"Things Change": Working the "Healthy" Sexuality Education Assemblage in an Age of Uncertainty

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

Abstract

Purposes
This paper argues that a mix of theoretically informed practices, collaboration and student activism provide helpful directions for ‘working’ the myriad ways that public health discourses shape school based sexuality education. I draw on multiple theories to explore how school- based sexuality education programs could attend more closely to, and build on the ways in which young people are already engaging with and developing material, affective, intra-relational, and embodied ways of becoming in their own lives.

Theoretical frameworks
Drawing on post-humanist (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), new materialist (Barad, 2007) and feminist philosophical approaches (Todd, 2011, 2014) to both map and explore the possibilities of ‘working’ the ‘healthy’ sexuality education assemblage provides both an opportunity to understand how the assemblage works and its effects, and also how it can be ‘worked’ in order to exploit the emergence of unexpected and unpredictable insights as they arise in sexuality education classrooms. These approaches provide some productive, albeit challenging, epistemological, ontological and pedagogical approaches for school- based sexuality education programs to consider.

Mode of Inquiry
The New Zealand Kauri College qualitative case study is one of four undertaken in a two-year Australian Research Council Discovery Project Study (2011–2012) investigating the extent to which racial, cultural and religious diversities in sexuality education are engaged with in two Australian and two NZ public schools (Rasmussen et.al, 2011). Kauri College is a decile 3, racially diverse suburban South Island high school ‘currently experiencing white flight’. Participants included nine diverse students in a ‘high-ability’ Year 9 and 10 Health class, and their teachers. Diffractive post humanist, feminist philosophical and queer methodological approaches (Barad, 2007; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), Todd, 2011a&b; Quinlivan, 2013) which attempt to move beyond humanist notions of the bounded researcher to experiment with producing something unexpected and different from my original researcher intentions are utilized.


Data
Data drawn in this paper includes preliminary individual face-to-face video-recorded interviews, focus group interviews, and video-recorded participant observations of sexuality education classes, fieldnotes and artifacts.

Substantiated Conclusions and Scholarly Significance
Learning about diverse sexualities and relationships in school based Health Education programs in an era of uncertainty, rapid technological change, (Bauman, 2003) and growing social inequalities (Gordon, 2015) will continue to be fraught, and an ongoing challenge. My analysis shows that there are multiple ways that young people are learning about sexualities and developing relationships in enhancing ways, and multiple opportunities in classrooms to engage with their insights. ‘Healthy’ approaches to sexuality education need to recognize and engage more fully with students’ material, affective, intra-relational, and embodied ways of becoming in their own lives, and understand how they are negotiating the challenges they face. School- based research that draws on a range of diverse theoretical and pedagogical approaches to engage with students lived experiences in the classroom is an approach that is worth considering to engage with the complex challenges sexuality educators face.

Author

• Kathleen Anne Quinlivan, University of Canterbury