Evaluating a gender diversity workshop to promote positive learning environments

ABSTRACT

Drawing on data from an Aotearoa/New Zealand study of more than 230 secondary students, this article evaluates the potential of a 60-min gender diversity workshop to address bullying and promote positive environments for learning. Students completed pre- and postworkshop questionnaires. The authors used descriptive statistics to summarize results and conducted t-tests to assess the statistical significance of changes from before the workshop to immediately after the workshop. The authors used thematic analysis to analyze open-ended questionnaire responses. In summary, 237 students (M age = 13.7 years) attending 10 workshops participated in the study. More than 80% of students thought the gender diversity workshop would reduce bullying in schools, and 94% of participants reported that they would recommend the workshop to other young people. There was a significant increase in valuing (p < .001) and understanding (p < .001) gender-diverse people before and after the workshop. School cultures were largely perceived to be hard for gender-diverse students; however, many respondents reported a desire to be supportive of their gender-diverse peers. Reducing bullying related to gender identity and expression is very likely to have a positive effect on the mental health and educational achievement of young people. Brief diversity workshops, as a part of a wider suite of educational reforms, have the potential to create safer environments for learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Bullying
• diversity education
• gender-based bullying
• transgender
• adolescence

Acknowledgments

The authors thank all of the students for their involvement in this study; staff members at the participating schools; RainbowYOUTH's staff members, storytellers, and interns; the New Zealand Ministry of Education for funding this study; and Grant Malins from the Ministry for support during this project.

Disclosure

James Burford and Mathijs F. G. Lucassen worked as contract researchers for Rainbow YOUTH to carry out this study, which was funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education. At the time of completing the study, Thomas Hamilton was the executive director of Rainbow YOUTH, and Mathijs F. G. Lucassen was an advisor to the RainbowYOUTH board. The authors alone are responsible for the contents contained in this article.

Notes on contributors

James Burford is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Learning Sciences and Education at Thammasat University, Thailand. His research interests lie in the area of sexualities, gender, embodiment, affect, and higher education. James is a tau iwi (non-indigenous) New Zealander who is passionately attached to sex, gender, and sexuality diverse communities.

Mathijs F.G. Lucassen is a Lecturer in the School of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care at The Open University and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland. He is a gay and queer tau iwi (non-indigenous) person whose research interests include LGBT+ mental health, bullying prevention strategies, child and adolescent mental health, and e-therapies.

Thomas Hamilton is a Lecturer in the Department of Social Practice at Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Thomas is a trans masculine tau iwi (non-indigenous) person. His work focuses on mental health and community development in the sex, gender, and sexuality diverse communities across Aotearoa/New Zealand. He practices as a narrative therapist and works as a facilitator, activist, and advocate within these communities.

Notes

1. The Yogyakarta Principles (2007) affirm that this right must not be curtailed on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation: http://www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/principles_en.htm/.

2. The Rio Statement on Homophobic Bullying and Education for All (2011) affirmed the responsibility of all states to provide universal access to education by eliminating the barriers created by homophobia and transphobia.

3. It is important to note that bullying on the basis of gender expression is not only an issue that effects gender-diverse young people. All students, irrespective of their gender or sexual identities, can be targeted in this way.

4. We use the term gender diverse to refer to transgender, nonbinary, and gender-fluid young people (i.e., people whose sex assigned at birth may be incongruent with their gender identity), as well as nonnormative gender identities that originate from non-Western linguistic-cultural traditions (e.g., kathoey in Thailand or fa'afafine in Samoa). The term gender diverse should be viewed as connected to others in circulation in the field such as gender nonconforming (Toomey, McGuire, & Russell, 2012) and gender variant (Hill & Menvielle, 2009). We use the term cisgender to refer to people who experience greater congruence between their gender identity and the sex they were assigned at birth. Although the limits of space preclude a deeper examination, we point to some of the ongoing debates that have informed our conceptual work. These include feminist poststructuralist deconstruction of the male/female binary (Davies et al., 2006); queer scholarship regarding the politics of normalization, particularly hetero- and (trans)gender normativity (Bornstein, 1995; Nicolazzo, 2016; Roen, 2002); and transgender studies debates about the social consequences of gender variance including high burdens in education (Toomey et al., 2012) and health (Reisner et al., 2016).

5. The selection of two schools was driven by practical considerations of achieving the research within one school term.

6. Decile rankings are a measure of the socioeconomic composition of a school's community. For example, decile 1 schools are the 10% of schools with the highest proportion of students from low socioeconomic communities, whereas decile 10 schools are the 10% of schools with the lowest proportion of low socioeconomic students. These decile rankings are used to provide targeted funding to state and state-integrated schools (Ministry of Education, 2016).

7. Participants were provided open response boxes in relation to their age and gender on the questionnaires, and were asked their ethnicity using a standard Statistics New Zealand question (Statistics New Zealand, 2005).

8. We acknowledge that a term such as “coming out” can have exclusionary effects. For future research, a more inclusive phrasing might be used, such as “disclosed they are transgender.”

9. Our desire in framing this question was to create something that was brief and easy to understand for young participants, at the same time as gesturing toward a diversity of gender-diverse identities. The questions were pretested with an advisory group of sexuality and gender-diverse young people to ensure comprehension and relevance, and amended accordingly. Given the high number of Pacific students at the schools we elected to include the Samoan term fa'afafine, literally “in the way of the woman,” which describes people assigned male at birth who adopt behaviors associated with a feminine gender (Wallace, 2003, p. 140). In future studies, we suggest that researchers in Aoteaora/New Zealand include Māori gender identities in items, as well as other Pacific terms, such as the Cook Islands Māori concepts of akava'ine (“to be or behave like a woman”) and akatāne (“to be or behave like a man”).

10. We acknowledge that the wording of this question conflates the perceptions of cisgender students with the lived experiences of gender-diverse students. However, in our analysis, we differentiated between the responses of the 7 participants who reported a gender identity other than “female/f/girl” or “male/m/boy” and other participants. Because there were no discernibly different patterns in the responses to the question, we analyzed these responses together.