Initial Teacher Educators’ insights on gender and sexual equality when preparing teachers to teach Relationships and Sexuality Education RSE: Preliminary findings from the TEACH-RSE Research Project: Sexuality and Gender Equality

UNESCO (2019) advocates for the power of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) to achieve gender and sexual equality. In an Irish context, the first strategic goal of the National Sexual Health Strategy 2015-2020 is that: ‘Everyone in Ireland will receive comprehensive and age-appropriate sexual health education/information’. A goal which mirrors the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, including, SDG3: Good Health and Wellbeing, SDG 4 Quality Education and SDG5 Gender Equality).While it is unequivocal that teachers play a central role in the provision of comprehensive sexuality education, another key player in the ‘total ecology of teacher education’ is that of the teacher educator (Wideen, Mayer-Smith and Moon 1998). Initial teacher educators, however, operate within certain socio-political structures that undoubtedly influence their professional choices - ‘what Discourse we are in is often a matter of negotiation, contestation, and hybridity’ (Bakhtin, 1986). This presentation aims to examine the type of wider socio-political discourses initial teacher educators engage within in constructing their understandings of gender and sexual equality and
its positioning within the subject of Relationships and Sexuality Education RSE and more widely in Initial Teacher Education ITE.
As part of the TEACH-RSE research project (IRC Coalesce 2019/147) which, for the first time in an Irish educational context, investigates the role of Initial Teacher Education ITE in preparing teachers to teach Relationships and Sexuality Education RSE, this presentation will draw on preliminary findings from qualitative face-to-face interviews with a sample of Initial Teacher Educators drawn from a range of sites of primary and post-primary ITE across Ireland. The presentation will focus on their insights on gender and sexual equality in the contexts of Initial Teacher Education and the preparation of student teachers to teach Relationships and Sexuality Education. Given the recent and wide-ranging changes in national social and educational landscapes, the Initial Teacher Educator’s role as enabler of gender and sexual equality has been nevermore important, and warrants increased attention within Initial Teacher Education scholarship, practice, and policy