‘I Never Knew that Pictures Could Convey Such Powerful Messages’: Chinese Students in an English Department Explore Visual Constructions of HIV and AIDS

This article reports on a recent project in which 25 Chinese college students in an English Department of an urban university in China engaged in a series of photovoice workshops. In the context of a youth as cultural producers framework, the project was meant to engage youth in media production. This approach helped not only to expand their vision and experience related to HIV and AIDS, but also to mobilise their engagement in social issues related to HIV and AIDS, and to pave a path to action and social change. The study has implications across a range of areas, including implications for cross‐curricular integration (in this case English) of HIV and AIDS in higher education institutions and the issue of ‘which language’ (L1 or L2) and why in studying sexuality education.     

Innocent Victims, Fighter Cells, and White Uncles: A Discourse Analysis of Children’s Books about AIDS

In this article, we examine a set of 26 children’s books on HIV/AIDS published between 1989–1999 to identify the ways in which these texts construct HIV/AIDS and people living with HIV/AIDS. We explore how this marginalized group is depicted in these books, and how well-meaning teachers may in fact be reproducing dominant discourses about HIV/AIDS in their curricula. In this article we focus, in particular, on how the discourses connected to public health, medicine, and secrecy (as a discourse across many institutions) are filtered to children and take part in constructing their beliefs and assumptions about HIV/AIDS. We illustrate our argument with examples from the books and show why teachers need to know how to analyze texts they select for their curricula so as to read books about HIV/AIDS critically in the classroom. Megan Blumenreich is Assistant Professor of Childhood Education at The City College of New York, City University of New York. Her research interests focus on urban schooling, poststructuralist approaches to qualitative research, and teacher education. She is the coauthor of The Power of Questions: A Guide to Teacher and Student Research (Heineman, 2005). Marjorie Siegel is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests include transmediation and multimodality in literacy education, content area literacies, and literacies and technologies. She is the coauthor of Reading Counts: Expanding the role of reading in mathematics classrooms (Teachers College, 2000). M. Himley, “Teaching the rhetoric of AIDS: Blurring the boundaries.”     

Globalization,public policy,and ‘knowledge gap’: Ethiopian youth and the HIV/AIDS pandemic

Set against trans‐ or supra‐national policy initiatives which have framed the HIV/AIDS pandemic as in part a pedagogical issue, this paper critically explores local understandings of sexual practices (generally) as well as of HIV/AIDS (more specifically) among young people in the sub‐Saharan African country of Ethiopia. Ethiopia has the third largest number of HIV/AIDS infections in the world, behind only South Africa and India. Like many countries dealing with this pandemic, the Ethiopian government has articulated its response to a broader set of global presses, including those around information and education. Such responses, we will argue, are helpful but have important limitations. As this study shows, knowledge about safer sex practices and the dangers of HIV/AIDS are by now well known among many Ethiopian youth. Yet, this knowledge does not always effect behavioral change. Taking condom use as a key exemplar, we will look at how Ethiopian youth narrate their own sexual experiences, conduct, and practices. Deeply informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, we look to open new ‘thinking tools’ for a range of actors addressing this global pandemic in situated contexts. In particular, we challenge the ‘pedagogical subject’ – a subject lacking key information – interpolated into many of these policies. We highlight, instead, new disjunctures between emergent discourses around sex and sexuality as well as long‐standing, conservative attitudes toward gender.     

Arab Americans: Into the Multicultural Mainstream

As the percentage of youth of color in the nation's public schools continues to increase, so, too, does the urgency of preparing a predominantly white, female, middle class teaching force to work with racially and culturally diverse youth. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of an urban, youth-serving HIV/AIDS prevention and supports center, this article describes how two white women staffers engaged culturally responsive modes of care, support, and advocacy in order to address young people's emotional, developmental, and educational needs. Since both women performed motherly personas as they cared for and supported youth at the center, this article builds upon their experiences to develop “further mothering”—an adaptation of the “other mothering” tradition of black women—as a possible heuristic for analyzing white women educators’ culturally responsive work with black youth.     

Managing Risk and Experiencing Danger: tensions between government AIDS education policy and young women's sexuality

Much of the early panic relating to AIDS has focused on non‐heterosexual sexualities and the identification of high risk groups. It can be argued that fear of the spread of HIV and AIDS into the heterosexual population was the spur for the development of government policy in this area. The protection of the population in general depends on changes in high risk sexual practices, and the part played in these changes by young women has been given scant attention. We argue here that the sexual knowledge and practice of young women are crucial factors in the spread of HIV and AIDS, and that information on these factors is limited and interpreted within a framework of patriarchal ideology which obscures the power relations embedded in sexual relations. These issues are discussed using data from an investigation of young women's sexual beliefs and behaviour (the Women Risk and AIDS Project — WRAP) in relation to government AIDS education campaigns.

     

Visualizing the politics of innocence in the age of AIDS

We are concerned with the ways in which social constructions of age can contribute to reducing or exacerbating the vulnerability of young people, and for this reason we refer to the issue as one of ‘the politics of innocence’. The focus of this paper is on gender, youth and HIV prevention/AIDS awareness in the context of South Africa and investigates the uses (and abuses) of images of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ in the age of AIDS. Notwithstanding the particular case of South Africa where the incidence of new cases of HIV infection amongst young people is at crisis proportions, the impetus for our work on the visual representations of youth, gender and AIDS comes out of a recognition of the increasing risk of youth to sexually transmitted infections, HIV and AIDS, and within that the particular vulnerability, worldwide, of young women.     

FROM CONFUCIAN MASTER TEACHER TO FREIRIAN MUTUAL LEARNER: CHALLENGES IN PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Abstract

This article addresses the dilemma faced by religious and theological educators committed to a feminist, liberative pedagogy when teaching learners in the church whose Confucian upbringing has socialized them into different means of instruction. After a brief sketch of the Confucian ethos that permeates the life of such persons and communities in present‐day North America, the article examines the pedagogical practices of Confucius/Kongzi, traces the historical development of Confucianism, and suggests how we might live and teach in the tension of what appears to be two extremes of pedagogical practice.

At fifteen 1 set my heart on learning; at thirty I firmly took my stand; ... At seventy 1 followed my heart's desire without overstepping the boundaries of right.

—Analects 2:4

Learning something and practicing it often—is this not a delight?

—Analects 1:1

Whenever three persons walk together, there is sure to be a teacher for me.

—Analects 7:22

I learn without flagging and teach without growing weary.

—Analects 7:34     

Voice,empowerment and youth-produced films about ‘gangs’†

This article explores the dissonance between the expansive discourses imagined by the advocates for youth media as helping foster ‘empowerment’ and ‘voice', versus the more circumscribed realities of participatory media production. I focus on a two-part case study – considering both a film-making project for ‘at risk’ young people in South London and the English national government funder that provided the resources for the young people to take part. This case study allows for an exploration of the political economy of youth media, and the relationship between youth media funding and how and why young people in my research often chose to make films about ‘gangs', a striking topic of concern across 11 youth media case study sites. I use this empirical example as a means to analyse how ‘empowerment’ in youth media projects, understood as both critical media literacy and youth voice, moves from abstract discourse to on-the-ground practice.     

Theorizing the implementation of the HIV/AIDS curriculum in Zimbabwe

A growing need for utilizing school-based HIV/AIDS interventions the world over has been acknowledged as the most cost-effective means for arresting the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic among the vulnerable youth. However, the question on how teachers as educational change agents and cognitive sense-makers of HIV/AIDS curricula situated in a complex web of systemic social interactions are faring in mediating these interventions has not received much attention in curriculum theorization. There seems to be an underrepresentation in the literature, of post-modernistic approaches to the problematizing and explanation of teacher enactment of such complicated yet important curricula. This article sought to highlight the Adaptation Approach to education and Honig’s model and teacher cognition as an example of a post-modernistic approach to analysing teachers’ enactment of school HIV/AIDS curricula. It sought to enhance our understanding of the interplay of a myriad of factors endogenous and exogenous to teachers in shaping and framing teachers’ individual responses to the HIV/AIDS curriculum policy. We thus contend that one of the major reasons why teachers’ efforts to effectuate purposive mediations are so elusive is the failure by theoreticians and policy-makers alike, to consider the myriad of human-generated antecedents in different venues and how these impact teachers’ adaptation of HIV/AIDS interventions.     

Won't Fade Away: Intersections of Narrative and HIV and AIDS Activism in Jackson,Mississippi

This article demonstrates the therapeutic benefits of storytelling and testimony through qualitative interviews with HIV+ Black gay men in Jackson, Mississippi, in 2017. Sponsored by Project + Connect, a story preservation nonprofit based in New York, the research trip was inspired by a New York Times article claiming that 50% of all gay Black men in the South will contract HIV in their lifetimes. Analyzing the personal narratives of the study's participants against the political and historical contexts of racism and homophobia in the deep South, the researcher argues for the strengthening of the HIV/AIDS movement through storytelling, providing a pathway for theater teaching artists to use their skills to facilitate social change.     

HIV/AIDS and legal rights: When the educator's rights collide with learners' rights

Abstract

It is commonly held that when one has disclosed one's human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) status to an official, the official is bound by principles of confidentiality not to disclose this information to other parties. In this article, I argue that while it is important to maintain confidentiality on the disclosure of HIV, there is a limitation to this confidentiality. The information may be legally passed on to other particular persons under procedures prescribed by law and policy. In this article arguments are drawn from a literature study and an empirical investigation. The empirical investigation was conducted through the medium of an authentic case study, but was constructed hypothetically on a critical incident of HIV/AIDS in the school context. The school governing bodies (SGBs) were asked to respond to the case in terms of the actions they would take should such an event occur in the schools. SGBs of five schools were interviewed. This research clarifies the levels of understanding of HIV/AIDS legislation and policy and the practices likely to arise from such understandings in South African public schools. The findings amplify the distance between policy and practice and the need for vigilance with respect to legal challenges that schools might face without adequate knowledge of, and information on, the pandemic.     

Enhancing school HIV and AIDS strategic plan through expanded stakeholder involvement

Abstract

This article focuses on the need for expanded stakeholder involvement as a means of enhancing the Botswana Department of Secondary Education (DSE) HIV and AIDS strategic plan. Research has indicated that the effects of HIV and AIDS on the supply of and demand for education are considerable. Using a questionnaire and interviews, the research has established that the current DSE HIV and AIDS strategic plan lacks comprehensive strategies for preventing HIV spread in schools. Furthermore, the study has shown that there is limited external stakeholder involvement. The study, therefore, has explored how greater success could be realized. The study has concluded that the strategic plan can be improved through expanded external stakeholder involvement at all the stages of the strategic plan. In order to enhance the DSE strategic plan, a stakeholder involvement model is presented.     

Guy talk: contesting masculinities in HIV prevention education with Canadian youth

This paper takes up the concern that sexual health programs targeting adolescents may actually increase HIV risk among youth by reinforcing dominant versions of masculinity that portray males as sexually irresponsible and unconcerned about their health. If a key aim in HIV prevention education is a renegotiation of high‐risk behavioral norms, an important consideration is the ways young people resist stereotypical gender norms that can lead to risky sexual practices. From this perspective, opening up spaces for the expression of counter‐hegemonic masculinities may be an important health prevention strategy. In a study conducted in three urban Toronto high schools, we explore the ways students in mixed‐sex groups supported or challenged dominant discourses of masculinity expressed through three themes: notions of male sexuality as unrestrained and unrestrainable; narrow definitions of sex; and concepts of ‘risk’ and resistance to condom use. We argue that designing HIV prevention programs that begin with the exploration of alternative masculinities may be one way to fashion a framework for gender relations that can offer youth more effective prevention strategies.     

What Older Adults Know about HIV/AIDS: Lessons from an HIV/AIDS Education Program

Despite being one of the fastest growing segments of the HIV/AIDS caseload, persons age 50 and older have been largely neglected in terms of HIV/AIDS education. This study describes a project involving HIV-related health education for persons ≥50 in an urban area of Ohio. Data from 50 persons age ≥50 were collected. Pre-and postsurveys were used in the completion of repeated measures ANOVA, and focus groups provided qualitative data. Despite a paucity of available educational materials addressing HIV/AIDS, older adults are willing to participate in sessions about HIV/AIDS. Findings suggest the need for alternative approaches to providing HIV/AIDS education.     

HIV/AIDS education in schools: the ‘unassembled’ youth as a curricular project

This paper describes the ways in which administrative structures of the state, techniques of self-government, and practices of social relations exist within HIV/AIDS curricular discourses, a critique enabled by a Foucauldian analytical frame. We argue that youth have been singled out as a particularly risky lot and are therefore prime candidates for HIV/AIDS education. We situate HIV/AIDS education as a method of neoliberal governmentality concerned with regulating the categories of health, risk, and disease in relation to youthful identities. Our aim is to expose the ways in which scientific savoir, values, freedom and restraint work in tandem and hold the potential to shape youthful lives in meaningful ways. We further hope to unmask a certain kind of politics of knowledge that goes, for the most part, unquestioned, because it is linked to normalized ideas about sexuality, morality, individual responsibility, risk, and health.     

Without Sex Education: Exploring the social and sexual vulnerabilities of rural Bangladeshi girls and boys

In 1997, two organizations, BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) and ICDDR,B (International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research), as part of their collaborative research model, developed an HIV/AIDS prevention strategy for rural Bangladeshi youth. Currently, HIV/AIDS is not apparent in rural Bangladesh. Other sexual and reproductive health problems are more pressing. Moreover, there are few inor out-of-school sex education programs for adolescents in Bangladesh. Therefore, preliminary qualitative research was conducted to understand the broad parameters of sexual and reproductive health within the sociocultural context of young people's risks and vulnerabilities. Exploratory research revealed that youth were vulnerable to sexual diseases, late-term abortions, sexual violence, reproductive tract infections, and premarital pregnancies. Adolescents and adults thought that youth today need sex education. Adults said that youth should not be educated about condom use because this would conflict with a girl's prospects for an arranged marriage. Bangladeshi youth today are being exposed to experiences unfamiliar to their parents. Lacking appropriate knowledge, information and awareness about sexual and reproductive health unduly heightens young people's fears, and increases their social and sexual vulnerabilities.     

祥云县2004年至2011年HIV／AIDS流行特征分析

目的：掌握祥云县HIV／AIDS流行趋势,为制订防控措施提供依据。方法：利用描述流行病学方法分析祥云县2004年至2011年报告的祥云籍HIV／AIDS疫情资料。结果：2004年至2011年祥云县共报告祥云籍HIV／AIDS389例,年平均报告率10．6。1／10万,死亡58例;其发病率的分布特征为：2004年至2007年呈快速增长趋势,2008年至2010年趋于平缓;县城高于坝区,坝区高于山区;男性（14．62／10万,年均）大于女性（6．89／10万,年均）,两者差异有统计学意义（X％36．82,P〈0．05）,在男性和女性中的比例为2．27：1;以20~40~为主,占79．69％;以农民（293例）为主,占82-4％;以初中以下学历为主,占97．13％;以非婚性接触和静脉吸毒为主,分别占病例总数的45．76％、38．56％。结论：祥云县艾滋病疫情经过实施全球基金艾滋病控制项目后,疫情已得到初步遏制。由于HIV／AIDS疫情的复杂性,感染途径的多样性,必须加强对艾滋病防治知识宣传,提高全民预防艾滋病的意识;重点应对农民、待业青年开展宣传和教育,加强对流动人口的管理;进一步完善咨询检测网络,提高艾滋病的发现,以有效控制艾滋病的蔓延。     

Reducing the vulnerability of young Cambodians to HIV / STDs by mobilising and strengthening local NGO sector. RAS/88/P15

This project seeks to help reduce the vulnerability of young Cambodians aged 12-25 to HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) by strengthening nongovernmental organization (NGO) capacity to develop sustainable, effective and appropriate responses to HIV/AIDS and STDs. The strategies include strengthening local NGO capacity, sharing technical support concerning HIV/AIDS, and working together to develop information, education and communication on HIV/AIDS. Main activities included in the project are: 1) enable NGOs to undertake broader response to HIV/STDs by mobilizing, selecting, contracting, monitoring and supervising local NGO projects; 2) enhance local NGO capacity to work with the youth by organizing specialist training workshops, providing technical support and training in external relations and sustainability, and promoting local NGO/youth volunteer exchange and exposure programs; 3) strengthen the capacity of local NGOs through training, skill building, technical support and development of NGO support program; and 4) improve the knowledge base of programming for youth by identifying, documenting and disseminating effective programming models and tools.     

In Excess of Epistemology: Siegel,Taylor, Heidegger and the Conditions of Thought

Harvey Siegel's epistemologically‐informed conception of critical thinking is one of the most influential accounts of critical thinking around today. In this article, I seek to open up an account of critical thinking that goes beyond the one defended by Siegel. I do this by re‐reading an opposing view, which Siegel himself rejects as leaving epistemology (and, by implication, his epistemological account of critical thinking) ‘pretty much as it is’. This is the view proposed by Charles Taylor in his paper ‘Overcoming Epistemology’. Crucially, my aim here is not to defend Taylor's challenge to epistemology per se, but rather to demonstrate how, through its appeal to certain key tropes within Heideggerian philosophy, Taylor's paper opens us towards a radically different conception of thinking and the human being who thinks. Indeed, as will be argued, it is through this that Taylor and Heidegger come to offer us the resources for re‐thinking the nature of critical thinking—in a way that exceeds the epistemological, and does more justice to receptive and responsible conditions of human thought.     

Becoming artist,becoming educated,becoming undone: toward a nomadic perspective of college student identity development

In this article, I place my ethnographic project among undergraduate university art students and their professor in dialog with Rosi Braidotti’s figuration of the nomadic subject and her reflections on the importance of creating theoretical alternatives for mapping the embedded and embodied social positions that we inhabit. As educational interlocutors, college students must negotiate expectations and categorizations about age-appropriate relations, career paths, and identity passageways, which are always already framed by Western psychological development discourses. Interested in loosening the grip of these closure-seeking and normalizing discursive practices, I argue for a revision of identity development grounded in a nomadic theory of the subject and engage my data through an alternative analytic of arts-informed assemblage in light of Braidotti’s ideas. In so doing, I uphold my feminist commitment to do theory as both critique and creativity, bringing into view poetic-enough writing and imagery as a response to the question how is it to be in the process of becoming?