Sexual tension : the imagined learner projected through the recontextualising of sexual knowledge into pedagogic communication in two curricula in South Africa and Ontario, Canada

Includes bibliographical references. ; This study conducts a textual analysis of the structure and discourses present in two sets of sex education curriculum documents - one from South Africa and one from Ontario, Canada. It did so to make visible the imagined learner projected by these curricula in the recontextualising of sexual knowledge into pedagogic communication. Using a deductive framework built on Basil Bernstein’s concepts of classification, framing, vertical and horizontal discourse and instructional and regulative discourse to recognise the structure, and an inductive coding process complemented by Louisa Allen’s discourse of erotics to recognise the discourses and strategic silences present and absent, it concludes that the imagined learner would have a sex negative, context independent orientation to meaning, be heterosexual and not yet be sexually active. The study problematises this learner, presenting statistical evidence that the vertical discourse of the school is significantly disconnected from the horizontal discourse of the everyday. The research raises questions about the role of recontextualising in reproducing a sex negative hegemonic discourse of adolescent sexuality and, through a unique coding scheme, provides a framework for recognising the relative implicitness and explicitness of regulative discourses and their respective relations to power and control over sexual knowledge.