The use and misuse of pleasure in sex education curricula

Since Michelle Fine's writing on the missing discourse of desire in sex education, there has been considerable prompting among sexuality educators and feminist scholars to incorporate talk of pleasure into sex education curricula. While the calls for inclusion continue, few have actually examined the curricula for a pleasure discourse or explored how it is contextualised within sex education curricula. In this paper, we analysed curricula used in the USA in the past decade. A qualitative thematic analysis revealed that the discourse around pleasurable sex was often linked to a range of dangerous or negative outcomes including not using condoms, rushing into sex without thinking, regretted sex, and pregnancy or STDs. When the discourse around pleasure was included in sections on ‘knowing one's body’, this discourse took a medicalised, scientific tone. Pleasurable sex was also presented in more positive ways, either linked to marriage in Abstinence Only Until Marriage curricula, or within a more feminist discourse about female pleasure in comprehensive sex education curricula. Our research indicates that a discourse of desire is not missing, but that this discourse was often situated as part of a discourse on safe practice and there, continues to equate pleasure with danger.     

School-based sexuality education in Portugal: strengths and weaknesses

Portugal, like many other countries, faces obstacles regarding school-based sexuality education. This paper explores Portuguese schools’ approaches to implementing sexuality education at a local level, and provides a critical analysis of potential strengths and weaknesses. Documents related to sexuality education in a convenience sample of 89 schools were analysed and findings confirm both the results of the few existing Portuguese studies on the subject and commonalities in sexuality education between Portugal and other European countries. These include strengths, such as the existence of teams in charge of sexuality education in schools and the provision of resources, but also weaknesses, such as too heavy a focus on health-related issues, difficulties in cross-curricular teaching, low levels of community participation and poor-quality evaluation. Findings point to the need for a greater sharing of information and good practice between countries, and the need for clearer guidelines. Suggestions are made for improving the quality of sexuality education in Portuguese schools.     

Culture and sexuality in Finnish health education textbooks

In Finland, Young people’s sexuality education has not been examined from a multicultural perspective, with the exception of a few policy-oriented papers. This paper examines how cultural diversity is addressed in chapters on sexuality and sexuality education in Finnish health education textbooks. The analysis is based on material contained in textbooks used in grades 7–9 and upper secondary schools. Findings suggest that cultural diversity is included in textbooks in one of two ways: either to demonstrate the uniqueness of liberal, emancipated and progressive ‘Finnish’ sexuality; or as a way of distancing Finland and Finnish values from the rest of the world. In these textbooks, culture is understood as belonging to non-Finnish ‘others’ and a culture that itself as not being Finnish. This somewhat tendentious treatment of cultural diversity leaves teachers with limited tools with which to promote anti-discriminatory education. The textbooks also overlook the diverse backgrounds of young people growing up in Finland today.     

转变教学观念开展愉快学习

转变教育教学观念，提高课堂教学效率，挖掘利用无形的课程资源，促进中学生物学教学开展愉快学习，是《生物课程标准》的基本要求．激发学生的学习兴趣；建立新型的师生关系；改变教学方法，树立学生的学习自信心；提高教师的教学素质，师生互助学习，是开展愉快学习的有效途径．     

Sexuality as movement

In this article, I rethink the key arguments of my co-authored paper Teaching Pleasure and Danger in Sexuality Education (Author and Co, 2013 Author and Co. (2013). Teaching pleasure and danger in sexuality education. Sex Education, 13(2), 121–132.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) by bringing the postmodern logic of critical sexuality education theory into conversation with the relational ontology of new materialism. I begin by rejecting the key problem presented in Author and Co’s (2013) paper as a false problem. This false problem is the drawing of an ‘unqualified line’ between positive and negative sexual experience in sexuality education. Instead, I argue that the actual problem is the initial act of drawing a line to separate sexual experience into a binary. My modification of the problem is an ontological move that allows me to consider sexuality education outside the binaries of negative and positive experience. Elaborating on the ontology problem presented in my paper Teaching Pleasure and Danger in Sexuality Education, I explain new materialism and its key task of realizing the interdependence of dualist terms. Drawing on Bergson and Braidotti’s philosophies of difference, I argue that pushing for sex-positive sexuality education strengthens the sex-negativity in sexuality education. I further critique the logic of negation that structures sexuality education by interrogating the contemporary push for pleasure-based sexuality education. Through this process of rethinking my previous scholarship through new materialist logic, I begin the task of reconfiguring the phallogocentric sexual subject as a subject-in-the-process. The conclusion of this article offers a beginning consideration of sexuality as an act of becoming where forces brought into relationship are entangled, creating a new thing.     

Feminine sexual desire and shame in the classroom: an educator’s constructions of and investments in sexuality education

ABSTRACT

Within the growing body of literature on sexuality education in South Africa, researchers have highlighted how teachers may face, or themselves be, barriers to the implementation of rights-based comprehensive sexuality education. Important issues with regard to educators are: firstly, the social and discursive space within which educators are located; and secondly, the complex emotional and psychic investments that educators take up within particular discourses and practices. This paper explores, through a psychosocial reading of an interview extract with a particular educator based in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, how discursive and psychic concerns are sutured within the complex subjectivity of the educator as the medium for sexual education in schools. Specifically, it highlights the numerous ways in which feminine sexuality and desire may be avoided, denied and silenced. Even when feminine desire is specifically evoked as in this case, it is done so in a way that ensures social and cultural respectability, thereby reproducing shame narratives that form and maintain traditional gender discourses. Our analysis demonstrates how engaging with educators as subjects with their own sexual history and psychic dynamics, and as individuals with raced, gendered and classed identities, is a potentially transformative perspective for effective sexuality education.     

Sexual choreographies of the classroom: movement in sexuality education

This paper is interested in thinking more about sexuality education at school. As such, it is concerned with a mundane and unacknowledged feature of the sexuality classroom – the mapping of movement. While human movement is a familiar focus of educational research, the movement of things is not. With reference to Barad’s concept of intra-activity, the paper maps human-non-human movements and characterises these as a sexual choreography of schooling. Instead of asking what does movement mean or reveal about sexuality education, I attend to the event movement inaugurates. Predominantly theoretical, the paper weaves together ideas from conventionally disparate disciplinary fields. These include Edensor’s concept of rhythm from geography, Eggermont’s notion of the choreography of schooling from education, and Barad’s spacetimemattering from quantum physics. This theorisation enables a recognition of movement as a force in human-non-human classroom intra-actions implicated in the becoming of sexuality education as event.     

Exploring discursive barriers to sexual health and social justice in the New Zealand sexuality education curriculum

Sexuality education is a compulsory part of The New Zealand Curriculum for state-funded schools. In 2015, the Ministry of Education has published an updated revision of their official guidelines for schools on the teaching of sexuality education. This paper employs Foucauldian discourse analysis to argue that this policy document, Sexuality Education: A Guide for Principals, Boards of Trustees, and Teachers, reflects and reproduces particular ways of knowing which constrain possibilities for socially just sexuality education. These discourses include the adoption of an intellectual approach to teaching sexuality, the mandate to measure learning objectives, and a narrow emphasis on positive sexuality. Intentions for the curriculum to deliver a holistic, socio-ecological vision of sexual health as well as one which embeds Māori values are undermined by dominant understandings of individual action which shape approaches to both sexuality and pedagogy. Furthermore, the liberal recognition of cultural, ethnic, sexual and gender diversity in the curriculum unintentionally reinscribes an unmarked white, secular, heterosexuality as the norm. This paper reflexively critiques the discursive tensions that inhibit the realisation of sexuality education in schools which meets the needs of diverse students and offers it as a possible site for social justice.     

School-based primary school sexuality education for migrant children in Beijing,China

In May 2007, Beijing Normal University launched a programme of school-based sexuality education for migrant children in Xingzhi Primary School in Beijing. Over the past seven years, the project team has developed a school-based sexuality education curriculum using the International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education published by UNESCO. The team has developed 12 volumes of textbooks for grades 1–6; trained teachers to deliver sexuality education using participatory teaching methods; and involved parents in the sexuality education process. The first group of migrant students to receive the full 6 years of sexuality education graduated in June 2013. Sexuality education in schools is gaining increasing attention and help from many sectors of Chinese society.     

Teaching philosophies guiding sexuality instruction in US colleges and universities

Teaching philosophies are central to the approach of pedagogical strategies but there has been little examination of discipline-specific teaching philosophies. This study addresses a significant gap in the literature by discussing the teaching philosophies of 122 instructors of sexuality courses. Sexuality education is unique compared to most disciplines due to the personal nature of the content, thus being more difficult for students and instructors to distance themselves from the course content. The teaching philosophies in this study conveyed two overarching approaches to sexuality instruction: the instructor’s perspective of the course and the approach of the sexuality instruction. Although teaching philosophies typically inform one’s practice of teaching and course content, this study proposes that sexuality education is intrinsically different than other areas of instruction despite the interdisciplinary backgrounds of college instructors.     

Policies,principals and parents: multilevel challenges and supports in teaching sexuality education

A teacher's capacity to provide sexuality education may be hampered or enhanced by a number of factors. A social–ecological framework can be used to understand these influences, and the present study assesses interpersonal, organisational/institutional and community/policy level influences on teaching sexuality education. Seven focus groups were conducted in 2009 with 41 sexuality education teachers in Minnesota; discussion focused on challenges and the supports teachers experienced. At the interpersonal level, teachers reported both positive and negative interactions with parents, regarding parents as highly influential on school administrators and policy. Teachers reported many organisational level challenges, including their administrators, district policy, and structural factors such as time, financial resources, and diversity in the student body. At the community level, participants overwhelmingly felt that policy changes could be very beneficial to sexuality education in Minnesota, and believed that this support could come from all levels. Findings suggest numerous intervention points to reduce challenges and strengthen supports for teachers, and indicate that a multi-level approach is needed to increase teachers' ability to deliver sexuality education that meets their students' needs and is less onerous for the educator.     

英语专业学生兴趣阅读频率和态度调查研究

运用定量和定性研究的方法调查了英语专业学生兴趣阅读的习惯和态度。151名在校大学生接受了问卷调查。结果表明：英语专业学生总体课外兴趣阅读的频率较高,他们对待兴趣阅读的态度也是积极肯定的。多元回归分析进一步表明,调查对象过去接触过的英丈课外书与其阅读频率和态度均显著相关,其母语阅读频率与英语兴趣阅读频率之间的相关也达到了显著水平。此研究结果对二语阅读教学和实践有着重要启示。     

在中职历史教学中渗透心理素质教育的尝试与思考

中等职业教育担负着培养高素质劳动者这一艰巨的历史重任,是全面推进素质教育,提高国民素质,增强综合国力的重要力量。社会发展,竞争加剧,中职学生的心理健康问题日益突出,这些问题制约了中等职业教育的健康发展,影响了高素质劳动者的培养。文章结合中职学生的身心发展特点和历史学科的优势,探讨如何在历史教学中渗透心理素质教育,提高学生的心理素质,为现代化建设培养高素质劳动者。     

网络时代高校思想教育工作者的三个转变

人类社会正进入网络时代，它将改变人们的生活方式，尤其对青年人的思想观念和生活方式产生深远的影响。网络对青年人来说是一把双刃剑。高校作为青年思想教育的主阵地，对网络缺乏必要的参与，使之一时成为思想教育工作的盲区。所以高校思想工作者必须进行三个转变，主动出击，占领网上空间。     

What does the teaching and learning of sexuality education in South African schools reveal about counter-normative sexualities?

ABSTRACT

Using the interlocking concepts of power, knowledge and discourse, this article focuses on how counter normative sexualities are discursively constructed in the sexuality education classroom and with what effects. Drawing on in-depth interviews with teachers and classroom observation, the evidence highlights the presence of specific discourses about the teaching and learning of sexuality diversity. First, while many teachers argued for the inclusion of counter-normative sexualities, in their teaching and responses they privileged heterosexuality as legitimate and natural and same-sex sexualities as deviant and Other. Second, teachers’ discourses construct queer youth not only as innocent and childlike but also as hypersexual and rebellious – requiring discipline and intervention. These constructions link closely to discourses of pity and tolerance, or blame when counter-normative sexualities were expressed. Finally, despite heterosexuality being privileged in the classroom, teachers’ and pupils’ questions about gender and sexuality diversity suggest the need for a more defined and inclusive curriculum sexuality education curriculum. Findings justify concern about how counter-normative sexualities are addressed in the sexuality education classroom and advocate for improvement in teaching and learning about counter-normative sexualities in South African secondary education.     

Fathers as sexuality educators: aspirations and realities. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Men can play a significant role in teaching their children about sexuality but fathers’ practices and perceptions in this domain remain under explored. This study presents an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of eight fathers’ perceptions and practices in educating their ten-year-old children about physical maturation, reproduction and relationships. A Foucauldian analysis with a focus on governmentality and biopower revealed tensions and contradictions between the fathers’ aspirations and their realities, which appeared to be underpinned by the dynamic, contradictory, shifting, plural nature of fatherhood identities. Whilst fathers wished to adhere to the cultural imperative for father–child emotional closeness, a disparity between their ambitions and their conduct emerged. Care appeared to be a deeply gendered concept for the fathers and despite their aspirations for an intimate relationship with their children, gendered norms for motherhood and fatherhood prevailed resulting in passivity in their role as sexuality educators. The study concludes by arguing that challenges to structures and subcultural contexts, which may deter fathers from fully engaging with their sons and daughters in this aspect of communication are required.     

Teaching gender and sexuality diversity in foundations of education courses in the US

This article is a summary of comprehensive units on gender and sexuality diversity that the authors have used in teacher education courses in undergraduate and graduate social foundations of education classes over several years. The course lesson plan includes a five‐part analysis of the following categories: biological sex; gender identity/sexual identity; gender roles; sexual behavior; and sexual orientation. The authors have experienced much success and positive student evaluation by using this approach. This is true even in religiously and politically conservative universities. The authors introduce the complexity of biology, gender roles, and gender identity, before addressing human sexuality. This helps to diffuse many stereotypes and misconceptions in the initial lessons.     

Comprehensive sexuality education,culture and gender: the effect of the cultural setting on a sexuality education programme in Ethiopia

Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is recognised as an effective method of sexual health education, with the school identified as a fitting site of implementation. Its holistic and participatory nature endeavours to develop the knowledge, attitudes and life-skills of students to help them secure their sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). This qualitative study aimed to better understand aspects of CSE implementation in one context. Specifically, it focuses on the effects of the cultural setting, considering how gender and sexuality norms influence teacher and student implementation strategies. The research was carried out in one secondary school in Ethiopia, which delivered a Dutch-developed programme throughout 2013. Over 50 in-depth interviews were conducted with teachers and students, influential community members and experts in SRHR. Data were also gathered through focus group discussions and classroom observations. Results show that CSE teachers and students, both male and female, were able to discuss issues of sexuality. However, the cultural context was seen to affect interpretation of programme information, influencing the nature of this discussion. For an impactful implementation, it is recommended that sexuality education aims to engage with and involve the wider community, to reduce contradictory messages and increase programme support. Furthermore, teachers should undergo extensive and comprehensive pre-programme training that addresses their attitudes and values, not just their knowledge.     

差异化创业教育模式的探索———以中山职业技术学院为例简

创业教育的发展趋势及学生需求的多样化,要求构建差异化的创业教育模式。针对目前高职院校创业教育研究薄弱,创业教育同质化倾向严重等问题,中山职业技术学院积极探索构建差异化创业教育模式。通过面向全体学生开展“普及化”创业教育,实现创业教育全覆盖;通过面向不同专业学生开展“融合化”创业教育,助推人才培养改革;通过面向特定学生开展“专业化”创业教育,培养自主创业人才。