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Miami University will host the first national summit to “re-think” sexuality education in the public school system, an event that is part of a larger, two-year study funded by the Ford Foundation.
The National Summit on Youth Culture, Popular Culture, and Sexuality Education will be held at Miami’s Marcum Center May 28-30.
The summit will examine these topics and their evolution since the 1950s in the United States. The historical endeavor will result in journal articles and a book at the culmination of the project.
“The summit will bring together top scholars, educators and youth activists from around the country and Canada to discuss research and policy initiatives in sexuality education and youth culture,” said Dennis Carlson, project director and a professor of education leadership at Miami. “We hope to determine how to re-frame the conversation to get beyond the ‘stuck point’ of abstinence-only education. We’ll be interested in linking sexuality education to issues of class, race, gender and sexual orientation.”
Historically, sexuality education has been framed within the larger fields of “health education” and “family life” education, according to summit organizers. They believe this has affected the kinds of questions that get raised in sexuality education, how problems are defined, what can and cannot be talked about and who is authorized to speak.
“How might sexuality education be re-conceptualized in ways that make it more consistent with democratic projects in education and in the broader culture?” Carlson said. “That is a question the summit participants will attempt to answer in at least some tentative ways.”
Organizers say democratic sexuality education should:
- Engage young people in a critical reading of gendered, raced and classed representations of sexuality and identity in popular culture (fiction, video, and music);
- Engage young people in a critical analysis of sexuality as an element of the performance of identity in various youthful subcultures;
- Affirm the “okayness” of the sexuality of all young people, as well as different sexual identities and orientations and differing performances of gender;
- Be linked to a language and project of empowerment and social justice, associated with challenges to sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism and ablism.
“In re-thinking sexuality education along these lines, we see promise in a number of diverse and inter-related theoretical movements, including feminist theory, masculinity studies, queer theory, critical race theory, post-colonial theory, social justice theory and critical pedagogies,” Carlson said. “Among other things, participants in the summit will assess the usefulness of theory in informing empirical research and forging a democratic response to the current crisis of sexuality education.”
For more information on the summit, please contact Dennis Carlson at 529-6850 or carlsodl@muohio.edu.
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