only the conscious practice of seeking out information for the purpose of gaining knowledge. Many of the experiences that trans young people recounted to me did not resemble ‘formal’ knowledge seeking at all, but could best be understood as passive, ‘informal’ learning about how to live a queer life, constituted in social interaction and cultural consumption. Fox and Ralston (2016) use Boyd (2010) conceptualisation of the affordances of networked publics to explain how they facilitate the sharing of information concerning diverse gender and sexuality. The capacity to curate an archive of content (such as in a blog or user profile), replicate and share content publicly, and to perform searches for user-created content allows queer young people to easily access, organise and circulate information, and engage in dialogue on common themes and causes.

Most participants I interviewed had a significant history with the microblogging platform Tumblr. Though posts within Tumblr break convention with traditional learning materials, taking the form of diary entries, selfies, debates, fiction, jokes, memes, erotica and more, the body of queer posts creates both an amalgam of tangible resources users can view and learn from, and an affectual queer ‘vibe’ they can become embedded in (Cho, 2015; Robards et al., 2020). The silosociality of Tumblr facilitates queer and trans networks within the platform, cultivating queer-specific memes, jokes, digital aesthetics, pop culture artefacts and vernacular (Tiidenberg et al., 2021). The result is a platform with large pockets of organic queer cultural production, which has been described as a ‘trans technology’ (Haimson et al., 2021).

Geneva and Mae, both prolific Tumblr users in their adolescence, described the posts they consumed on Tumblr in the following way:

I saw the [Tumblr] posts almost as a step-by-step guide with links to online shops that I could purchase materials from. It felt like all these little puzzle pieces came together, whereas before, trans was like some abstract concept. People would reblog and comment their own perspective, add another online shop, or put someone’s video on it. So, it became this lexical chain of matter that actually became physically tangible. (Geneva, non-binary)

I have seen some really amazing threads, someone talking about their experience, and someone adding on and adding on … eventually you have 10–20 people talking about their experience … and I think that’s really educational, being able to see such a wide variety of experiences in one thread. (Mae, non-binary)

For the participants that used Tumblr, the threads of content that circulated within the platform, collecting commentary and amendments from other users, became ‘chains of matter’; educational resources that not only proved to be practically useful for their everyday lives, but that promoted critical introspection on their identity. The personal and practical dimensions of living a trans life became much clearer for many of my participants through their access to content posted by others. The primary reason that these threads were useful, according to Geneva and Mae, was the sheer breadth of information available compared to their sexuality education classrooms. The kind of information that my participants had access to went far beyond anatomy, puberty, and sexual health, variously incorporating queer readings and critiques of popular media, politics, media, history, literature and more, tailored to their specific interests, via the curation of their feeds. The participant narratives depict a transdisciplinary curriculum of content and personal reflections that blur the lines between topic areas that would otherwise be rigidly separated in school-based curricula, and that certainly cannot fit neatly within contemporary health and physical education.

Important aspects of these online pedagogies are the relevance and meaningfulness of the content that queer young people can access. Freire (1970) describes the identification of ‘generative themes’ in the ways oppressed groups understand and articulate their life-worlds as fundamental to the implementation of critical pedagogies. The goal of an educator is to be able to listen for, identify, and facilitate the productive use of generative themes in order to overcome the ‘limit-situations’ that prevent full participation in education as an emancipatory project. For the trans young people that I spoke to, the generative themes represented in their online teaching and learning included gender dysphoria/euphoria, self-esteem, social isolation, political alienation, and the struggle for recognition in the popular media landscape. Many of their pre-existing, internalised prejudices or the gaps in knowledge left by unsatisfactory school experiences represented the ‘limit-situations’ that prevented them from achieving self-actualisation as trans people. Consider Amy’s reflections in her survey response on how she came to realise she was a trans woman over a number of years:

After high school, as time went on, I slowly stumbled upon more information about trans people on the internet and slowly started to think about it more and more. As I realised it was possible to be who I wanted to be, eventually I was actively searching for information on the internet and ended up spending hundreds of hours watching YouTube videos and reading forums and websites. I realised so many similarities once I understood gender identity and what being trans is … I could even relate back to things, to experiences from my childhood. I had a real OMG moment. I eventually realised that I don’t just physically want to be a girl, but I want to be seen as one by others. (Amy, trans woman)

Amy’s reflection emphasises the transformative potential of her embeddedness in queer internet cultures and the learning opportunities she accessed. Over ‘hundreds of hours’, participants like Amy watched the stories of others, their joys and successes, their hardships and failures, their views and opinions, and their humour and self-presentation. Subsequently, she was not only able to look toward an imagined future, where she could see herself as potentially being trans, but back at a reimagined past, where she could see that she was trans, despite her complete lack of queer inclusivity at her Catholic high school.

For trans young people, the intimate personal narratives shared by other trans people online is extremely powerful in facilitating their own understanding of sexuality, gender and identity. My participants reflected fondly on their consumption of content from trans people from around the world, who shared their thoughts, emotions and everyday experiences through text, images, and video, thus revealing the queer possibilities in their own lives. Some, including Amy, Geneva, and Mae, described how this kind of personal content developed their ideas of what a trans life was and what it could be. This facilitated a total re-evaluation of their understanding of what it meant to be trans; Amy in particular outlined how online content allowed her view of transness to evolve from the highly prejudiced depiction of trans women in the media she consumed in childhood. In these narratives we can observe a kind of emancipatory pedagogy that unshackles trans young people from the limit-situations that, in their reflection of hetero- and cisnormativity, had narrowly constrained their self-concept.

By placing their whole selves into the content that they post and interact with, queer users within networked publics occupy a liminal space where they are simultaneously serving as teacher, student, and curriculum. While their content can teach others, and they can learn from content posted by others, the presence of self in the content they post means they are the content as well. Here, the parallels with hooks’ work are clear. The vicarious appropriation of queer narratives, and the bringing of oneself to the classroom, echo her call for an engaged pedagogy that values holistic personhood in dialogic exchange, making possible the kind of praxis that can meaningfully speak up to structural inequity.

In the traditional classroom, hierarchies of authority and knowledge limit the extent to which students can exercise autonomy in bringing their own lived insights to discussions on sex, gender and identity. However, as Geneva and Mae indicate above, content in networked publics is contestable; the principle of replicability enables user content to be repurposed, amended or challenged, rendering the truth value of any material malleable in comparison to what is possible within a traditional classroom dynamic. Often, the ‘teacher’ in queer networked publics is displaced from a position of unquestioned authority and control over the form and direction of dialogue as a result of the digital infrastructure of the networked public. Asked about the dynamic of authority and authorship within Tumblr, Geneva and Mae stated:

I think because you don’t have that … one central authorial figure that dictates how things should play out, how everything needs to look like, how you should learn about these things. I think there’s some sense of safety in that you are in control of what content you consume … In the classroom you are fed information and, whether you like it or not, it will be provided to you. You don’t have room to move on it without there being repercussions. (Geneva, non-binary)

Hearing people’s experiences, there’s someone on the other side who has experienced it … It’s just a more real portrayal of it rather than coming straight out of a textbook. Nobody’s going to tell you better than someone who’s trans. (Mae, non-binary)

Both Geneva and Mae valued the information they found on Tumblr specifically because it was delivered by those who can speak from experience. This aligns with Masanet and Buckingham’s (2015, p. 486) finding that the perceived efficacy of sex education information in online spaces depends on the ‘plausibility and authenticity’ of the information, which, for Mae, depends predominantly on trans authorship. The dialogic exchange of experiences and advice that is facilitated by networked publics represents a dynamic that trans youth often feel is impossible in classroom settings.

Taken alongside other research into the online lives of queer youth, these participant narratives reveal parallels between online sexuality education and the critical pedagogies articulated by Freire and hooks. Per Geneva’s reflections above, there is little ‘room to move’ in claiming authority or knowledge within a traditional classroom where sexuality education is delivered by an authority figure who interprets a state-provided curriculum, and communicates this interpretation, including any biases or moral judgments, as a form of institutionally sanctioned truth. However, due to the affordances of networked publics, any user-created post is a potential resource for others to view, interpret or learn from. Where posts in networked publics allow for user interaction, amendment, appropriation or challenge, there is significant opportunity for dialogic exchange compared to the traditional classroom. With posts being created and contested every second, the landscape of networked publics represents a fluid curriculum that ‘learns, changes, and evolves toward new ways of understanding gender and sexuality’ (Robards et al., 2020, p. 287).

Implications for school-based sexuality education

Mapping the limits of school-based sexuality education

It is clearly not possible to just transpose the kind of pedagogies occurring in networked publics into classroom practice. One significant barrier to this is the evidence within the global literature that teachers have long felt unprepared or anxious about delivering sexuality education content, particularly where it concerns sexuality, gender and body diversity, and the internet (Alldred et al., 2003; Chambers et al., 2004; Drew et al., 2023). This is compounded by evidence that many tertiary teacher education programs do not engage with sex education specifically at all, much less in the depth that queer school students desire (Carman et al., 2011). Subsequently, many teachers are graduating with very little knowledge about how to confidently teach issues related to sexuality, while rates of up-to-date professional development are very low (Ezer et al., 2021). The lack of specific training constrains teachers to banking pedagogies that rely on the staid communication of ‘facts’ that implicitly reinforce heteronormative temporalities and models of ‘good’ social and sexual citizenship (Shannon, 2016).

Of course, another significant barrier to realising this version of sexuality education in Australia and beyond, is an entrenched political status quo that is largely resistant to progressive change. Sexuality education exists in a contested sociopolitical nexus, influenced by what Rasmussen and Leahy (2018, p. 71), drawing on Ahmed (2004), call the ‘cultural politics of emotion’ concerning youth, gender and sexuality, making reform unlikely in the way my participants would like. In Australia, this is perhaps most obviously demonstrated by the series of near-identical moral panics have emerged to contest numerous incarnations of sexuality education or queer youth resources over the past several decades (Marshall, 2012; Ward, 2019). Analogues of these moral panics are readily observable across the Global North, reflected in, for example, the banning of books that contain (or are alleged to contain) antiracist or queer content in a number of US states and school districts (Pinsky & Brenner, 2023), and the targeting of individual teachers that prescribe them. Indeed, some participant comments about their schools corroborated that some teachers avoid teaching sexuality education topics they consider ‘controversial’ to avoid repercussions. These included survey respondents Zane, a non-binary person who went to a rural Anglican single-sex high school, and Kim, who went to a rural public high school:

Our teachers wanted to teach us more but would often say that they were limited by the school’s beliefs. (Zane, non-binary)

[Teachers] assume the dominant discourse of binary gender and heterosexuality and try very hard to avoid the ‘controversial’ topics. (Kim, non-binary)

Taken with evidence from the literature, we can infer that teachers may feel anxious about straying from any topics in sexuality education that are not explicitly prescribed or sanctioned by their school leadership, further entrenching banking pedagogies. It is regrettable that teachers and queer young people find themselves on the front lines of culture wars where any initiatives aimed at providing affirming education or healthcare are the subject of acrimonious public debate. It is for these reasons that it is necessary to queer sexuality education curricula and pedagogies; decades of curriculum reviews and packaged reforms tell us that a fully realised, positive sexuality education cannot be accomplished simply by creating the perfect sexuality education classroom resource.

Digital literacies and school-based sexuality education

Teachers and schools must then contend with the fact that the quality of learning that is available online, particularly for queer youth, is beyond what many advocates of comprehensive sexuality education could imagine is practically or politically possible in a school environment. Queer youth can access the internet from almost anywhere, at almost any time, to seek information or advice from others while remaining virtually anonymous. Those quoted in this article frequently described transformative experiences of learning from others which, in their offline lives, were limited by school climate and curricula. Their participation in networked publics also allowed them to fashion a queer life in the way they present themselves and interact socially with others, enabling a freedom to be themselves that was often not extended to them at school, or in their broader offline lives.

Though this tension may appear difficult to grapple with, the path forward should not involve schools delegating their responsibility for sexuality education to the internet altogether. In terms of providing a contextually relevant and useful sex education for young people, there is a vital role for schools in equipping young people with the digital literacy skills they need to manage their relationships safely and enjoyably, acknowledging their agency and leveraging their embeddedness within internet cultures. At present, despite developments in the field, this ideal is not widely achieved in Australian schools. Often, resources aimed at young people reflect sensationalist discourses of risk and danger, particularly where they feature issues such as sexting, image-based abuse or porn. Issues such as these tend to be framed as problems that students must manage themselves, individualising negative experiences and attaching shame and taboo to potentially positive ones (Albury & Byron, 2014; Albury & Crawford, 2012; Dobson & Ringrose, 2016). In the context of such ‘cybersecurity’ programs in Australian schools, Pangrazio and Gaibisso (2020, p. 52) found that most tend to neglect the ‘complex negotiations’ in young people’s everyday social media and internet use, findings echoed by Pinsky (2023) in her research with high school and college students in the US. Perpetuating silence on the multiplicities in young people’s digital sexualities carries the implication that information or insight that young people gain autonomously from outside of school is illegitimate, unreliable, and potentially dangerous. The paternalistic gatekeeping of young people’s knowledges on sexuality neglects a meaningful evaluation of the myriad social interactions that are possible online, and denies young people the opportunity to critically evaluate the process of cultural production of knowledge in networked publics. By not taking seriously the ways that youth cultures and sexual practices are entangled with networked publics, or developing pedagogies that engage with these realities, educators and researchers may forever doom school-based sexuality education to irrelevance in the eyes of young people.

A further reason for a comprehensive focus on digital literacy in sexuality education is that, despite how valuable the internet may be, it is far from utopian. Recent research by Barsigian et al. (2023) demonstrates that queer youth must still contend with ‘master narratives’ of gender conformity and heteronormativity in the networked publics that they inhabit, as well as harassment and abuse. It is also important to acknowledge that the kind of sexuality education offered in online spaces is not always good quality. Apart from the obvious possibility that information circulated on the internet might be incorrect, unsafe or inappropriate, research on networked racism and networked misogyny tells us that users within certain platforms actively cultivate extreme attitudes about race, gender, sex and sexuality (Dickel & Evolvi, 2023; Wescott et al., 2024). Left without guidance or advice, young people might therefore take in a ‘sexuality education’ online that results in the adoption of a set of views or practices that place them, and any romantic or sexual partners, at risk of harm. Taken all together, this evidence reveals the need for young people to be properly equipped to participate in online spaces productively, and to critically evaluate the information they come across online, particularly where they are learning formative lessons about gender, sex and sexuality. Again, silence on this fundamental aspect of young people’s lives cannot continue in any aspect of school curricula, especially sexuality education, and banking pedagogies that do not attend to nuance in young people’s lives are unlikely to be effective.

Reconceptualising ‘whole-of school’ approaches

To ensure that sexuality education can achieve its aims while schools can still foster principles of diversity and inclusion, it is perhaps time to consider decoupling sexuality and queerness, as civic concerns, from sexuality education altogether. Doing so invites a reframe of what we might consider ‘sexuality’ education to be, as opposed to ‘sex education’. While it is vital that ‘sex education’ educates young people about puberty, reproduction and respectful sexual relationships in a way that resists heteronormativity and cisnormativity, a fully realised ‘sexuality education’ occurs beyond the health curriculum, and engages with literature, histories, psychologies, media and social movements within other discipline areas. Sexuality education is inherently whole of person and whole of school, an acknowledgement that sexuality is a fundamental aspect of personhood beyond one’s physical or sexual health.

While it is not new to propose a whole-of-school approach to sexuality education that permeates all year levels and incorporates inclusive school policies and parental involvement, it is relatively novel to actively decouple the kinds of ‘civics’ lessons learned about diversity, sexuality, gender and belonging from the health curriculum, looking for ways to more explicitly connect them to a broader range of subject areas. In their call for a whole-of-school approach to trans inclusion in schools, Bartholomaeus and Riggs (2017, p. 365) recommend that ‘all areas of curriculum are open to including gender diversity content’, including ‘literature and language arts, sexuality education, history, civics, mathematics, visual arts’. Similar recommendations concerning the inclusion of intersex students are made by Brömdal et al. (2021), while the potential of the English curriculum for interrogation of gender and sexuality in the wake of moral panics in Australia has been raised by Wescott (2018). Indeed, when reflecting on the most affirming and useful learning experiences at school that related to gender and sexuality, participants mentioned the content within English or social studies classes, and their schoolyard friendships, rather than sexuality education.

This was true of Geneva, whose identity was, in part, facilitated by their examination of feminist poetry in a dialectic English classroom. In our interview, they reflected on their connections with literary themes and tropes that called social norms into question, particularly those that concerned gender, sexuality and politics. Encouraged to critically interpret texts in their English classes, Geneva and others were provided with the space to negotiate and explore their relationship to gender and sexual norms, demonstrating the kind of dialogic, engaged pedagogies that are arguably not possible in a traditional health and physical education classroom that is primarily concerned with relaying a set of ‘facts’ about sex and health. Such a model may provide better opportunities for engagement than framing queerness as a mental or physical health issue to be safely, correctly and individually managed. Adopting a whole-of-school approach to educating students about the diversity in their world acknowledges the fact that inclusion cannot be achieved simply by providing a set of individual instructions in a classroom; it is fostered as students absorb cues from the environment and the culture in which they are situated.

Conclusion

The internet is central to the way that young people learn, engage in their social relationships, and practice civic participation. This article makes the case for researchers and educators to afford legitimacy to the kind of learning young people engage in online, particularly where it concerns gender, sex and sexuality. The relative dissolution of hierarchy, open dialogue, and the deployment of personal narrative within queer networked publics suggests that young people’s online teaching and learning constitutes a critical, engaged sex education pedagogy that answers the calls of Freire and hooks. The evidence presented here demonstrates that, in many cases, the pedagogies that queer youth enact online are far beyond what is possible at school, conceptually, logistically, and politically. Rather than trying to replicate the kind of learning that goes on online or trying to perpetuate silence concerning young people’s digitally mediated sexualities, school-based pedagogies should seek to bridge the gap, allowing engaged, dialogic exchange with students about their lives, worldviews and practices as they relate to sexuality, identity and the internet. The infrastructure required to support teachers to deliver this content confidently and competently should be a matter of urgent focus for researchers and policymakers.

School-based sexuality education cannot possibly go into all the detail that queer young people want or can imagine, nor can it wholly replicate an idealised dialogic, engaged pedagogy. However, it needs to be a safe place where curiosity and empowerment are front-and-centre. I argue that this is the way forward for dialogic sexuality education that provides information for students while complementing their informal learning from popular media and the internet, rather than attempting to override or ignore it. Of course, this extends to include cisgender and heterosexual students, whose lives are equally intertwined with networked publics, and who, through little fault of their own, can be left entirely ignorant of diversity in gender and sexuality to the detriment of their queer friends, family and classmates. To achieve this vision, perhaps what is most important is the cultivation of broader classroom and schoolyard environments that embrace transdisciplinarity, rather than reducing discussions about gender and sexuality to a checklist of topics and discussion points in each unit. A critical, engaged sexuality education pedagogy creates understanding, dialogue and mutual respect for difference in the very practice of learning at school, as well as allowing for the kind of discussions that resonate with young people’s lived experience, not only enhancing their sexual health, but also their mental health, wellbeing and their perceptions of their social citizenship.

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Notes on contributors

Barrie Shannon

Barrie Shannon (he/they) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion (CRESI) at the University of South Australia. Their research agenda focuses on the formal and informal educational experiences of LGBTIQA+ young people.