Conference Program

Gender education, most often framed today as comprehensive sexuality education (CSE), is predominantly discussed and implemented in the preadolescent and adolescent age-gap, reflecting the assumption that it becomes relevant only at those ages (UNESCO et al., 2021). However, students have repeatedly described this timing as “too little, too late,” consistently calling for earlier engagement (Pound et al., 2016). In fact, when gender education is introduced later in schooling, beliefs, attitudes, and overall social norms are already long embedded in young people’s identities and social worlds, making it more complex to enact transformation.

Despite global consensus on adopting a life-course approache to CSE (articulated as spiral curriculum models beginning in early childhood and unfolding across grades and subjects), implementation continues to fall short of its transformative aims. Common barriers include insufficient teacher training, weak alignment with learners’ needs, limited use of participatory pedagogies, and institutional constraints. These difficulties are intensified by the controversial nature of gender education, which frequently generates “classroom wars” (Mehlman Petrzela, 2015), being a common target of the anti-gender movement.

With the 2030 SDG benchmark approaching, persistent gaps in the SDGs crossed by gender education foreground the urgency not only to start in early childhood, but to rethink this educational object as a whole. Gender and sexuality education demands a transversal approach embedded in institutions’ learning cultures instead of being occasional add-ons. Recent research in the field highlights the potential of whole-setting approaches in early childhood gender education, while also emphasizing the complexity of adopting and sustaining such models (Sità & Trivelli Díaz, in press). However, evidence on which ECEC initiatives operationalize whole-school approaches, and how, remains unexplored.

This study explores and analyzes early childhood gender education initiatives through a whole-school lens, defined as whole-setting change across curriculum, staff, leadership, and family engagement, with the aim of identifying design features, implementation patterns, and lessons for practice.

A literature review and document analysis of secondary sources was conducted to identify ECEC gender education initiatives. Inclusion criteria were: (1) focus on children aged 0–6; and (2) documentation of implementation components extending beyond classroom-based lessons.

Initiatives most closely aligned with whole-school approaches like “Body Emotion Education” in Finland and “Welcoming Schools” in the U.S. combine elements such as sustained professional development for educators, leadership commitment, and deliberate family engagement strategies. These initiatives tend to report stronger outcomes, including educator confidence, reduced resistance from families, and more consistent engagement with intersectionality. At the same time, key challenges persist, particularly regarding sustainability over time, coherence across institutional actors and practices, and navigating external contestation (Cacciatore, 2020; Derman-Sparks & Olsen-Edwards, 2012).

Findings support whole-school approaches as a promising model for adressing the effectiveness, sustainability, and contextual resilience of gender education in ECEC. While learning in this domain cannot be reduced to narrowly measurable outcomes, longitudinal research could deepen out understanding of ECEC institutions as activity systems (Hedegaard, 2012) and of children’s evolving meaning-making and attitudes related to gender over time.