Future Sex Educator Perceptions of Rural Versus Urban Instruction: A Case for Community-Centered Sexual Health Education

Instructors of sexual health courses in rural areas face unique challenges as they are often forced to use school-based prevention curricula field-tested in urban areas. Research has yet to consider what future sex educators’ regional expectations are for their profession and how those expectations might have an impact on the classroom. Drawing from interviews with 26 sex-educators-in-training, we find that future educators tended to expect that rural communities would be less diverse, more conservative, and less informed about sexual health matters, even though research demonstrates that today's rural communities inconsistently align with those perceptions.     

The State of the Art

The Blackwell Companion and Blackwell Guide to the philosophy of education, edited respectively by Randall Curren and by Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith and Paul Standish, are potentially field-defining volumes. The present essay moves back and forth between the two books to assess the overall impression they provide of the 'state of the art'. Whilst both texts can be criticised for failing to engage sufficiently with non-philosophical work on education, these are otherwise estimable volumes, containing many fine essays that can be read with profit.     

The Artist in Residence concept: A new direction in living learning programs

This year the Centennial Education Program at the University of Nebraska piloted an Artist in Residence Program which has significant potential for serving both the student body and the larger community. It benefited Centennial by broadening the basis of support for the Program and providing a mechanism for revitalizing the curriculum on a regular basis. From the artists' standpoint the Artist in Residence Program provides valuable wide-ranging experience.