Prepared to stay: Arts-based pedagogies, generative discomfort and teacher durability in sexuality and relationships education

Abstract

Arts-based pedagogies (ABP) offer innovative pathways for pre-service teachers' professional formation in sexuality and relationships education (SRE), yet their integration into initial teacher education (ITE) remains limited. This qualitative study examines how ABP shapes professional confidence, relational readiness, and emotional preparedness for teaching SRE. Drawing on interviews and reflections from pre-service teachers in a Victorian ITE unit, alongside retrospective accounts from in-service alumni, we offer a theoretically informed interpretation of how professional dispositions formed during ITE may persist into school practice. Applying Ahmed's (2017) theorisation of generative discomfort, we argue that ABP creates structured encounters with the relational challenges SRE demands, and theorise the outcome as a form of professional durability: a disposition participants describe as sustaining, not depleting. As the alumni data is retrospective and the study is non-longitudinal, we frame professional durability as an interpretive claim, not a demonstrated one, with implications for SRE preparation design in contested curriculum areas.