WMST 4400

This course will explore discourses, materials, and contemporary practices in bodies, sexuality, relationship, and sex education for children and youth in the United States and beyond. We will enter into these explorations with the assumption that inclusive, affirming, comprehensive sex and relationship education is an imperative part of justice-oriented education that has been largely missing in K-12 and even post-secondary educational spaces. We will also assume that young children, adolescents, and young adults are in a constant process of learning about bodies, sexuality, and intimacy. This learning is through an entanglement of formal education settings, home lives and families, social networks, media, advertisements, and books and other resources specifically created for them. Students will be invited to reflect on their own formal and informal learning about these topics themselves and analyze those with an eye toward re-imagining the role of formal education about bodies, sexuality, intimacy, and romantic relationships. 

 

Centering the body, our relationships with our own bodies, and relationships with others can open up ways of thinking, being, and doing that are more ethical, just, and joyful. Students in this course might be K-12 educators, post-secondary educators, community youth workers, healthcare workers, sex and relationship counselors or educators, and/or people who want to expand their thinking, being, and doing in their own personal and professional lives.