Sexuality & Gender Curriculum
Curriculum Overview
Context
Urgency of Asian Sexuality and Gender Curriculum
Our Sexuality and Gender Curriculum is designed for middle school age students in Asian contexts. In contrast with western societal and learning environments, students in Asia experience different schooling experiences and develop distinctive epistemologies about gender and sexuality. Here we need to bring in Asian contexts before we delve into our philosophy.
Unfriendly Sociocultural Atmosphere
The social environment in Asian countries potentially impedes the development of sex and gender education. Socio-cultural ideologies in China emphasize collectivism that stresses the importance of the community and harmonizing relationships in the community, and conformity, which mainly values specific behavior that is in accordance with socially accepted conventions or standards. Under the prevailing ideologies such as conformity and collectivism, our private and public lives are segregated so students are less likely to open up and talk about personal issues and experiences, especially about sex and identities in an educational setting. Students from LGBTQ+ community rarely reveal their identities in any social contexts including schools and home. They tend to conform to the dominant/normative construction of identity rather than interrupt/display their differences. This dominant idea constructs gender as sex assigned at birth and gender roles are respective to their sex, male and female, but silent existential construction of gender non-binary and idea of gender nonconformity. To conform to the social norm and dominant sex and gender construction supported by Confucianism and collectivism, Chinese tend to disguised and not express their gender and sexuality that are not in alignment with dominant ideologies. They acquire their knowledge through informal ways via Internet. Furthermore, exacerbated by the authoritative figures and reverence for education under Confucianism as well as high-stake testing, the classroom is more teacher-centered with implementation of banking knowledge in that students hide their different opinions on the relevant topics (Freire, 2014).
Lagged Educational Policy and Curriculum
There is an urgent need for a comprehensive sex and gender curriculum in Asian contexts. The educational policies in Asian context are lagging behind compared with many European countries. For example, sex education is now compulsory in all schools in UK. In March 2017, the UK government announced all children aged four and above would be given relationship education. However, Until 2021, the Chinese State Council stated that “sex and reproductive health education should be included in the compulsory education curriculum system.” Accordingly, the knowledge about sex and gender in compulsory education curriculum is sporadic and prioritized abstinence only as well as subject knowledge and technical terms for testing. The lack of comprehensive sex education does not protect the "innocence" of teenagers, but puts them at greater risks of sexual abuse, violence, injustice and lack of awareness to protect themselves. Due to the lack of comprehensive sex education, adolescents mainly acquire their knowledge about sex and gender from informal settings and resources, which constitutes lots of wrong information. This potentially contributes to bigger social issues, including the high abortion rate in China, the high incidence of sexually-transmitted diseases, the frequent sexual crimes against minors, and serious discriminations against sexual minority groups.
Ill preparation of Teacher Education
In Taiwan, although the Ministry of Education (MOE) requires a certain amount of sex and gender equality education content be incorporated in the existing curriculum, the MOE has still overlooked the lack of a rigorous and structured teacher education on the specific field of sex and gender curriculum. Without being fully trained and instilled with correct and healthy concepts and attitudes toward the field, and fearing that touching on these sensitive topics might cause backlash from the majority of parents and the conservative, making fewer teachers have the courage to take up the responsibility to educate themselves and students and parents likewise. In our curriculum, guidance for untrained teachers will be added in order to assist both students and teachers with continuous learning in the field.
Dissent from Parents
Similar situation also shared in China that condemnation from parents stumbles the development of sex education. China’s latest sex education textbook, Cherish Life: A Sexual Health Education Book for Primary School Students, has encountered strong denounce and negation from parents. Chinese parents are extremely concerned that the curriculum incorporates overtly blunt sexual descriptions. For instance, the sex curriculum uses technical terms such as testicles and vagina in addition to some illustrations of physiological knowledge.
Admittedly, there are more factors contributing to the urgency of Asian sex and gender curriculum. Here we illustrate four major impediments which also stress our urgency: Unfriendly Sociocultural Atmosphere, Lagged Educational policy and curriculum, Ill preparation of Teacher Education and Dissent from Parents.
Rationale
Goal and Philosophy
The goal of our curriculum is to provide access to high-quality sex education with much needed content and skills to help adolescents grow into healthy adults with responsible approaches to sexuality, consent, and sexual behavior. It also brings youngsters with knowledge about themselves that they start exploring self identity and acceptance. Our curriculum also helps our students to know about lesbian, gay, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+ community) so that they can develop caring for others and build tight (social) relationships with each other. We tend to create a learning community that can further their critical thinking and consciousness to activism.
Schools are not segregated institutions from society but a vibrant and active teaching and learning place drawn from all stakeholders’ lived experiences and perspectives, particularly students’. The dominance of schooling is still a straight way as normativity/heteronormativity presented and confirmed (Lesko, 1988). Departing sideways and not being limited by norms require us to create a supportive environment for learning and sex and gender curriculum. In order to transform schools into inclusive, affirmative, therapeutic, supportive and empowering spaces for students (Kumashiro, 2000), our philosophy is to interrupt the existing and normative curricular activities teaching on self-identity.
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A Safe and Brave Space
In order to gain the possibility to interrupt the existing and normative learning content, our teachers need to create a safe and inclusive learning environment and hopefully a brave space, which “allows students to engage with one another over controversial issues with honesty, sensitivity (Arao & Clemens, 2013, p.135).” A safe space is a fundamental precondition to proceed our curriculum in a learning classroom before we continue to delve into their identity exploration, critical consciousness awareness and interruption of heteronormativity and gender binary constructs. A safe space allows our students to feel comfortable and free to share their epistemological perspectives and lived experiences in our designed learning activities. Our topics and contents are very sensitive and difficult to tackle. A safe is not enough for our mission of interrupting norms in curriculum but a brave space works. A brave space constructed for students and their learnings will bring in “respectful but challenging dialogues will happen in the classroom (NASPA, 2017, p. 6).”
Language & Dialogue – Critical Consciousness
Our philosophy of the curriculum aligns with Kumashiro’s (2000) anti-oppressive educational philosophy. As we illustrate the urgency of sex and gender curriculum implemented in Asian context, our curriculum needs to design from adolescents to start their journey of exploring sexuality and gender identity. This journey will start at the beginning of our curriculum. Our curriculum equips students with language, which is an essential tool to name issues centered around the body and sexuality, as well as masculinity and femininity, to facilitate dialogues and reflections. The language will lead them to articulate their identity and frame the problems. The learning of languages related to sexuality and gender in the curriculum gradually leads students to utilize these words and phrases to start conversation and dialogue that target to raise their critical consciousness (Freier, 2014).
Our curriculum expands on individual identity learning and further brings in, “a vision of gender and sexuality liberation that are both concerned with the freedom of oppressed groups, particularly women and trans, people of color (Freire, 2014).” During the process of exploring language and different discourses, students naturally start their process of exploring and learning about their interests, self identities, knowledge about others, and, more importantly, sexuality as relational/social construct (Jiménez, as cited in Talburt, 2018).
Interrupting Norms + Intersectionality
With the raising of consciousness and the emergence of critical thinking, our curriculum can begin to bring in Education for the Other, women and members of LGBTQIA+ community. With careful consideration of our curricular design, educators guide students to learn about dominant ideologies, stereotypes, marginalized people, and oppression.＂Interrupting commonsense understandings of what constitutes sex, sexuality, pleasure, desire, and the relationships among these and the technologies for learning about and enacting their differences＂ (Sumara & Davis, 1999, p.192)”. Then, with ample acquaintance of the aforementioned dimensions, the classroom can move into the next phase to queer our long-fixed thoughts and “​​broaden perceptions to complex cognition and to amplify the imagination of the learners (Sumara & Davis, 1999)”. Recognizing the explicit power structure in Asian classroom settings, teachers will be able to hand over power to students. Students can start their conversations with each other and have more chances to question, to negotiate, and to defend themselves (Boomer, 1992). The experience of having conversation and collaboration between peers and teachers include students’ curiosity, potentially affirms diversity of students’ identities and challenges normalizing and pre-labeling based on presumed gender and sexuality, and other parts of their identities.
Caring for Other
Our curriculum fosters sympathy in our students and encourages them to care for others by providing the queering notion of Self and Other and knowledge about the LGBTQ+ community. Noddings (2012) emphasizes that the ethics of care is rooted in relationships and does not start with the individual. Our curriculum helps students position themselves in a larger picture of social contexts and deconstruct binary thinking and build tight social relationships with each other. Also, the learning experiences of sexual violence, abuse, and harassment inspire students’ awareness of protecting themselves and others. Aligned with Giroux’s (1994) Critical Pedagogy, which promotes students’ critical thinking ability and the responsibility to be citizens, our curriculum is designed to let all students apply learned skills and knowledge to practice.
Advocacy
The curriculum focuses on activism and narrows the gap between the discourse and reality by designing advocacy parts. It promotes students’ inner motivation to continuously express their concerns about Self and Other, injustice and problems around sexuality and gender in society. In participatory culture, members should believe that their contributions matter and they feel social connection with one another (Jenkins et. al, 2009). We dedicate our curriculum to letting students’ voices be heard, and gear them with civic duty and social responsibility.
Goal
Our curriculum used the National Sex Education Standards: Core Content and Skills, K–12 (NSES, 2020) and Future of Sex Education (FoSE) Initiative, which provide clear, consistent, and straightforward guidance on the essential content and skills that is age-appropriate for K-12 students. Our curriculum aims to provide access to high-quality sexuality and gender education with much needed content and skills to help adolescents grow into healthy adults with responsible approaches to sexuality, consent, and sexual behavior. It also brings youngsters knowledge about themselves when they start exploring self-identity and acceptance and helps them know about lesbian, gay, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+ community), which further develops their caring for others, critical thinking, and advocacy.
