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South Africa’s constitution, wider legal context, and educational policies should enable its teachers to help create environments in which the safety and welfare of all their learners are protected and in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, or intersex (LGBTQI) learners, and other vulnerable leaners, can develop integrated identities. Life Orientation (LO) is the main learning area in which comprehensive sexuality education and human rights are addressed. But despite the supportive policy framework, research shows that the school curriculum only makes oblique references to gender and sexual diversity, and that for the most part schools are not ensuring that educators or schoolgoing youth learn how to respect the diversity of human sexuality and genders. Instead, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, homophobia, and transphobia remain prevalent in South African schools and textbooks, with very little intervention from teachers to challenge discrimination. How it is possible to make sense of the disparity between what the country’s laws and policies stipulate and what is actually happening in schools? Why is it that policies are not resulting in improved experiences for the vast majority of learners who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT), are same-sex attracted or nonbinary, or assumed to be LGBT? Why have South African school governing bodies, principals, and teachers not been able to respond to the fundamental changes in the country’s democracy in ways which disrupt, or even challenge, hetero- and cisnormativity, making schools safer for all learners? There are a number of known challenges to the implementation of LGBT-inclusive practices and curricula in South Africa. More research is required to understand how best to ensure that teachers are willing and able to integrate topics around gender and sexual diversity into their curriculum without perpetuating heteronormativity, cisnormativity, homophobia, and other forms of oppression.

Education has been a central institution in the installation and legitimation of gender binaries and racialized difference in colonial and postcolonial eras. While the term “postcolonial” can refer to the period after which colonized nations gained their independence, a postcolonial critique also engages with the afterlife of the metaphysics of Western modernity. Notably, the imperial project of Western modernity assumed the superiority of the colonizers and provided the legitimation for the deep injustices of colonization to be framed as a “civilizing mission.” In particular, the processes of colonization imposed a “modern/colonial gender system,” which reconstructed the gender norms of many societies around the world, and which subordinated women by binding them to the domestic sphere. Its “biologic” presumed a heterosexual matrix in ways that were also profoundly racialized. Importantly, education was a critical institution that not only legitimated Western knowledges and values, but also secured women’s regulation and subordination. In postcolonial eras, education was given central importance in ways that have tied it to modern imperatives. For the newly independent postcolonial nation, education was critical in the construction of a national imaginary but this framing has reproduced rather than disrupting colonial gender norms. Harnessing education in support of national development inserted the postcolonial nation in a hierarchy of “developed” and “developing” nations. The focus on development similarly permeated efforts at curricular reform, such that they often reproduced the gendered, racialized, and classed hierarchies of colonial education. What counted as legitimate knowledge remained framed by Western elite institutions and their technologies of power. Importantly, from the moment of their independence, the global reach of multilateral organizations has constantly framed the postcolonial trajectories of “developing” nations and their educational reforms. Although often contradictory, the discourses of such organizations intensified the imperatives of education for national development. This compounded pressures to increase educational access beyond elite groups and to include more females. However, the technologies of power that support these international policy agendas bind such reforms to modern imperatives, so that they have become a critical site for the reinscription of binary understandings of gender. This is also true for contemporary international concerns for “quality” education. This is prosecuted largely through promotion of learner-centered education, a concept that is also infused with Western democratic ideals and values. Interrogation of the “hidden curriculum” further shows that the education in postcolonial contexts remains a key institution through which gender is instantiated in essentialized and binary ways, infused by modern ideals of presumptive heteronormativity. Resisting such binaries requires an understanding of gender as something that we “do,” or that we “perform,” within the contingencies and exigencies of particular social and cultural contexts. In turn, these theoretical understandings call for in-depth qualitative studies that can attend to the particularities of the gender regimes in different educational contexts and other intersecting structures of difference (race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality) that are rendered invisible by education’s legitimation of difference as a question of disembodied individual merit and ability.

The concepts of queer theory and heteronormativity have been taken up in educational research due to the influence of disciplines including gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, and critical race theory. Queer theory seeks to disrupt dominant and normalizing binaries that structure our understandings of gender and sexuality. Heteronormativity describes the belief that heterosexuality is and should be the preferred system of sexuality and informs the related male or female, binary understanding of gender identity and expression. Taken together, queer theory and heteronormativity offer frames to interrogate and challenge systems of sex and gender in educational institutions and research to better support and understand the experiences of LGBTQ youth. They also inform the development of queer pedagogy that includes classroom and instructional practices designed to expand and affirm gender and sexual diversity in schools.

Queer pedagogy is an approach to educational praxis and curricula emerging in the late 20th century, drawing from the theoretical traditions of poststructuralism, queer theory, and critical pedagogy. The ideas put forth by key figures in queer theory, including principally Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, were adopted in the early 1990s by to posit an approach to education that seeks to challenge heteronormative structures and assumptions in K–12 and higher education curricula, pedagogy, and policy. Queer pedagogy, much like the queer theory that informs it, draws on the lived experience of the queer, wonky, or non-normative as a lens through which to consider educational phenomena. Queer pedagogy seeks to both uncover and disrupt hidden curricula of heteronormativity as well as to develop classroom landscapes and experiences that create safety for queer participants. In unpacking queer pedagogy, three forms of the word “queer” emerge: queer-as-a-noun, queer-as-an-adjective, and queer-as-a-verb. Queer pedagogy involves exploring the noun form, or “being” queer, and how queer identities intersect and impact educational spaces. The word “queer” can also become an adjective that describes moments when heteronormative perceptions become blurred by the presence of these queer identities. In praxis, queer pedagogy embraces a proactive use of queer as a verb; a teacher might use queer pedagogy to trouble traditional heteronormative notions about curricula and pedagogy. This queer praxis, or queer as a verb, involves three primary foci: safety for queer students and teachers; engagement by queer students; and finally, understanding of queer issues, culture, and history.

All students deserve a safe and welcoming atmosphere in which to learn and to be valued and respected as their authentic selves. For educational leaders, gender- and sexuality-related equity involves the recognition that schools often represent hostile, discriminatory, and inequitable learning environments for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer plus (LGBTQ+) individuals; however, this is merely the first step. Establishing equitable learning environments for LGBTQ+ individuals requires action and, especially in this instance, the courage to take effective action toward purging the school culture of all institutionalized barriers and negative beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors regarding LGBTQ+ people. School leaders dedicated to ensuring that all students genuinely have an equal opportunity to succeed will extend that obligation to the many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer and questioning individuals, plus those who do not otherwise identify as heterosexual and/or gender compliant (LGBTQ+) and those who are merely perceived to be, as well as their family, friends, and allies, who are also all a vital and deserving part of the school community. Achieving gender- and sexuality-related equity involves the creation of LGBTQ+-inclusive curricula, decentering hetero/cisnormativity, eliminating homophobic and transphobic harassment and bullying, identifying and eliminating policies and procedures that discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals, and ensuring that all school personnel have the necessary knowledge and understanding of LGBTQ+ realities to become caring and supportive allies.