Abstract
This chapter explores how academic research on language and sexuality can be used to inform and influence educational policy and, in particular, attempts to change curriculum content. I focus specifically on government-produced documents designed to provide direction and guidance on how to deliver Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in state secondary schools in England and Wales. The research entails a corpus-based critical analysis of the language used in RSE documents currently being used to inform teaching in schools. The analysis shows that the verb promote repeatedly collocates negatively with sexual orientation and same-sex marriage. This creates what Leap terms ‘spectrality’ in that it reiterates the 1988 ‘Section 28’ legislation. I argue that curriculum developers and policy-makers should completely remove this spectral language of Section 28 in order to make it more inclusive.
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Sauntson, H. (2020). Changing Educational Policies: Language and Sexuality in Schools. In: Mullany, L. (eds) Professional Communication. Communicating in Professions and Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41668-3_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41668-3_14
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