ABSTRACT
This chapter examines teaching and learning materials addressing gender-based violence produced for Australian schools at two points in time to consider how issues of concern shift, along with the framing of learning and teaching by disciplinary knowledges. It addresses both the micro practices of classrooms and wider frames of feminist theories, policies and politics. It considers whether it is possible to identify a ‘subject didactics’ for teaching and learning about gender-based violence. Comparative analysis of No Fear: A Kit Addressing Gender-Based Violence, from the mid-1990s, and Building Respectful Relationships: Stepping Out Against Gender-Based Violence, produced two decades later in 2016, suggests continuities in curricular strategies addressing gender-based violence. These include establishing the scale of the problem in order to secure stakeholder support, committing to ‘whole school approaches’, recognizing and managing ‘risk’ and the continuing influence of post-structural feminism. Analysis of classroom materials traces the classroom choreography of ‘joint meaning-making’ between teachers and students. These lessons require ‘safe spaces’ to be established, draw on narratives and discussions as pedagogical tools and require empathy, reflexivity and compliance from students. However, recent classroom materials show greater insistence on the expertise of external professionals, more directive instruction and more explicit links to mandated curriculum.
