More than 'fixing something': Professor Jen Gilbert, on her long research focus on sex ed controversies

Professor Jen Gilbert’s long interest in sex education has evolved over time, and it started as a focus on a related topic. 

“My doctoral research was in HIV/AIDS education, and then I just sort of followed that path and started thinking about sexual and gender identity in school,” said Gilbert, who began her time at OISE this past September. “I'm interested in moments of conflict – when things break down and what we can learn from the conflict.” 

For Gilbert, who now chairs the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE, there are always conflicts around sex education, though the controversial objects and topics change. “Sex education occupies this really unique place in schools—it’s a place where the school, the government, families, and communities come together to try to talk about the futures that young people should or could have,” said Gilbert, whose research interests also include LGBTQ+ sexualities, youth studies, and psychoanalytic theories of teaching and learning. 

“And that means that there's conflict and debate – and I find that really generative.”

For Dr. Adam Greteman, Gilbert stands out because of her capacious and generous thinking about how sexualities and genders are always already part of scenes of schooling.

“Eschewing frameworks of controversy for frameworks of hospitality, Jen's work asks us – scholars, students, educators – to think through the complexities that exist as students and teachers meet,” said Greteman, currently an Associate Professor of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). 

Her work asks us to take seriously how such meetings implicate our complex selves, with an important emphasis on our emotional lives, he says. “For me, Dr. Gilbert's work has pushed conversations on LGBTQ+ issues in education in ways that recognize the need for nuance, for generosity, for hospitality – not to shield ourselves from the challenges LGBTQ+ people face in schools, but to also engage the possibilities we bring to the scenes of schooling we exist in; possibilities that point to new realities.”

Before OISE, Gilbert held a tenure stream appointment in York’s Faculty of Education since 2002. There, she held a number of leadership appointments including as faculty council chair and director of graduate programs. 

At York, she hosted a long-standing 2SLGBTQ+ book club for queer, trans, and allied teacher candidates and graduate students and supervised numerous theses and dissertations in Education, Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, Critical Disability Studies, and Urban Indigenous Education.

She has collaborated on or led research projects that have attracted significant funding, including 4theRecord, a study of racialized and LGBTQ+ young women and nonbinary youth’s experiences of risk-taking during COVID (funded by the SSHRC New Frontiers in Research Fund), and “Between Yes and No,” a study examining discourses of consent in sex education (funded by SSHRC). 

“I think that my role is really to draw attention to the rich texture of young people's lives,” said Gilbert. “As opposed to ‘fixing something,’ I want my research to offer a portrait of LGBTQ+ youth that captures that complexity and ordinariness of their lives, and I hope that those portraits then can become part of the conversation.”

These projects have been training grounds for undergraduate, graduate student, and postdoctoral researchers seeking training in adolescent development and health, sexualities and education, and qualitative research – including Greteman. 

He met Gilbert through her scholarship when I was completing his PhD in the late 2000s – when he was beginning to think through LGBTQ+ issues in education. “It was at Bergamo, a conference on curriculum theory, that I met Jen in person,” he recalls. “I was just out of my PhD program hustling as an adjunct and remember being introduced to Jen by a colleague; excited to get to meet and talk with her. 

“Dr. Gilbert was so incredibly generous and thoughtful in some of those early conversations, modelling a way of mentoring early career scholars,” he adds. “This generosity and thoughtfulness continues today.”

Their collaborations continue to this day, and Gilbert has continued to be an important mentor and colleague. They were visiting faculty at the University of Sydney in spring 2023 – for the Hunt-Simes Institute in Sexuality Studies. They are currently developing a number of other opportunities to work together, including a proposed symposium at the 2024 AERA annual meeting.

“I hope Dr. Gilbert's tenure at OISE/U of T provides her a joyful, critical, and generative space and time to engage the work she does not only as a scholar, but also as a mentor, an administrator, and public intellectual,” said Greteman. “I hope this opportunity aids in expanding the reach of her scholarship and the important interventions she has made to make LGBTQ+ issues in education central to contemporary conversations.”

To come downtown to OISE, and continue building her scholarship, is a privilege that Gilbert has already leapt into with full force. 

“I felt really lucky and proud to have worked at York all those years. I carry those lessons and commitments with me into this new role. And, I'm really excited to learn more about what matters here in CTL and at OISE – I want to know what faculty, staff, and students are passionate about, what they care about, and how I can support their ambitions.”