Teaching Integral Sex Education

Thinking contributions from teachers in psychology

Abstract

This paper makes focus on the links between Comprehensive Sex Education and its teaching from the perspective of Psychology teachers.

The treatment of comprehensive sex education in the teachers training it becomes a need and at the same time a powerful tool for a teaching practice that values the right of children, young people and adults in the education system to receive comprehensive sex education.

Research design obey to a bibliographic investigation method, realized as I was training in the chair Didactic Planning and Teaching Practice, Psychology Faculty (UNLP), between 2017 – 2019.

The approach of comprehensive sex education in the subjects of middle and high school that Psychology teachers are enable to teach it must consider a key point for the treatment of sex education as considered in Law Nº 26.150 (2006): the integrality issue that also includes Gender Perspective. This point requires to appeal to feminism theories and queer pedagogy, which gives the chance to deepen and define the specific contributions of Psychology, to resituate the social and affective dimension of gender, considering them as tools to be used for a critic view of the trend to teach about Sexuality and sex education as if it only has a natural meaning (Morgade, 2016).

The goal is to problematize, expand, and situate in gender perspective fundamental concepts of comprehensive sex education teaching, which enable us to break binary logics and heteronormative ways of thinking this kind of affairs (those that we could learn in socialization or in training process) (Butler, 2007; Martínez, 2015).

From the analysis of the treatment that books makes about comprehensive sex education contents of both subjects that Psychology professors can teach (Psychology and Health an Adolescence), we appreciate that an issue we can find is that the approaches of contents usually prioritize its biological aspects. The problem when teaching about sexuality is that we usually focus on its biological aspects that can be translated as an exclusive natural meaning that doesn't put into questioning the equation sex/gender and that is expressed in the same way in the consideration of gender identities (Del Cerro, Busca, 2017).

When meanings are almost exclusively biological (something to problematize, because sometimes even in Psychology Teachers’ pedagogical strokes that happens) we can appreciate that those meanings appear in the way we talk to students, in the assignments, in the readings we suggest, in the proposals we make… Are we considering desire options not exclusively heteronormative? Are we considering diversity of bodies and identities?... Teaching doesn’t unfolds into vacuum, it needs links between teachers, students, and some certain knowledge.

Because of that, we draw the conclusion that  it is necessary that in teachers training contexts we work for a positioning that denatures sexuality, bodies, identities; and that make a teaching objective that naturalize is not the only perspective, and less the only pedagogically accepted option.

It is fundamental to pose dispositives in teaching training to allow future teachers make themselves the question about what assumptions we use and what we feel when we have to teach about comprehensive sex education. This is an important issue to consider because not making visible prejudice and stereotyped thoughts can affect our professional development in teaching about sex education from Human Rights and Integrality Perspective (Re, Bianco, Mariño, 2008).

It is there that disciplinary and pedagogical - didactical training of Psychology teachers could make significant contributions to comprehensive sex education.  Construction of new meanings could be possible through introduction gender perspective as a look that allow us to situate sexuality and its multidimensional essence, not exclusively natural or biological, and Psychology as a human discipline that has the need to make a revision of theoretical constructions if we consider knowledges of academic, scientific and political context.