divers:ed: Gender-sexual diversity in everyday school life. A dispositive-analytic investigation of school-based gender education.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Bettina Kleiner
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 497213126

divers:ed: Gender-sexual diversity in everyday school life. A dispositive-analytic investigation of school-based gender education.Social and educational discourses on gender and sexuality have changed over the past 10 years. On the one hand, the current legal situation with the third category of civil status ;divers’ entails an expansion of gendered and sexual modes of living. On the other hand, claims for the recognition of gender and sexual diversity have also increasingly emerged in the context of sexual education since 2010. Gender, sexuality, and related social norms are thus important issues at the educational policy level that need to be adequately addressed, with school as a key site for education. How and to what extent current social and educational policy discourses on gender and sexuality are reflected in everyday school life has not yet been empirically investigated. The requested research project therefore addresses the question to what extent and how such juridical-discursive changes are translated into school practice. Based on the example of an integrated comprehensive school, whose management places diversity and anti-discrimination at the center of school development, it will be analyzed how, for example, discourses on inter* and trans* gender, gender diversity, on an expanded understanding of marriage and family as well as on sexual diversity are taken up at the level of the school's mission statement and by school actors, and what effects they produce. The connection between educational policy guidelines, mission statement, school practices and symbols with subject positions and things will be examined with the help of a Foucaultian dispositive analysis . The planned dispositive analysis includes a discourse analysis of educational policy and school documents, expert interviews with teachers, external educators and parent representatives, participant observations in school projects (with 12-15 year olds) around the topic of gender and sexuality and on regular teaching days. Gender and sexuality are conceptualized relationally and intersectionally as well as discursive effects, following Judith Butler's theory of the performativity of gender. The sampling procedure, the survey and the analysis are based on the cyclical-iterative process of the Grounded Theory methodology according to Strauss and Corbin (1996), which is modified in a dispositive-analytical way. The main goal of the study is to conduct an empirically grounded power-knowledge analysis in the field of school-based gender education and to develop an object-based theory on the gender-sexual "diversity dispositive."

• DFG Programme: Research Grants