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In our conversations about sexuality, Kathleen Quinlivan and I mused over how a subject as potentially vibrant and life-enhancing as sexuality education could so often be taught in uninspiring and disembodied ways. Students' existing critique of much sexuality education is that it is typically disease and danger focused, marginalises the sensuous body and fails to address their lived experiences. Motivated by the wildness and adventure that Kathleen inspired in her work, this paper is offered as a provocation that attempts to attend to sexuality education's pedagogy differently. Employing the idea of 'smellwalks' as an educational activity, it proposes a reconceptualisation of the subject in ways that endeavour to engage the body and the sensuous. The notion of smellwalk pedagogy challenges the conventional aims of sexuality education and how these are mobilised in the classroom. In the spirit of Kathleen's interest in unruly aspects of sexuality and gender, smellwalks seek to reconfigure the purpose and pedagogy of sexuality education and the nature of sexuality itself. The point of thinking about such a pedagogical experiment is to capture the sense of playfulness and adventure currently missing from most sexuality programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the schooling experiences of 12 fa'afāfine and fakaleiti who attended an all-boys faith-based secondary school in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Fa'afāfine are Samoan, and fakaleiti Tongans who are assigned male at birth, but enact varying degrees and types of behaviour deemed as feminine. There are currently no in-depth qualitative studies that examine the schooling experiences of these young people. Within the existing literature the experiences of fa'afāfine and fakaleiti are typically subsumed under the umbrella of transgender and/or non-binary students. This study examines participants' recollections of daily experiences of being fa'afāfine and fakaleiti at an all-boys school where any expression of femininity was frequently disallowed and denigrated. In this highly masculinised environment, participants describe the struggle to be 'like-women' and the cisgender discrimination they faced. Incidents of bullying, physical assault and marginalisation from teachers and students along with the pathologisation and erasure of their identities within school curricula and practices were daily occurrences. These accounts contribute to an emerging and broader picture of schools as cisgender spaces, in which educational structures and processes reinforce the idea there are only two genders, and that gender is based on sex assigned at birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homophobia is an enduring issue within schooling contexts internationally. This paper attempts to rethink homophobia from the perspective of heterosexual students' accounts of bearing witness to it. Within the existing literature it has been LGBTQ students who have held the responsibility for naming and recounting homophobia. This paper re-orients this conventional account by positioning heterosexual students as its narrators to see what this might reveal about homophobia's operation at school. While this strategy does not disrupt the 'othering' and 'victimization' of LGBT youth in these stories, it has other effects. When heterosexual students name homophobia as unjust, it is possible to see the instability of the victim/perpetrator binary that typically structures these accounts. Narratives of participants in this study did not fit neatly into this binary, revealing its inability to capture the complexity of homophobia's operation. To have any hope of effectively addressing homophobia at school, we need to move beyond the victim/perpetrator binary. This is because it masks some of homophobia's more nuanced moves, such as targeting difference, rather than sexual identity exclusively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexuality and humour share a fraught relationship at school, so that how humour might be productively employed in sexuality education constitutes a ‘risky’ consideration. This paper explores the role of humour in sexuality education as observed in a Year 9 New Zealand health class. Adding to existing literature emphasising students' use of humour at school, it also considers how teachers might productively mobilise humour in the classroom. Findings reveal that while humour serves established purposes for students such as consolidating heterosexual masculinities, securing peer group hierarchies and disrupting learning agendas, it may hold other pedagogically productive possibilities. Potential uses include the relief of monotony, engaging with the needs of particular cultural groups of students, reinforcing taught information and reducing apprehension around potentially uncomfortable topics. Via this empirical exploration of the mobilisation of humour, the paper endeavours to open its potential as a conceptual site of possibility in sexuality education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sexuality education and preventive sexual abuse education emerged from different historical moments and social movements. Consequently, they are often taught as separate subjects in secondary schools. This paper seeks to highlight how this separation denies space for young people to grapple with the concept of consent, the art of negotiation, the interrelatedness and acknowledgement of pleasure, danger and ambivalence within sexually intimate relations and the complexities of sexualities. Importantly, this separation also negates possibilities for education to embrace a discourse of ethical erotics that includes space for the exploration of desire and pleasure; for it is not possible to discuss ethical erotics when one is not allowed to discuss ethics and erotics within the same conversation. To highlight this argument, we analyse the Health and Physical Education Curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand which states that programmes for the prevention of sexual abuse should not be taught concurrently or consecutively with programmes that emphasise the positive aspects of sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that pleasure might form a part of sexuality education is no longer a ‘new’ idea in the field of sexuality studies. In this paper we examine how originally conceived notions of pleasure have been ‘put to work’ and theoretically ‘taken up’ in relation to sexuality and education. It is our contention that because of the nature of discourse and varying cultural and political contexts, pleasure has been operationalised in ways we did not intend or foresee. Throughout this discussion we seek to discern the discursive limits of visions of pleasure to illuminate their normalising potential. Drawing on Foucault's thoughts about pleasure as having ‘no passport’ and queer theoretical understandings of this concept, we argue for a re-conceptualisation of the potential of pleasure in sexuality education. In particular we identify the need for wedging open spaces for the possibility of ethical pleasures, in forms that are not heteronormatively pre-conceived or mandatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that pleasure might form a part of sexuality education is no longer a ‘new’ idea in the field of sexuality studies. In this paper we examine how originally conceived notions of pleasure have been ‘put to work’ and theoretically ‘taken up’ in relation to sexuality and education. It is our contention that because of the nature of discourse and varying cultural and political contexts, pleasure has been operationalised in ways we did not intend or foresee. Throughout this discussion we seek to discern the discursive limits of visions of pleasure to illuminate their normalising potential. Drawing on Foucault's thoughts about pleasure as having ‘no passport’ and queer theoretical understandings of this concept, we argue for a re-conceptualisation of the potential of pleasure in sexuality education. In particular we identify the need for wedging open spaces for the possibility of ethical pleasures, in forms that are not heteronormatively pre-conceived or mandatory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Those who teach sexuality education are integral to the success of programmes that positively foster young people as sexual subjects. Knowing what makes an effective educator is therefore crucial for developing and delivering programmes that are successful in this respect. Starting from the premise that effective sexuality education meets the needs and interests of young people, this paper considers who young people think make the best educators and why. Findings are drawn from questionnaire and focus group data. Peer educators were named most frequently in questionnaire findings as the best people to teach about sexuality at school. Reasons for naming them were the same as for selecting other educator categories as 'best'. Interpreting this finding in conjunction with focus group data suggests participants valued particular educator 'qualities' more than 'who' the educator was. An argument for problematising the perceived relationship between educator identity and teaching effectiveness in sexuality education is made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do young people conceptualise ‘effective’ sexuality education? This paper explores 16‐year‐old to 19‐year‐old New Zealanders' vision of effective sexuality education as it emerges in answers to a survey question about improving programmes at secondary school. Young people's responses suggest that their view of what makes sexuality education effective may diverge from those who perceive a reduction in sexually transmissible infections and unplanned pregnancy as ultimate markers of effectiveness. Participants in this study referred to other criteria around aspects of classroom structure, curriculum content and teacher competency as rendering programmes effective. Through their comments young people are positioned more positively and legitimately as sexual subjects than they are typically constituted in programmes that emphasise reducing negative outcomes of sexual activity. It is proposed that giving more weight to young people's view of effective sexuality education, and the constitution of student sexuality this implies, could be beneficial to their sexual health and well‐being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]