Re\Assembling Welsh relationships and sexuality education: A post-qualitative journey through dynamic policy-practice contexts

Ashton, Max Richard 2024. Re\Assembling Welsh relationships and sexuality education: A post-qualitative journey through dynamic policy-practice contexts. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

	PDF - Accepted Post-Print Version Restricted to Repository staff only until 11 January 2025 due to copyright restrictions. Download (7MB)
	PDF (Cardiff University Electronic Publication Form) - Supplemental Material Restricted to Repository staff only Download (182kB)

Abstract

Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) is a statutory element of the national Curriculum for Wales. RSE is a cross-curricular entitlement within Welsh schools, designed to support learners to form and maintain relationships; understand sexuality; and develop knowledge of rights, wellbeing, equity, diversity and respect. RSE has been re\assembled between 2016 and 2022, replacing Wales’ outdated sex and relationships education curriculum through ongoing and contested policy transitions enfolding teachers, young people, parents/caregivers, experts, and other stakeholders. This thesis invites readers within that complex process. My research has also been re\assembled, from adventitious fragments of a project shattered by the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Constrained by uncertain, viral interruptions to face-to-face research, I salvaged ‘data’ from an RSE professional learning programme (PLP) with 14 teachers, and visited a secondary school between pandemic lockdowns, gathering insights into how teachers and learners produce, negotiate and resist RSE across shifting policy and practice contexts. Extending from a post-qualitative ethico-onto-epistemology, which imagines research processes as messy, processual entanglements with↔in the world, I deploy assemblage theory to map three generative research Events. Drawing on audio, photo, video, and fieldnote ‘data’, I cultivate insights into the transformation of Welsh RSE by observing teachers engaging a resource early in the PLP; presenting their reshaped RSE pedagogies at the end of the PLP; and secondary students completing an RSE ‘creative audit’. These engagements gesture towards the complexity, multidimensionality, and contestation of teachers’ and learners’ entanglements with↔in an emerging curriculum. ‘Findings’ underscore the importance of teacher confidence and preparedness for RSE, extending calls for protected time and ringfenced funding for professional learning; the heterogeneity of extant RSE in Wales, and how this effects what change is possible across diverse Welsh schools; and the ways diverse actants including context, location, and resources shape professional learning and practice in RSE.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	11 January 2024
Last Modified:	09 May 2024 15:38
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/165417

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item