Approaching “sensitive” topics: criticality and permissibility in research-led teaching about children, sexualities, and schooling

This paper considers the feasibility and desirability of radical, critical pedagogies in teaching higher education students about “sensitive” topics with children, sexualities, and schooling used as an example to explore this. Reflecting on early career research-led teaching, I confront anxieties informing decisions about what and how to teach children’s geographies of sexualities in light of student and institutional expectations and evaluations, and in relation to how colleagues have taught. Scrutinising my pedagogy with respect to what could have been more evocative teaching and uncomfortable learning, I question the extent to which I achieved the radical and critical potential I foresaw in introducing teaching on children and sexualities; teaching which – alongside student and institutional expectations and evaluations – has been informed through broader social norms of acceptability and permissibility, and contemporary imperatives for knowledge to be “relevant” and “useful”. In gesturing toward more challenging teaching, I consider the appropriateness of trigger/content “warnings” and explore speakability (after Monk) as a strategy for approaching “sensitive” topics, including age of consent. As an alternative to trigger/content warnings, I explore principles of content previews/ forecasts when broaching “sensitive” topics while remaining critical of what constitutes “sensitive” topics/content throughout.