Curricular silences and sexual diversity: LGBTI Inclusion in Albanian upper‐secondary education

This article examines how sexual diversity is constructed and rendered (in)visible within Albanian upper‐secondary school curricula. The paper conceptualises curriculum not merely as a repository of content but as a discursive and normative formation through which knowledge, identity and social boundaries are produced. Drawing on qualitative interpretive analysis of official curriculum documents and approved textbooks in Civic Education, Psychology and Sociology (in use from academic year 2016–2017 to 2025–2026), the study investigates how LGBTI identities are represented, contextualised and pedagogically framed. The analysis is informed by recognition theory, capability approach and the policy implementation theory, enabling examination of how curricular texts shape opportunities for inclusion, belonging and civic participation in line with Albania's inter/national commitments. Findings indicate that LGBTI‐related content is largely absent from compulsory curricula and appears sporadically and fragmentarily within elective subjects, where it is often weakly integrated into broader discussions of rights, diversity and social relations. These curricular silences operate as discursive boundaries that normalise heteronormative assumptions and limit the epistemic recognition of sexual diversity. By analysing curriculum as a site of knowledge selection and social ordering, the article contributes to scholarship on curriculum, power and inclusion, highlighting the importance of how textual formations shape educational imaginaries of difference. The study concludes by reflecting on the theoretical and practical implications of inclusive curriculum development in contexts where formal equality frameworks coexist with constrained curricular representation.