Stakeholder Perspectives on Consent and Violence Prevention in Ontario K-12 Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the implementation of sex and consent education in Ontario K-12 public schools by focusing on perceptions of stakeholders in education: parents, students, and teachers. The study asks: What factors inhibit and activate consent education curriculum reform in Ontario K-12 public schools? How do diverse stakeholders respond to curriculum modules pertaining to sex and consent, and what factors determine these responses? By addressing these questions, the study enriches research on sexual violence prevention in K-12 education, deepening knowledge that supports or inhibits such education. The study highlights an important gap in the literature: the role of parents/families in shaping sex-education. The study extends multiple fields: critical media literacy education, consent education, sexual violence prevention, and social justice education. The social justice education framework anchoring this study draws from critical race theory, intersectionality, and feminist standpoint theories focused on the role of social differences in sexual violence and its prevention. The study uses three qualitative approaches: (1) the design of an original media literacy curriculum module to discuss consent and non-violence with Ontario adolescents, (2) curriculum assessment of the module by diverse adult stakeholders in Ontario (n=20), collected through in-depth personal interviews to probe adult stakeholder views about sex-education; and (3) analysis of archival documents, including official curricula and media reports to map the social and cultural contexts of sex-education in Ontario. Based on stakeholders’ perceptions of the study’s curriculum module, the analysis highlights four barriers to effective sex-education in Ontario K-12 public schools: (1) rigid “consent” definitions that neglect the diverse cultures and histories of Ontario’s population; (2) “childhood innocence” narratives that do not consider research assessing adolescent needs and activism; (3) the persistence of neoliberalism that prioritizes preparation for the workplace over non-violence; (4) a lack of training and administrative support for K-12 educators. Additionally, four key factors enabling K-12 consent education were analyzed: (1) youth and parents’ intrigue with media-based pedagogies; (2) teachers’ professional development pertaining to consent; (3) educator collectives and resource-sharing groups; and (4) parent council activism and education. The study concludes by discussing future directions of the research, including piloting the module.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".