Please note: These live learning blogs are posted on the fly, and I am more concerned with capturing information rather than perfecting my writing/proofreading skills. So yes, there might be mistakes, and no, it’s not the next great American novel. We’ll live!

Presenter: Alejandro Ortiz

TriConference 2024, Mexico City, Mexico

Some things that Alejandro discovered while doing his research:

• Millions of students face exclusion due to gender, race, religion, etc.
• Paradigm shifts in education can create conflicts that delay equality and equity.
• Mexico urgently needs to change educational practices that foster gender-based violence.
• No policies exist in Mexico to eliminate violence based on gender, identity, or sexual expression.

What is the concept of development?

• advance in a positive way – but positive for whom?
• evolving – as the world changes, evolve with it
• We need to change because we live here.

We need to remember that our values are not universal. Our values today are not the same as they were 100, 150, 200 years ago. Together we can change our values and we can change our context.

Alejandro researched policies relating to gender, sex, and identity in private IB schools – he didn’t find any!

Policies and practices can develop safe educational spaces for all students and ensure equal learning opportunities. We must crate spaces where heteronormativity is not the only paradigm.

Espinoza (2009): Policies are goal-oriented actions. And this means they are ever evolving based on context.

• Identify – what do we want to do?
• Estimate – how will this impact our community?
• Determine – how will we implement?
• Monitor – how’s it going?
• Evaluate – what is the impact?

What is practice? It’s what we do with our policies. It’s our every day.

Gender is a sum of values, attitudes, roles, cultural practices, or characteristics based on sex. Historically and across cultures, gender reflects and perpetuates power relations between women and men (Arango).

Stereotypes exist for a reason, and we can’t deny that. And they’ll keep existing but over time, we can change them.

Why do we line up kids by gender? Or boy girl boy girl seating – why do we do that?

Traditions are great, but sometimes we need to create new traditions.

Trying to create policies and protocols as if they were a cooking recipe is impossible. Each educational center must review its reality and adapt its actions based on its mission, vision, values, and objectives, which must include everyone (LAOR). We can’t copy policies from everyone else. There aren’t magical policies and practices.

Things that policies need to do:

• Create dialogue spaces
• Explicitly establish non-discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity
• Involve families, teachers, staff, and administrators
• Ongoing training for all parties in schools
• Modify internal regulations
• Avoid gender assumptions and stereotypes
• Identify harassment, abuse, and bullying
• Develop intervention protocols

We cannot copy paste from other schools. We need to have the conversations in our on educational institutions.

From the IB (2016): Inclusion is an ongoing process aimed at increasing access for all students and their participation in learning processes by identifying and eliminating barriers.

It doesn’t matter how many policies and practices are implemented if teachers and school staff don’t believe in equity, equality, and social, sexual, and gender inclusion.

Ben Keward (2017): It’s one thing to have boys and girls, but it’s another thing for boys to do “this” and girl so do “that.”