Development of a Cross-curricular Unit Aimed at Sexual Minority Inclusion:

Collaboration between Social Studies and Health and Physical Education

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify the constitutive principles of cross-curricular units in social studies and health and physical education that are aimed at the inclusion of sexual minorities. In recent years, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) issued a notice on implementing meticulous measures for pupils with gender identity disorders, which has drawn attention to sexual minorities in school education. Based on this notice, teachers are expected to support such pupils, but this is insufficient because schools are based on gender dualism and heterosexism. Therefore it is not possible to solve these structural problems with only the support provided by teachers and stakeholders. Thus, It is necessary to conduct lessons about sexual minorities. However, the lessons provided so far have not been able to question sexual norms adequately. Sexual norms are not only individual norms but also social norms, so it is impossible to include sexual minorities without approaching such norms from both perspectives. Therefore, researchers and practitioners of social studies and health and physical education collaborated to conduct class research, focusing on cross-curricular issues. As the two subjects had different characteristics and research methods, mutual understanding was established between the subjects, and research methods were determined based on discussions. As a result, we developed, practiced, and verified a cross curricular unit while overcoming such methodological challenges in the practical research on subject pedagogy. The lessons developed were given to students in the first year of junior high school. The first outcome clarified the unit constitative principle, based on the Queer Pedagogy theory proposed by Britzman. In Queer Pedagogy, the “study of ignorance,” the “study of reading practices,” and the “study of limits” are necessary. Therefore, the unit constitative principle was derived from a review of these three issues, and three specific unit-building principles were proposed: “Goal: Inclusion, based on the two perspectives of individual and society,” “Content: Sexual norms created by the majority,” and “Unit process: The spiral process of relativization, construction, and deconstruction.” The second outcome is that we discovered new possibilities, in terms of subject pedagogy, by reevaluating their structure and presenting the principles and specifics based on the core goal of schools to foster citizenship in the pursuit of diversity and social justice.