Advanced RSE Training Course

This advanced RSE training course is for RSE practitioners who would like to spend some time learning about some of the core themes in relationships and sexuality education in some depth. If you regularly deliver RSE, or support people around it, then this is for you. So: outreach workers, youth workers, PSHE co-ordinators, training leads, therapists, health advisors, etc.

Advanced RSE training course Justin Hancock Bish Training

About

The processes of this advanced RSE training course will model the critical pedagogy that the very best practice RSE delivers. That is: consensual, participatory, interactive, and experiential. The content of the course will be a critical reflection of cultural discourses of sexuality and relationships. It’s also a feminist course, exploring how interlocking oppressions and agency interact and produce or reproduce intersectional unequal power relations. As with all of my work, it is resolutely trans inclusive, pro-sex worker rights, and grounded in anti-(dis)ablism. 

We will also learn from feminist new materialism and why key concepts such as uniqueness, and intra-activity can help us to break some of the areas in which sexuality education gets stuck. This will help us overcome many of the unhelpful binaries we can get stuck in. Such as nature vs nurture. Risk vs pleasure. Body vs mind. This will be embedded with a new vision of RSE as an entangled ‘becoming’ education. 

Please don’t be put off by this high falutin’ intro. It’s also an extremely practical, down to earth, and accessible course. I developed it, yes me, Justin Hancock. I’m an extremely experienced RSE practitioner (24 years and counting). I’ve also learnt how to bring theory into RSE work and why that is valuable. Yes my lockdowns were spent learning theory (and making sourdough). 

Content of the Advanced RSE Training Course

Over this 5 day course we will cover:

Sex Education

Exploring the messages we receive about sex (discourses). What they do. How these discourses are passed on. The traps that RSE falls into, and what it is we need to actually do. 

The Self

Developing an understanding of ‘the self’. From (neo)liberal discourses of self-reliance and efficacy, to an intersectional and material critique of ‘the self’. An introduction to affective flow and the self as an assemblage. 

Gender

Using a feminist new materialist framework we will seek to explore how gender is produced (rather than performed). That this is a becoming from a complex entanglement of human and non human relations. Overcoming the binaries of nature vs nurture regarding gender. Critiquing the interrogations of gender and the normativities that creates. 

Sexuality

Taking some of the learning from the module on gender we will also learn together about the possibilities for ‘uniqueness’ in sexuality. What the possibilities for sexualities are (including asexuality) and working towards a holistic and solidaristic model for sexuality. 

Relationships

We will critically explore the discourses of romantic relationships, ‘enamoration’, ‘micro-moments of positivity resonance’, how platforms organise romantic desire, the idea of a healthy relationship, how to teach about relationships when we are doing relationships.

Moving beyond the binary consent discourses of permission we will learn practical examples of how we maximise our freedoms to choose to agree in everyday life. We will learn how these tools of consent have the potential to be liberatory.

Sex (including safer sex and pleasure)

Reflecting on our own sex education we will seek to understand and overcome the risk / pleasure dialectic of sex. Through a holistic understanding of what sex is, but more importantly, what sex might do

The Sex We See

Moving away from theories of ‘effect’ and questions of causality, we will understand the sex we see (porn, TV, social media) as part of the affective flow of what constitutes sexual knowledge. Just as porn is not sex ed, why porn is a problem for sex ed and what we can appropriately do to meet these challenges.

Bodies

Beginning with an intersectional feminist critique of how our bodies are rendered and produced in culture, we will also learn about embodiment, the materialdiscursive body, and ‘the body without organs.’

The Unconscious

We will bring together what we have learnt in the course in order to critique the mind / body split. However we will also learn some key theories from psychoanalysis and the work on the unconscious in order to further understand desire, the subject, the Other, objet a, fantasy, and circling back to the self.

How we will work together

Despite how theoretical this all sounds, it will all be very accessible, fun, interactive, and using everyday language. In fact, to see a version of this course that I’ve developed for young people head to the Teach Yourself Sex Ed resources at BISH

It would be on zoom but it would be very interactive and as near to being in a training room with me in person as possible. I’ve done a bit of this now and it’s worked really well (and sometimes better than in person training). 

I’m thinking that each section would have one or two interactive activities to take part in in break out rooms, lots of room for discussion etc. I will also facilitate using a Jam Board where we can keep our notes, ideas, links to things, and resources we might develop along the way. There will also be lots of resources from me

I’d also invite you to join a Discord server where we can discuss our work privately with other folk who have taken part in training with me. 

Dates

Next course, now booking for

Australia / NZ!

9am – 12 (noon) Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) on the following mornings.

Wednesday 24 May
Monday 29 May
Monday 5 June
Monday 3 July
Monday 10 July
Wednesday 19 July
Monday 24 July
Monday 31 July
Monday 7 August
Wednesday 16 August

4th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 16th May 2023

7th, 8th, 14th, 15th, 16th March 2023 

9.30 – 4.30 GMT, on Zoom

(if there’s enough interest I may also run some more dates in June/July)

To Book

The fee is £750 (for the full course). Again, bear in mind that the going rate for courses is around £150 per day per person. To reserve a place just email me to confirm. Contact me via the contact page or directly bishtraining at gmail dot com.

I’m afraid I have had to drop my sliding scale initiative for the course but if you really don’t have the budget but really want to do the course, send me a message and we can try and agree a fee.

© Justin Hancock, 2023

Justin Hancock has been a trained sex and relationships educator since 1999. In that time he’s taught and given advice about sex and relationships with thousands of young people and adults in person and millions online at his website for young people BISH. He’s a member of the World Association for Sexual Health. Find out more about Justin here and stay up to day by signing up for the newsletter.