Defended JK Rowling; banned from PHSCE

[Worriedthisisactuallyhappenin]

I have name changed for this as outing and have been vague about my connection to it but I am quite involved in the situation and don’t know what advice to give.

A person I know is a teacher in an all girls school and as part of being a form tutor does PSHCE with them. Last week they were looking at cancel/call out culture and looked at the examples of JK Rowling’s discussions around trans/women’s rights. Every student in his form agreed that she was a hateful bigot that shouldn’t be allowed to say those things. They then looked at some (censored) examples of the things that were said in response to her, and the students again all agreed that they were an appropriate response to “hate speech” though a few thought they shouldn’t have been so rude. The person I know tried to encourage a bit of critical thinking and encouraged them to think how loss of female only spaces could impact people eg. rape victims, women of certain religions, and to think about who decides what is considered hate speech and how JK’s message could be considered that while the responses to her weren’t.

Since then they have been called into a meeting with the head and asked to hear their side of the story as students had complained that they were defending a transphobic bigot. Having heard their side of the story they have been told they are no longer able to teach PHSCE as it’s “obviously not working”

I don’t really know what I’m looking for, maybe just reassurance that there are still other people out there that would be worried by this!

This is where old fashioned Debate Club or Forum Discussion as standard in schools should come back (or come in in the UK?) - learning to critically exam and defend a view point, even if it isn't your own....

@Andante57

The open ended questions and giving pupils space to voice their thoughts with out bringing yours into the discussion

It sounds like the pupils did voice their opinion and refused to accept there could be another one.

I think I agree with this.

Can your teacher friend go through appropriate channels or at least have a meeting with the head to discuss what went wrong?

I’m not a teacher. It’s just good management, surely, to appraise performance and build on (what the head sees as) failure?

If you show him the thread, he will get some pointers of how things went ‘wrong’.

@JoodyBlue

I do disagree with the prior posters. How on earth do our young people stand a chance if their teachers are not allowed to put an opposing view and encourage freedom of thought. I would applaud your friend for the attempt. It is worth recognising that there will have been children in that class who hold a different view, would have been unable to have it recognised and that this teacher is supporting those children.

Agree.

We were encouraged to join in debate at a level around some v difficult topics.

How will these kids make it to university without being able to recognise balanced debate?

My DS seems to have a very healthy view regarding this issue. He does go to a school where critical thinking and tolerance is encouraged. They have had a gender fluent pupil on his year since yr8 so school have had to address the issue. Unlike the other independent school in the city most parents are unaware of the pupil because the situation was quietly introduced to the pupils rather than being broadcast across the whole school in an attempt to promote their PC policies. The pupils have accepted the situation and, particularly the girls, embraced the pupils gender choice without parents influencing their behaviour. Whether they agree with there gender fluidity is irrelevant, they just don’t challenge it.
I don’t know the arrangements school have made but it certainly hasn’t lead to a rush of the boys dressing as girls in order to access girl only spaces.
I am a supporter of JKR because not every institution seems able to deal with the issue sensibly.

Fluent - fluid
I’m recovering from surgery so brain is foggy

Pupils should be encouraged to debate and view issues from alternative perspectives. A teacher may play devil's advocate on occasion; this doesn't necessarily mean they are expressing their own opinion, merely ensuring differing viewpoints are aired and debated.

I do have to wonder where, specifically, they found the "hate speech" in anything JKR has written.

How they explained that it was hate speech.

And whether if what she'd written could have been anonymised, so there was no off-the-shelf opinion to borrow, they'd have made the same judgment.

The problem is, PHSCE is usually just taught by the form teacher, who hasn't been trained or prepared for the topic. They just get given a bunch of stuff and have to get on with it.

Yes, I remember a PSHE lesson when I was about 14 (so about 15 years ago) that was focused on politics. If I remember correctly it was a broad overview of the UK political “set up”. The teacher had an information booklet he was working from, which started by defining capitalism and communism. He didn’t know which one the UK was. Maybe this was deemed so basic that he should just know it, but PSHE sessions are a little pointless if the teacher doesn’t have a full grasp of the topic.

Sorry, bit off topic from the OP’s question!

Well, they gave a good demonstration of cancel culture.

I wonder with hindsight, whether instead of the teacher taking the contrary view to challenge the class, a more successful approach might have been to assign half the class (or if that would have been an unmanageable group size, then a quarter of the class - and have a separate example used for the other half of the class) to debate why its right to "cancel" views they perceive as harmful and the other group assigned to the freedom of speech side.

Because the point isn't really whether they are one side or another. It is that they think about why they and other people hold certain beliefs and how you can have engage in debate about an issue.

"We're right and you're wrong" isn't a persuasive argument.

But it is hard for adults with fully mature brains to see both sides of this issue, and it is one that teens feel particularly passionate about at the moment. So it would be difficult however they tackled it.

Maybe they need some time practicing debating issues that whilst also contentious impinge less on their immediate lives. Or if cancel culture is the right topic, maybe it needs a fictional example that people wouldn't have a reference for who was right/wrong to parrot.

On JKR's views themselves I'm surprised by the lack of curiosity her detractors have about why an author whose famous work is largely centred on exposing the injustice of bigotry and prejudice, would hold views they consider prejudiced is interesting.

Not that hypocrisy doesn't exist, but even if I didn't hold the gender critical viewpoint myself, as a fan of her works, I'd be curious as to whether she was wrong on this issue and why.

Why is it transphobic? Who decides? If she's wrong on this subject, does that mean she's a terrible person?

I am not a teacher though so I don't know how to advise your friend. It is very meta, that this issue is so contentious, that not only can we not accept people might reasonably hold an opinion that we disagree with and want them to shut up, but even discussing that happens is so contentious that a teacher proposing it is told to shut up too.

It was discussed and the teacher didn't like the outcome? Why can't the teacher be open minded and accept they are wrong? Why must it be that everyone who disagrees is wrong?

A key issue in cancel culture is to look at who gets to decide what is cancelled and the implications for society of this, both now and in the future
I agree, but this teacher went beyond that and started using the PSHE lesson as a springboard to debate single sex spaces, which doesn't sound like it was an objective in the scheme of learning.

There's a few of us on this thread who teach PSHE, know what a minefield it can be, and believe it's important to explore a range of views/promote critical thinking.
I can see how if a teacher has gone off on a tangent highlighting arguments in favour of Rowling's stance, single sex spaces (even if they say they're only showing balance) students could easily suggest the teacher was pushing their personal views, which on this topic is likely to end with cries of 'bigot'. There's a potential training need to develop this teacher's PSHE teaching, or a little bit of a wake up call from them being a bit naive about how teens work at times.
The teacher shouldn't be removed from teaching PSHE in my opinion, but it does sound like elements of the lesson might have be misjudged .

I think there probably was some naivety in his approach. He moved to the school last year but with covid form was all done differently and he had a change of year group so it’s a new group to him.

As far as I know he didn’t try to derail it to a full on discussion of same sex spaces just encouraged them to consider why people might not consider JKR’s views as indefensible as they did.

This is so chilling. I would strongly advise your friend gets in touch with the Free Speech Union ASAP. They will represent him straight away (unlike other unions, who are worse than useless on this issue). The FSU are incredibly effective at tackling this kind of thing.

As far as I know he didn’t try to derail it to a full on discussion of same sex spaces just encouraged them to consider why people might not consider JKR’s views as indefensible as they did.

That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If he had been giving his own views about trans rights and single sex spaces, that would be a completely different matter. And that is what some posters seem to have inferred (with no evidence).

Hopefully he can have that conversation with the head to establish what the head considers the issue to be (which is hopefully linked to PSHE teaching strategies and not that some teenagers didn't like hearing ideas outside their echo chamber).
It's poor of the school to remove him from PSHE teaching as it sends the wrong message to students and also doesn't allow staff to access useful CPD opportunities. It would be more appropriate for him to observe a strong PSHE teacher, or talk to someone who is good in that area for advice on navigating tricky discussions with students.

Schools are hot beds of the woke left. We can only hope that ultimately these things shall pass and free speech shall prevail and do our bit to have children at home with critical thinking skills.

@lazylinguist

As far as I know he didn’t try to derail it to a full on discussion of same sex spaces just encouraged them to consider why people might not consider JKR’s views as indefensible as they did.

That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If he had been giving his own views about trans rights and single sex spaces, that would be a completely different matter. And that is what some posters seem to have inferred (with no evidence).

Thanks Lazy, I was wondering if I’d missed something. The teacher asked the class to consider why some people disagree with JKR and if the way they expressed that disagreement was acceptable

Nothing about his own views as far as I can tell

Tell them to take a copy of JKR statement to the meeting.

Ask if the person has read it.

Then ask which bit is problematic and why.

And is there anything that JKR has said that is of value.

I would completely throw it back at them.

And refer to checking source at route as a valuable part of fact assessing and forming an opinion.

They haven't read what JKR has said. Just about every one who spouts about it does so on hearsay not having read it for themselves.

Theeyeballsinthesky
Not his own point of view, but did shift the discussion onto debate about single sex spaces, which wasn't the lesson objective and does leave him potentially open to question. It was quite a risky thing to do with students, especially with the update that he's reasonably new to the school.

Students sometimes also pick up on more than staff give credit for. I've observed lessons where the teacher was adamant that they had presented both sides of a topic, and facilitated discussion, but the way they taught it and facilitated discussion made their own attitudes obvious. A lot of PSHE teaching is nuance and skillfully handling emotive and tricky topics.

Without us being there none of us can say either way that there was/wasn't grounds to question some of the lesson.

I'm a form tutor who has to teach pshce without any training (even in teaching- I'm a librarian!) and I live in dread of this sort of thing. I try to concentrate on getting the students to explain exactly why they think a and not b

@lazylinguist

I know nothing about the curriculum or course content but I do wonder if the preparation was insufficient? Diving in on JK Rowling is like handing a learner driver the keys to a Ferrari.

The problem is, PHSCE is usually just taught by the form teacher, who hasn't been trained or prepared for the topic. They just get given a bunch of stuff and have to get on with it. It's mostly just unbelievably tedious, but some topics can be a minefield.

I am very well aware of the ramifications of the JKR debacle and am a seasoned teacher with views very much on one particular side of the debate. But although I am well-practised at presenting a neutral front to students, I would have found this a challenge tbh.

A lot of teenagers are vehement verging on hysterical on this topic, and some would be very keen to try and goad or trap a teacher into saying something they could report as 'wrongthink'. I'm not saying that's what happened here, but it's hard to imagine dealing with groups of potentially difficult teenagers in a situation like this unless you've been there. I get on well with kids generally and last week I had one 16yo try to imply I was racist for calling out his appalling behaviour and another threaten to report me for mocking her dyslexia (by asking her to read a few pages of a book
(Turns out she was lying and isn't dyslexic).

So maybe the OP's friend's students were genuinely upset and appalled (jystifiably or not) at what he said. But some kids just really really love the idea of getting a teacher into trouble.

Hence my Ferrari analogy. I am not a teacher, my expertise is in change management and engaging staff and patients in implementing new practices and frameworks. While my objectives were of course different, the approach has much in common. In order to get people actually thinking about an issue and its solutions and not sticking to an entrenched position, you don't start with the hot potato and you work to get people understanding the concept and the generality before going on to the particular.

Counterweight is a organisation that I've heard of which helps people who run into these issues at work.
I have no personal experience but might be worth your friend checking them out

How will these kids make it to university without being able to recognise balanced debate?

Universities disallow balanced debate even more.

We're right and you're wrong" isn't a persuasive argument

Of course it’s not, but it’s similar to how schools were run in the former East Germany. Anyone, teacher or pupil, who criticised the regime would be cancelled.

To be honest, I’m more worried about sex trafficking than the toilets at the British Library or whether or not someone can read a room of teenagers well enough to know when they could be causing offence.