Post Secret for Sex Ed : post 1

Whew, it's been a long time since I've posted! (Hmmm...August 27th to December 20th? Sounds like a busy term in grad student land to me!) Thought I'd make up for it with a brilliant idea posted by Nora, an educator who trains other educators in how to teach sexualities. Nora (she didn't leave a surname) wrote to PostSecret that she uses some of the images from PostSecret to help educators and students explore some of the very real human issues we think/worry/wonder/ about when it comes to our sexualities. It's a brilliant idea, and one that I think could revolutionize the way we teach sexualities.

PostSecret , for those of you who don't know, is a community art project where people are invited to create a postcard and mail their secrets in. It's been going on for a few years now, and has become a bit of a cultural phenomenon inspiring several books, and countless PostSecret events all over North America.

New secrets are posted on the site every Sunday, and it's a fascinating glimpse into the act of being human. It's also incredibly addictive, and the first site I visit every Sunday.

When I read about Nora's brilliant idea, I started seeing how many of these secrets could apply to teaching sex edcuation. The next few posts will be exploring some of the images that could be used pedagogically to inspire conversation about real issues of sexuality. (All images owned by PostSecret). I think she's on to something big here. What do you think?

An innovative new sex education tool for parents and students

An innovative new teaching tool designed to educate parents and inspire conversations about sexualities between adults and their children has been developed in Brooklyn, NY communities. Community input used to create a set of three audio cds, which were distributed in neighbourhoods where youth were considered at risk to engage in early sexual activity. These communities were identified primarily through ethnicity; statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2000 suggest that 16% of African American youth, 8% of Hispanic youth and 5% of White youth reported having sex before age thirteen. Researchers in the study described here conducted extensive focus groups in the schools and community (38 focus groups involving 109 youth and 64 parents) and from this input the intervention ,“Saving sex for later” was developed, featuring professionally scripted and produced cds that tried to build on realistic ‘natural opportunities’ that could translate into teachable moments between parent and child. (i.e. events that could happen at school or to friends, television shows, song lyrics, etc. )

Strategies that aim to delay sexual initiation need to target pre-adolescent youth, which often resulting in controversy and worries that interventions aimed at youth of this age can actually have the opposite intended effect. With this in mind, and building on community feedback from an advisory board of parents and teachers, a parental education program was thought to be a potentially important project. The schools in which the intervention took place were in Brooklyn New York, where 90% of the student population were Black or Hispanic. 133 cds were randomly to parents in the community, and roughly half of them returned feedback, which was overwhelmingly positive and suggests that this kind of parental teaching innovation is highly welcomed. On average, about 90% of the parents who received the cd listened to it and would (or did) recommend it to other parents. Around 80% listened to it with their child, and more than 85% of the parents who responded said it initiated conversations with their child.

Interestingly, in parental feedback, the terms “caring and concerned” were used several times in the feedback, as can be seen below:

“As a caring and concerned parent, the CD’s I listened to were very helpful and useful. It taught me a lot, as well as my son. For the first time, I can really say while listening to the cds (Saving Sex for Later), it made it much easier and [more] comfortable to talk with my son about sex and its consequences, as well as safe sex…His feedback was amazing. I would like to take this time to thank you for your help and support in doing this, because it is very hard sometimes to talk to your children about these things”

“Let me first say thank you very much for your care and concern about all teens and the language of sex. There should be more programs such as yours reaching out to our children…Thank you! You have been most respect[ful] to me and my daughters.”


Incorporating an ethics of care into sexualities education may require that we consider the impact we could have as educators if we were to incorporate innovative strategies such as this to include parents and give them tools with which they can gain a level of comfort in discussing sexualities with their children.

(source: O'Donnell, L., Wilson-Simmons, R., Dash, K., Jeanbaptiste, V., Myint-U, A., Moss, J., et al. (2007). Saving sex for later: developing a parent-child communication intervention to delay sexual initiation among young adolescenets. Sex Education, 7(2), 107-125.)

Sex educators' level of expertise and a call for community partnerships in sex education

(photo source: Tom Pigeon for Newsweek)

Concern over whether teachers who teach sexualities curriculum are adequately informed enough to assume an ‘expert’ role in the classroom prompted an interesting recent study in the UK. Unfortunately, this survey of 155 sex education teachers in England (94 female, 61 male) suggests that not only do most teachers not have enough knowledge, but only rarely is their teaching in this subject even assessed. Adding to the uneasiness, teachers worry about the possibility of parental complaints, or even worse, litigation. As parents are able to pull their child from sex education at any time, it leaves a residual ambiguity with educators who are unsure about what material must be taught and what is optional.

Assessing sexual health knowledge in this study involved developing a questionnaire designed to measure three components: (i) contraceptive use and methods (i.e. “do you need parental/guardian consent to obtain contraceptives for under 16s/” (ii) sexually transmitted infections (i.e. “can you be unaware that you have a sexually transmitted infection?”) and (iii) about the relationship between contraception and sexually transmitted infections (i.e. “ do all methods of contraception protect you from sexually transmitted infections?” Other parts of the survey listed various medical conditions and asked educators to identify which were STIs, and attempted to measure the level of preparedness teachers felt they had to teach the subject.

Although teachers scored well on general sexual health knowledge, more than half were unable to correctly answer that emergency contraceptive pills are effective for up to three days after unprotected sex, and only 43% could state that the emergency contraception has an effectiveness of 85% if used correctly. Generally speaking, educators do not feel that they have been provided with sufficient information regarding STIs, youth legal rights or contraception. A concerning 73% felt ill-prepared to discuss the availability of local or regional sexual health services that might be available to youth.

Clearly, there is a disconnect between the desired and stated learning goals and outcomes of sexuality curricula, if we are not ensuring that educators are able to teach the material effectively and confidently. Perhaps most telling is that 83% of the teachers involved in the study suggested that they believed that sexualities education should be taught by partnerships involving “teachers, healthcare professionals and other outside agencies” (Westwood & Mullan, 2007, p.151). Providing this scaffolding could radically empower both teachers and youth in the sexualities classroom, and create very different learning opportunities than those that are being quelled through lack of knowledge or confidence.

(source: Westwood, J., & Mullan, B. (2007). Knowledge and attitudes of secondary school teachers regarding sexual health education in England. Sex Education, 7(2), 143-159.)

Text messaging sex ed questions

An innovative partnership between Fiesta Condoms (run by by the DKT Indonesia Foundation, the local chapter of a Washington-based charitable organization) and the Singapore-based multimedia health platform Love Airways launched a free service where people can text-message their questions about sexual health and get a response by a health professional. The hotline is a response to a study that found Indonesian youth were alarmingly unaware of accurate information in regards to sexual health, with almost half of young people getting their sexual knowledge from porn.

The hotline service allows teenagers and anyone with access to a mobile phone from all over Indonesia to send their queries to a panel of Indonesian doctors by text messaging to +65 94 DRLOVE (+65 943 75683) anonymously, allowing plenty of privacy and freedom to enquire about a topic that is largely a social taboo. "All questions are welcome and no question is too outrageous," said founder of Love Airways' "Dr. Love" aka Dr. Wei Siang Yu, who also set up the world's first wireless sex education initiative in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2002. He also pioneered a similar wireless campaign in Singapore, which is said to have received up to 8,000 queries daily. Although not all questions will be able to be answered due to insufficient resources, questions received in the next month will be compiled into a 20,000-point database that will not only help map out the most common questions Indonesians have about sex, but will also be converted into Indonesia's first interactive digital avatar, "Nova", at http://www.loveairways.com/.

Kudos to the organizations in Jakarta for championing this initiative. Too often, studies are conducted time and time again that suggest that young people are not having access to the information that they need to be sexually healthy, and nothing is done. Here in Canada, the Canadian Council of Ministers of Education conducted a massive study in 2003, duplicating one that been done accessing the knowledge of youth in the mid 1980's, and found that almost half of kids in grade 9 thought that HIV/AIDS is curable, and that the number of youth having unprotected sex had risen substantially. Sadly, four years later, the government has not responded in any proactive or urgent way to the study's findings, which have largely been shelved and educational activism around sexual health has been left primarily to activist agencies and organizations who pick up the cause.

(source: The Jakarta Post, July 19, 2007)

Tarot for Sex Ed! A note from the moderator of this blog

Hi everyone,

As you may know, sex education was essentially removed from the curriculum in Quebec in January of 2005. Stunning, since this province has one of the highest rates of youth having unprotected sex and sexually transmitted infections going. Head and Hands, a community group I work with is going into the schools this fall and will be teaching sex ed in several local high schools through their SENSE Project. As an innovative fundraiser, they are inviting you to help support sex education and have a little fun as well. For a donation of $10 (or more if you can do so), you can get an online tarot reading over Facebook to answer one of life's burning questions!

Here's how: Add Channing Rodman as your friend. You can find her by typing her name in the facebook search bar or by going to the Head & Hands group page Send her a message saying you are interested in the tarot reading. She'll answer your question, send you pictures of your cards... Karma will give you a big smooch for doing your thing for sexual health!

To pay, go to Head and Hands and click on "Canada Helps" (this is an online donation method and requires a credit card.) It is an easy step-by-step donation process that will take less than5mins to complete. You'll get an email tax receipt for your donation to H&H from Canada Helps. This is an excellent and reputable organization, and they are really needing our help right now... Jump on the karmic bandwagon, and do your thing, woooo :-)

If you are NOT on facebook, email me (link on my profile) and I'll set the reading up for you with Channing. I see the future, and it has SEX ED in it!

A retrospective of sex ed films from 1950's-1970's

A nice edit of retro sex ed films, from 1950 to about the mid 1970's seemingly pulled together from materials that are now in the public domain. Interestingly, the treatment about masturbation is more open than many programs now, particularly the animated piece from the seventies. Discourse of pleasure and the erotic are usually avoided in formalized sex education programs, with a few interesting exceptions. Interestingly, it's the thing that we avoid most as adults in talking about sex with youth, and one of the things young people say over and over again they wish we would be more honest about.

Sex Etc. : Why we need honest sex education

An insightful video by Sex Etc., an organization promoting comprehensive sex education for and by teens. Youth activism around sexualities often presents a very authentic look at where we could do better as adults, and in this video, they discuss the failings of abstinence only education and the ways it puts students at risk. They have a great youth-friendly website and cover everything from emotional health to questions about sexual health. They frequently put out a call looking for young writers to contribute. Check out the good work being done by Sex Etc.here

Why abstinence-only reasoning just doesn't fly

Source: Brian McFadden's Big Fat Whale

Sex Education for Teachers

Although the clip above is an amusing look at one of the struggles sex educators might have, the reality of many teachers who teach sex ed not being trained (or being uncomfortable with the material) is hugely problematic. Many of the moral wars fought around sexualities education focus on the regulation of language, concepts that speak to generations of controversy, hetero-normacy and social control. In Queens, New York, an administrative rule in place since 1987 banned the words abortion, masturbation, birth control and homosexuality from being discussed in any context in classrooms, and was still in effect up to a few years ago. Concern about the way curriculum is languaged not only originates with parents and moral activists, educators sometimes protest as well. Teachers at an Oshkosh, Wisconsin elementary school in 1994 felt uncomfortable with the prospect of discussing proper genital names with their students. The educators complained to their board, resulting in the words anus, penis, genitals, urethra and vagina being removed from the curriculum. I don't know what they replaced them with, but I'm certain it would make for a very odd sex education.

Most universities do not offer training in how to teach sexualities, leaving many educators in the uncomfortable position of Peggy Hill in this clip. In Quebec Canada, sex education has been removed from the curriculum entirely in a formal context, with the Ministry of Education suggesting it should be infused through the curriculum instead. Except, that it's not happening. Without formal curriculum requirements, most teachers will not opt to teach sex ed. Not only is it uncomfortable, but there is so much we don't know even as adults. Pop quiz: How do you catch (or prevent) Hepatitis "B"? Can you give your partner genital herpes if you have a coldsore? Where exactly is the vas deferens, hmmmmm? Yeah, I thought so. It's not an easy subject to teach. Not only do you have to be up on all the technical aspects, but in order to teach it well, you need to have done some pretty serious reflection on your own sexual biography, fears, interests and desires. And that can be a pretty intense mirror to look into. Giving teachers guidance, training and support is the first step in giving kids a meaningful sex education.

Groovy New Feelings

Always innovators when it comes to sexualities education, a clever and amusing commercial from Planned Parenthood, (Canada ) that is enjoying a lot of attention on YouTube. (Ed.note: many chapters now call themselves the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health, in Quebec it is called the Quebec Sexual Health Network.)