Conference Program

In contemporary Italian schools, an increasing number of children and adolescents identify as gender variant or non-binary, often pursuing—sometimes with family support—paths of gender exploration or affirmation. This action-research project develops and field-tests an innovative, vertically integrated methodological framework for inclusive gender and sexuality education across all school levels (primary to upper secondary), aiming to foster serene, informed, and authentically inclusive learning environments that center diverse embodiments, relations, and intimate citizenships.

Aligned with the panel's emphasis on gender and sexuality education as democratic practice (Plummer, 2001; UNESCO, 2018), the project repositions bodies, relations, and care as core to democratic coexistence, epistemic justice, and resistance to polarized anti-gender discourses. Rather than imposing normative knowledge, it cultivates student agency, mutual respect, and negotiation of plural identities.

The core intervention, “...La Principessa racconta...” (inspired by Drag Queen Story Hour but uniquely Italianized), merges fabula-based storytelling with STEAM laboratories. Facilitated by an educator embodying a “Princess” (a powerful archetype of femininity re-appropriated for empathy and inclusion), sessions use illustrated “forbidden books” (e.g., Piccolo Uovo) for narrative exploration, followed by hands-on STEAM activities (wearable technology, soft circuits, scribbling machines, podcasting, stop-motion video, electronic music). These clusters collect participatory qualitative data on students’ lived experiences, needs, and gender imaginaries, particularly from LGBT+ and gender variant/non-binary youth.

The methodology includes direct/indirect observation, reflective logs, online diaries shared via social media, and family questionnaires (Google Forms/QR codes). Pilots began in 2019 (e.g., I.C. Asola, European “We are the Makers”), continued post-COVID in associations and libraries (e.g., Biblioteche di Roma – Vaccheria Nardi), and featured at events like “Educare le Differenze” (Bari, 2023). Challenges include institutional resistance, parental concerns amplified by conservative campaigns (e.g., Pro Vita e Famiglia), and funding/logistical barriers, addressed through no-fee models and community partnerships.

Outcomes will yield evidence-based guidelines for curriculum integration, teacher training on gender-inclusive facilitation, and resources supporting intimate citizenship—enabling full school and social participation irrespective of gender identity. By amplifying gender variant/non-binary voices, the project counters epistemic injustices, promotes relational ethics of care and diversity, and renews pedagogy as a site of democratic transformation. Expected impacts include enhanced belonging, reduced stigma, and practical tools for enacting Comprehensive Sexuality Education as a democratic commitment.

Contemporary school-based sexuality education must move from pure biology to current challenges (e.g., online sexuality) and social aspects of sexuality. Sexuality education is crucial in reducing the rates of STIs, teenage pregnancies, and gender-related violence according to Společnost pro plánování rodiny a sexuální výchovu (Czech Society for Family Planning and Sexual Education [SPRSV], 2017) and UNESCO (2018). Studies show (UNESCO, 2018) that effective programs promotes responsible behavior instead of promoting earlier sexual activity. Nowadays, social media distorts sexual realities and can facilitate the commercial sexual exploitation of children (Smahel et al., 2020; Titheradge & Croxford, 2021). Schools are essential settings for guiding the perspectives of young people (SPRSV, 2017; UNESCO, 2018). Despite the Czech Republic’s reputation as a progressive post-communist country, sexuality education remains fragmented and hindered by outdated methods and insufficient teacher support (Bőhmová, 2025). While attitudes towards sexuality education are frequently studied (e.g., Hrubá, 2022), the preparedness of pre-service teachers remains under-explored. Addressing this gap, this quantitative cross-sectional study maps the knowledge and attitudes of future teachers. Using the ABC model of attitudes, data are collected from Master’s students across nine Czech universities via a custom-designed questionnaire combining a didactic test (for objective knowledge) and Likert scales (for attitudes and subjective evaluation of pre-service preparedness). Data will be analysed using techniques such as ANOVA, CFA, and reliability testing; however, the choice of specific methods will depend on data distribution. The study will map pre-service teachers' specific knowledge gaps (e.g., regarding legal frameworks) and assess their attitudes towards sexuality education. Ultimately, this research aims to optimise teacher preparation to improve the delivery of sexuality education in Czech schools.

Schools are deeply shaped by cis-heteronormative, binary and adultist regimes (Hall, 2021; Santambrogio, 2022; Demozzi & Ghigi, 2024) that reproduce broader social hierarchies and sustain cultures of gender-based violence, often through the implicit and hidden curriculum (Donovan et al., 2023; Rapini, 2025; Selmi, 2025).

In the Italian context, schools are currently experiencing contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, there is an increasing amount of censorship surrounding sexuality and gender education (Scarcelli & Selmi, 2025), as evidenced by the introduction of parental informed consent for sex education activities and the prohibition of such initiatives in primary schools. On the other hand, schools appear to be increasingly engaging with issues related to gender-based violence, particularly male violence against women and digital violence. However, these topics are often addressed within securitarian frameworks or through paternalistic and victimising narratives, which risk overlooking the broader cultural, material and relational conditions that produce violence. Moreover, discussions concerning young people’s uses of digital media frequently tend to be framed through dynamics of moral panic (Scarcelli, 2020), shifting attention toward risk and control rather than fostering critical and situated reflection on gendered power relations in post-digital contexts.

Against this backdrop, this paper asks how schools can create interstitial spaces for democratic agency in order to implement transformative gender and sexuality education practices that deconstruct, rather than reproduce, the culture of violence?

This contribution is based on an ethnographic research project (Bove, 2019) conducted in an Italian secondary school. The project involved interviews, participatory workshops and collective analysis with teachers and students. The research employs a participatory and reflexive methodology, consistent with a transfeminist epistemology (Branlat et al., 2023; Keenan, 2022; Leach, 2006).

Preliminary findings highlight significant tensions surrounding school discourses on gender-based violence. These discourses often generate forms of male resistance (Ging et al., 2024; Keddie, 2022) and struggle to engage students in meaningfully connecting their lived experiences - particularly within post-digital environments - with gender-based violence (Setty et al., 2024). Furthermore, the systematic invisibilization of LGBTQIA+ subjectivities within educational narratives contributes to the reinforcement and radicalisation of anti-gender discourses within the school context, perpetuating epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) and violence (Wozolek, 2018).

The research also foregrounds the tensions teachers experience when addressing gender and sexuality. These include fear of backlash from families and school leadership, institutional constraints, and a sense of unease in moving beyond disciplinary boundaries toward more dialogical, relational and embodied pedagogical practices. At the same time, the findings suggest that spaces of mutual recognition and critical dialogue can emerge through a pedagogy of discomfort (Reygan & Francis, 2015; Zembylas, 2015) that addresses vulnerability and co-learning, rewriting of classroom hierarchies and challenging the adultist power/knowledge binary that underpins traditional schooling.

When conceived as a participatory process, educational research itself becomes a democratic practice of questioning (Agud-Morell & Breull-Arancibia, 2025; Pacheco-Salazar, 2018; Bove, 2009). It fosters collective reflection on educational practices and creates opportunities to sustain gender and sexuality education, even in restrictive contexts.

In Italy, where Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) is not institutionally established and is increasingly targeted by anti-gender actors seeking to censor or delegitimize it, the integration of gender and sexuality perspectives in secondary schools depends largely on individual teachers’ initiative. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with twelve teachers in italian public secondary schools, analyzed through a critical feminist lens using thematic coding, this contribution explores how transfeminist principles are embodied in their everyday pedagogical practice and mobilized in efforts to promote or implement CSE interventions.

Findings show that participants, who identify both as transfeminist activists and public school teachers, describe transfeminism as a transversal pedagogical orientation (Barcelos, 2019) that shapes both classroom relations and CSE pathways. A recurring theme across interviews was a critical reflection on teacher positionality: the awareness that the teacher is a body in the classroom, embedded in asymmetrical power relations that must be continuously examined and renegotiated.

Through work on language, spatial arrangements, evaluation, and curricular choices, teachers seek to dismantle hierarchical and performative logics that reproduce exclusion and epistemic injustice. In this perspective, CSE (UNESCO, 2018) is understood as a transformative framework enabling students to critically analyze the social and cultural norms shaping sexuality and relationships, and to make autonomous, informed choices about their bodies and relational lives. By recognizing that sexual health is deeply influenced by gender norms and power structures, CSE becomes a vantage point from which to interrogate the norms that determine who is recognized, whose experiences count as legitimate knowledge, and who is enabled to participate meaningfully in collective life.

The contribution argues that these embodied and relational practices emerging from the interviewed teachers’ experiences enact forms of intimate citizenship within the classroom, transforming everyday pedagogy into a site of democratic struggle. The contribution shows how intersecting personal and professional trajectories translate into concrete transfeminist pedagogical approaches recognizable within the CSE UNESCO framework: an especially significant finding in the Italian context, where such practices face institutional obstruction. In polarized contexts marked by anti-gender backlash (Prearo, 2024) and attempts to censor or neutralize sexuality education, CSE and transfeminist pedagogies become sites of resistance and a practice of democracy in action, reshaping how we inhabit bodies, relationships, and shared social worlds.

Despite increasing legal protections, LGBTQ+ students remain among the most vulnerable groups within educational settings, facing persistent discrimination, exclusion, and emotional distress. Recent studies continue to identify LGBTQ+ youth as particularly exposed to violence and marginalization within schools (Harris et al., 2021; McBrien et al., 2022). In Europe, recent data indicate a concerning rise in school-based bullying against LGBTQ+ students (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2024). While numerous policies and interventions have been developed to address these issues, critical scholarship highlights that school violence is often framed as the result of individual behaviours rather than as a structural phenomenon embedded in institutional cultures and norms (Ferfolja, 2007; Payne and Smith, 2013).

In response to these limitations, this paper examines LGBTQ+ students’ school experiences from a relational and institutional perspective that situates them within a broader cisheteronormative logic shaping everyday school life. Specifically, the study focuses on the experiences of non-heterosexual boys and trans and non-binary students in secondary education in Catalonia. The research adopts a youth-centred qualitative approach (Bragg, 2010), combining the use of Relief Maps (Rodó-Zárate, 2014) and focus group discussions with a total of 285 students aged between 12 and 17 from 16 public secondary schools. Relief Maps were used to explore students’ perceptions of comfort and discomfort across different spaces and identity axes, while focus groups provided a collective space to deepen the narratives emerging from these visual mappings.

The findings reveal how students’ experiences are shaped by multiple mechanisms of regulation related to gender and sexuality that operate through what Payne and Smith (2013) conceptualize as gender policing. Among non-heterosexual boys, hegemonic masculinity is often enforced through peer dynamics such as homophobic language, mockery, and humour, which function as mechanisms for reinforcing gender boundaries and hierarchies (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Rawlings, 2019). These dynamics position heterosexual masculinity as the normative and desirable form of masculinity within school contexts.

For trans and non-binary students, experiences of discomfort are particularly associated with specific school spaces such as changing rooms, bathrooms, and physical education settings. These spaces not only reproduce binary gender norms through their architectural organization but also through the social interactions they enable, including exclusion, questioning of gender identities, and cisnormative microaggressions (McBride and Neary, 2021).

Overall, the study highlights the multidimensional role of school spaces in shaping students’ experiences, demonstrating how both spatial arrangements and everyday interactions contribute to the reproduction of cisheteronormative hierarchies. By foregrounding youth voices and analysing how school institutions (re)produce hegemonic identity models, this research calls for moving beyond individualizing approaches to school violence. Instead, it argues for addressing the structural dynamics through which gender and sexuality norms are enacted in schools, while promoting a feminist ethic of care and shared responsibility in educational practice. In doing so, the paper highlights how students’ everyday experiences shape their possibilities for recognition, belonging, and participation within school communities.

Italian schools are increasingly reflecting a plurality of identities and backgrounds, however this growing visibility of non-cis-hetero and non-white subjectivities clash with a parallel rise in oppressive, discriminatory and violent acts (Burgio, 2022; Biemmi, 2023; Di Grigoli, 2023; Rinaldi, 2023; Chiappelli & Bernacchi, 2024). In this scenario, Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) could play a significant role in preventing gender-based violences (GBV) through the promotion of self-respect and respect for others, the expression of consent and enabling to seek support when needed (Bonvini and Demozzi, 2024; Demozzi and Ghigi, 2024; Nimbi, 2025). However, despite almost 50 years of attempts of entering the topic into Italian public policy-making (Bruno, 2024), CSE’s structural integration in Italy is not ensured, leading to fragmented, inconsistent and often non-inclusive educational initiatives among the Italian regions (Goldfarb et al., 2021; Chinelli et al., 2024).

Drawing on the concept of participatory action research (Orefice, 2006; Cammarota et al, 2008; Demetrio, 2020), this contribution examines the youth-led path that created the campaign Piacere di Conoscerci, launched in Palermo in 2024 to ask the Municipality to engage in the promotion of Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) programs in local schools. The campaign, emerged from a qualitative data collection among students’ organisations, educators and parents on their experiences of GBV, was launched in the attempt not to limit their intervention to protest or awareness-raising, but engaging in a participatory process aimed at producing situated knowledge capable of informing local public policy: the research phase informed the development of a public Manifesto which reached 70+ subscriptions from NGOs and CSE experts, and a petition which collected +6000 signatures addressed to the Municipality of Palermo asking to commit to a publicly supported, holistic, compulsory and intersectional local program of CSE.

By positioning students as epistemic subjects and policy interlocutors, Piacere di Conoscerci may challenge normative hierarchies that traditionally exclude young people from shaping educational agendas, as well as heteronormative, binary, and moralising framings of sexuality that limit its discourse to a private sphere where young people cannot enter. Ultimately, the case invites a rethinking of CSE not as curricular content alone but as a transformative infrastructure for democratic coexistence: by situating CSE within broader struggles over normativity, structural inequalities and the control of bodies in contemporary Italy, the paper argues that youth-led, intersectional approaches can contribute to renewing democratic cultures and repositioning schools as sites where intimate life and democratic culture are co-constructed.