Counter-School-Health-Education: Queering Intersections Between Sexuality Education and Health Education

• In Event: Health and Sexuality Education: Considering Intersections of Policy, Politics, and Practice

Abstract

Objectives
To identify and analyze some of the pedagogical forces that shape relations between sexuality education and health education. And, to consider the affordances of conceptualizing sexuality education in school health education using Kane Race’s notion of counterpublic health.

Theoretical framework
In his book Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs Kane Race is critical of moral ideologies that permeate health education because he believes they impede efforts to respond effectively to public health needs. These moral ideologies mean that students and teachers alike may think about drugs only through the lens of risk. Race argues that drug use not be understood as something that needs to be disciplined but rather that “transformations, pleasures and forms of enablement, disablement and escape found in drugs should be approached more simply as experimental and material engagements with the circumstances of life” (2009: 31). What do these theoretical provocations about the queer politics of drugs mean for school health education? What might it mean to queer health education using this notion of counterpublic health?

Scholarly significance
We want to utilize this understanding of drugs and think about how it might be applied to thinking about education regarding sexual practices in which young people may, or may not be engaged. Drawing on Race, Wright (2014) affirms the value of a counterpublic approach to health education in schools where curriculum is negotiated with students, an approach she notes was absent in the consultative process that informed the drafting of the Australian Health and Physical Education curriculum.

Data/Methods
Drawing on Race’s theoretical provocations our paper provides an analysis of two teacher resources that have been developed to help teachers plan for and deliver sexuality education in secondary schools in Victoria. Both resources contain a range of pedagogical strategies that are designed to teach young people lessons about sexuality and relationships. We illustrate how these resources are embedded in the moral ideologies that Race critiques.

Conclusions
Sexuality education that is attached to, and fueled by, health imperatives manifests in particular ways in both curriculum and classrooms. Drawing on Race and Wright we consider the affordances of a sexuality education where young people can articulate their own needs in relation to sexual encounters, when they are understood as experimental and material engagements. We also consider the challenges of implementing such an approach in the context of existing pedagogical forces that shape sexuality education within the health education classroom.

Authors

• Mary Louise Rasmussen, Monash University

• Deana Leahy, Monash University