Introduction
Who we are
The International Falcon Movement – Socialist Educational International is an international educational movement working to empower children and young people to take an active role in changing society for the better and fight for their rights. We are an umbrella organisation for fifty child and youth-led movements all over the world, educating on the basis of our values of equality, democracy, peace, co-operation and friendship. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is a key document for IFM-SEI. Through our member organisations and our international movement, we aim to ensure that children and young people are well informed about their rights and are empowered to ensure they are respected. To reach this goal, we organise a variety of activities including seminars, training courses, international camps and conferences. Our work is based on peer education: We believe that young people have as much to teach as they have to learn.
By children and young people, for children and young people
Children and young people are involved in all levels of decision-making in our movement, from their local groups to the world congress. It is our firm belief that children are competent to make decisions and have strong opinions on global issues as well as local matters directly affecting them. They only need the genuine empowerment so that their voices will be heard in society.
IFM-SEI has a long history of working with young people on gender and sexuality. IFM-SEI members have been working with children on issues of gender and sexuality for over forty years, from running local campaigns to creating non-heteronormative stories. Since 2001, together with our partners the Kurt Lowenstein Education Centre and the Young European Socialists, we organise the annual ‘Queer Easter’ seminar. More than 120 young people from youth organisations and LGBT*IQ structures from all over Europe, the Middle East and Latin America meet at these seminars to discuss sexual diversity, heteronormativity and homophobia. Together they develop strategies for inclusion and the support of young LGBT*IQ people. In recent years, a special focus was placed on working on sexuality and gender issues with children to curb heteronormative and cisnormative attitudes before they have a chance to be fully developed. This publication compiles the work of IFM-SEI’s Rainbow Network and the Queer Easter team of the last few years. We became increasingly concerned that there were very few resources for use with children on gender and sexuality. In our Human Rights Education with children we extensively use the Council of Europe Manual ‘Compasito’, but even in this otherwise very useful publication, methods on gender and sexuality are lacking. As a response to this gap, we decided to run workshops, seminars and camps for educators to develop the resources that you are now holding in your hands. The first edition was published in 2011 thanks to a grant from the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe. The resource was disseminated widely among LGBT*IQ activists, youth workers and teachers, and in several seminars young people underwent training on how to use the manual. We received an incredible amount of positive feedback and very useful suggestions to improve activities and add new ones.We therefore decided to work on a new edition, taking into account the feedback from practitioners. Again the European Youth Foundation supported our work, and participants of the Queer Easter seminar 2014 helped us to develop new content for the second edition. We especially wanted to add more activities on trans* issues and on bullying, and focused on including activities that are easier to run with younger children. The work on the second edition was done in the framework of our wider inclusion strategy ‘All Together 2.0’, to make sure that gender and sexuality education is not isolated, but part of our struggle against all forms of exclusion and discrimination. This publication is the culmination of many hours of research, work and fun with hundreds of children and educators around Europe for which we are grateful. We would have been unable to create this handbook without them.
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