Clive Belgeonne is an Education Advisor at DECSY. He is seconded as National Leader (North) for the Global Learning Programme for three days a week and does a day a week as Course Leader for PGCE Citizenship at Sheffield Hallam University.
Clive is researching and developing teaching materials on Masculinities for the Gender Respect Project. Clive has been a feminist since he was a teenager, partly through the influence of an activist girlfriend and partly due to the fact that although he enjoys sport he has never felt comfortable with male ‘banter’ that seeks to create a ‘bond’ by belittling others, especially women.
Travelling and working in South America and West Africa made him even more aware of the central role of women in most communities yet dismayed that their overall state of oppression was rarely challenged by males. As a VSO high school teacher living in a village in the Gambia in the 1980s he was involved in many discussions about gender roles and how to end practices such as female genital mutilation.
Clive taught in a large comprehensive school in Oldham for 11 years, initially as a History teacher but he became a PSHE specialist in order to have more space for discussion with young people around issues of personal development and social roles. He was involved in developing the school’s Gender and Race Equality policies.
Clive worked at the Development Education Project in Manchester and then for the last 5 years at DECSY on a range of projects relating to social and emotional learning, dialogic learning and global learning. He is very pleased to have the opportunity to work with teachers and young people to develop teaching materials to help young men find different ways in which to explore masculinity.
