Music Education and Critical Reflection to Promote Sexual and Gender Diversity for Pre-Service Primary Teachers

Sexual And Gender Diversity In Teacher Training

The development of neoliberal policies is promoting an economy-based education, generating school curricula of competences based on the business model (Aróstegui et al., 2015). Faced with this reality, some authors such as Rusinek and Aróstegui (2015) advocate the inclusion of training in citizenship in school curricula and not only the STEM¹ subjects to educate in a knowledge-based economy. Nevertheless, the approach of critical pedagogy takes a stance to question the influence of neoliberalism on educational policies. In fact, it promotes developing an education that allows the construction of a transformative education for people through reflection and critical thinking (Freire, 1997). In order to achieve this transformation, it is necessary to foster a school that is connected to the context, just as its educational practices should address the issues that affect the context. In Spain, differences between public and private schools are related to who funds the educational centre, in other words, the state or a private institution. The national education legislation regulates every academic aspect for each school. Thus, every school must develop an educational process so that students achieve the purpose and objectives for every education stage that are regulated by the current national education law (LOMLOE, 2020).

One of the ongoing challenges that the school continually faces is the attention to the diversity of students as a reflection of the diverse reality presented in society. One of the increasingly visible diversities within the social context and the educational field is the sexual and gender diversity that thinks about the heteronormative binary framework (Sánchez Sainz, 2019). The new educational law in Spain fosters the inclusion of sexual and gender diversity schools (LOMLOE, 2020). This is a great goal because it regulates schools to justify what strategies use to improve the inclusion of people due to sexual diversity and gender identity. Although it is a national regulation for the whole country, a major progress in these issues depends on the political trend of the government. In other words, it depends on a progressive or a conservative ideology from the government administration. In fact, there is a research study that offers a vision about how the Spanish educational system has included or not the sexual and gender diversity of people in schools and curricula from the educational law of the dictatorship government in the earliest 1970s to current law of a democratic and progressive government (Valle, 2021). Also, each autonomous region could regulate more specifically for every local context as it shows differences among Spanish regions such as having a regulation with more rights for LGBTIQ+ people (Valle, 2021).