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Surtees: A Qualitative Analysis

Decent Essays

In this article Surtees, N. highlights the initial findings from a qualitative research study regarding exploring the discursive production of children’s sexuality in early childhood education. The article draws attention to instructor public lecture about and around sexuality. Drawing from heteronormative, developmentalist and biological treatment and discourses of children as asexual and innocent, this article show that such talk acts to patternize or minimize children. Teacher resistivity towards and silencing of sexuality, the functions the silences serve and the ways in which silences mark the borders of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ are uncovered. The article suggests that the marking of borders jeopardizes teacher acknowledgment and solemnization of difference and diversity. …show more content…

Normally,teachers talk within these sites may act to normalize, disorder, disarrange and rearrange savvy of sexuality. To suggest otherwise is to overlook the role that teachers and their talking invariably play in the formation of both their own and children’s understandings of sexuality. While deciphering the unwritten codification and fashioning real, in practice, the inclusive aspirations of Te Whäriki and the Revised Statement of Desirable Aim and Practices is doubtless challenging, it is a worthwhile challenge that will ‘unveil unthought-of possible action for all of us’. Unveiling such possibilities, in today’s rapidly changing world, is surely an important expression of the role of the teacher in early puerility

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