In recent years the issue of gender-based abuse and violence amongst young people in schools has come into sharp focus, in part due to the rise and subsequent arrest of social media influencer Andrew Tate. Movements like #MeToo and Everyone’s Invited have sought to offer a space for young women to speak out anonymously about their experiences of sexual and gendered injustice at school. In the often quite fevered debates that such websites have catalysed, there is arguably a danger that teenage boys can be positioned and pathologized as irredeemably deviant. This paper details and explores a response designed to positively address gender-based violence with boys in schools, named ‘Harm Free Futures’. The programme drew on psychosocial theories of violence to foreground how boys and girls psychologically invest in and perform gender norms through the discursive practices in which they engage. We focus on how as facilitators (1 male and 1 female) we sought to position ourselves in relation to those discursive practices in a sex-positive social pedagogic space designed to explore the harm inherent in gender-based abuse and violence. Taking an in-depth qualitative approach, we seek to convey some of the precise detail of the interactions between ourselves as facilitators and a group of 10, year 9 pupils over a 6-week period. The paper shows how our positioning in relation to the lifeworlds of the boys engendered processes and some outcomes that, if mirrored by teachers and other professionals elsewhere, could have the potential to reduce gender-based violence in schools. The paper links to several conference themes, primarily the evolving politics of gender and psychosocial approaches to digital culture and learning.

The purpose of the presentation is to outline how the use of object relations theory, is valuable for supporting students of the social professions to engage with the content of social justice education. The paper will outline how using fairy tales as ‘transitional objects’ allows students to engage with the emotional work of learning about diversity and difference.

Students of social work must engage with teaching on racism, ableism, gender, and homophobia. As an academic, I use group work to teach this material. The student groups are diverse in nature, and discussions on for example, racism, sexism and or homophobia evoke feelings of anger in students who experience these realities. The anger is focused on students who they view as having privilege. These students share feelings of guilt and shame. These explorations ‘split’ the group, and students withdraw (both emotionally and in person) As an educator, I am interested in narrative and story and drawing on Winnicott’s notion of ‘Transitional object…as a defence against anxiety’, I introduced fairy tales to the group. The rationale is that fairy tales have a universal appeal, and people are comfortable engaging with the narrative. However, tales such as Cinderella, with its stereotyped views on gender, are valuable for exploring diversity. Using stories changed the dynamic of the student group. The students engaged with the stories, exploring how they identified with the content and the feelings it evoked in them. The stories allowed the group to survive and, over time, allowed students to develop different perspectives about self and others. The link to the conference theme on ‘Learning or not learning from experience’ is that stories are transitional objects and can be used in teaching to contain emotion and support learning from experience.

The present study attempts to explore reflexive praxis in university classrooms in India. Case studies of three university teachers’ journeys are presented here, focusing on struggles they faced in the personal and professional space during their teaching career that shaped their pedagogical practices. Bourdieu’s structural parameters and Engestrom’s Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) provided analytical concepts, including reflexivity, to study the pedagogical praxis of these teachers. Data were collected from three teachers from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India using the biographical narrative interview method (BNIM), semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and the written autobiographical accounts of the teachers. Narrative analysis was used to analyse the data. The analysis reveals that as these teachers question their social positioning, academic field and intellectual bias, they experience conflicts and tensions that arise from several disruptions, resulting in pain and frustrations at one level and at another level, shaping their desire and the ability to engage critically and historically with the processes and outcomes of personal and pedagogic interrogations. Their ideological struggles and classroom tensions and contradictions were instrumental in forming their pedagogical praxis. Their willingness to challenge the traditional teacher-student relationship is the driving force towards developing a reflexive pedagogical praxis. The ontogenetic history of a teacher’s lived world lays the materiality of their reflexive classroom pedagogy. Their experiences with caste, class and gender sculpt their reflexive pedagogical praxis. During this process, these teachers also realised that there is no “A” algorithm for developing reflexivity. It takes a lifetime for a teacher to build a reflexive praxis.