Teachers’ Agency and Reproducing Racial Hierarchy in Mississippi’s Sex Education Classrooms

• In Event: 1169 - Sexual Racism

Abstract

Though policy and curricula guide school-based sex education programs, both are shaped by the interpretation of instructors at the classroom level. In this study, I focus on the teachers’ capacity to shape instruction at the classroom level within school-based sexuality education (SBSE) classrooms. Using data from twenty semi-structured interviews in Mississippi public schools, I examine the ways that teachers depart from the formal curriculum and how these departures constitute a site for the expression of teachers’ ideologies and the reproduction (or, less frequently, subversion) of inequalities. Specifically, I analyze how departures from the formal curriculum are used to introduce ideologies of racialized sexualities and how the SBSE classroom thus acts as a site of reproduction of racial hierarchy.

Author

• Sarah "Izzy" Pellegrine, Mississippi State University