As part of the DO…RSE for Schools project, we asked young people about their RSE. We were struck by how little they were taught about the emotional aspects of sex and relationships. Where they were taught it was reduced to overly simple key messages.

Overly simple ‘key messages’

Students were given talks on consent, sexuality or self-esteem which amounted to a key ‘take home’ message. Messages such as: ‘just say no’, ‘it’s okay to be gay’, or ‘love yourself before you love someone else’. They dismissed such lessons as having no relevance to them. When you think about it, it’s not a surprise. 

Take a moment to think about this for yourself in private. Think about how you feel about yourself. What affects how you feel about yourself? Are there expectations placed on you around gender and sexuality? What did you learn growing up about relationships. Are some kinds of relationships more valuable to you than others? Why?

If it doesn’t work for you, why should it work for your students?

Think about all your relationships – how do you make them work? How do you meet the needs of other people in your life without neglecting your own? How easy is it for you to say ‘no’ to a partner, friend, colleague, family member? The students we are teaching are often going through much of the same stuff that we are dealing with. Why should it be any simpler for them than it is for us?

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

Teaching Holistic RSE

Sex and relationships is also an extremely complicated topic because one aspect can’t be taught in isolation from another. For example we can’t teach ‘just say no’ without also addressing that this relates to how we feel about ourselves. That if we feel bad about ourselves compared to other people we may feel that we aren’t allowed to say no.

If there is a power difference in the relationship, where there is more at stake for us than the other person, we might feel we really can’t say no. If we have little decision making power over our bodies, we might not have experienced what saying no feels like. And that much of the wider societal messages we receive encourage us not to say no, particularly to someone who says they love us. 

A young person in our research summed this up perfectly “They just say ‘just say no’ but sometimes people don’t feel confident to do that.” They were saying to us that ‘emotional’ or ‘relationships’ side of SRE was best delivered when young people were asked to think about things themselves. Simply being told what to think in a lecture isn’t real or relevant for them. 

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The use of facts

However the same is also true for the more factual elements of SRE. Information about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), conception, contraception and the law can be taught much more simply. Information can be conveyed simply and effectively through powerpoint presentations, demonstrations and worksheets. So often the temptation is to stick to these topics – with clear learning outcomes and clear messages. But even here young people say that they learn too much about the ‘what’ and not enough about the ‘how’. 

“It separated it from people and just put it in scientific terms … ”

They might learn what STIs are, the different types, transmission routes, long term effects and treatments. However, they don’t learn as much about how to ask for help, or how to talk to a partner about risks, how to deal with the stigma surrounding STIs or how to negotiate safer sex. They might learn what the law is around sexting a sexual image. But how about how to deal with a partner pestering them for an image. Getting support if an image is shared without consent. How gender and power might result in status for some and stigma for others, or how to reduce the risks of sexting. 

The information is there but students aren’t given the opportunity to explore real life situations, how they can get help, how they can support others or how they can change culture of stigma. If students feel that they are simply being told what to think, or being scared off sex altogether, they will simply switch off. Young people may remember names of STIs, or the legal age for sexting, but how useful is this kind of sex education if they can’t put it into practice?

How Can We Change This?

When we were writing the DO… resources we wanted to address this challenge. RSE is a complicated topic but trying to simplify everything into something that would work for every young person won’t work and never has. 

This approach is also really hard to teach. How do we decide on the key message that will work for most students? How do we get to that point without excluding some people? The challenge of making all this engaging enough. How can we appear confident when we are teaching these key messages when we might be struggling with this stuff ourselves? Reducing SRE to simple messages implies that we find all this simple and have it all sorted and that students don’t. The Tea and Consent video is a perfect example of this. We wanted to get away from teachers feeling they have to be experts in sex and relationships, pretending to know all the answers. It makes teachers feel under confident and students can tell when a teacher doesn’t feel confident talking about SRE. 

How to do engaging RSE

So with DO … we shifted the focus from just imparting information and simple key messages to something more engaging and challenging. However as well as embracing the complexity of sex and relationships, we made it easier to teach. We created a set of lesson plans and supporting resources that don’t require specialist knowledge of sex and relationships but instead rely on the skills that teachers already have. These resources are about facilitating really engaging conversations rather than just talking and not listening.

We made it easier for teachers to make it easier for students to talk to each other about the issues that really matter. They are encouraged to reflect on their own values and the messages they have received about sex, gender, sexuality, themselves, consent, love and safer sex. In order to ask them to think, rather than telling them what to think, we wrote truly engaging lesson plans. All the activities are participatory: students getting involved in pairs or small groups whilst allowing them to get as involved as they want to.

You might also find my Bad Sex Ed Bingo resource useful over at BISH.

Making it about them not us

They get to explore these topics for themselves facilitated by creative and innovative learning methods: creating fictional characters to explore gender, using wordstorms to explore how they feel about themselves, practice handshakes to understand how consent feels, learning about love through diagrams and graphs, card sorts to figure out safer sex, asking some big questions about why people have sex or relationships. The course ends with a unique problem solving lesson. Where students to take part in independent learning exercise where they respond to several ‘problem page’ questions.

It’s a complex topic, but easier to deliver than you think

These activities allow for students to really understand how complex RSE can be. However the lesson plans are not complex. They are clearly laid out and structured so that each lesson builds on the next. Throughout there are detailed instructions on how to run the activities. As well as lots of great questions you can ask – if you really want to open the discussion up with students. There’s nothing quite like facilitating a really engaging lesson on RSE. It can be truly fascinating to hear the insights of young people. The key is to remember that your expertise here is not that of a sex education expert (sexpert). You’re a great teacher delivering really engaging, exciting and challenging lessons. So crack the lessons plans out, pin your ears back and start some really great conversations about sex and relationships.

For resources and support to make great RSE happen in your school download the resources, for free, from here.

The post It’s Simple, Sex and Relationships are Complex appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

RSE videos tend to be passive

Watching an RSE video is a very passive activity which is not great. It’s easy to stop paying attention to a video, particularly if it is a whole lesson, because we can go into relaxation mode and switch off. We want students to be switched on and thinking critically about the messages we receive about relationships, sex, sexuality, and gender.

Makes it about us not them

The action of putting an RSE video on can send out a lot of indirect messages to students if we’re not careful. ‘What I have to say is the most important thing here.’ ‘Listen to the message of this video and learn it.’ ‘I’m more interested in what this video has to say than what you have to say.’ Whatever our motivations for showing a video, the message it can send out is that it’s more about what we think is important to say in RSE rather than what students have to say and think.

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

Consent issues

It’s very hard to opt out of watching a video, so we need to be super careful about making everyone watch a video. Just as watching a film in a cinema can be a tricky experience for many, watching a video can be very tricky for your students. If a film features trauma, violence, threats, abuse, shocking scenes, or sex then this can be upsetting. Also you don’t know what your students will find difficult.

So this means that with any video you show, you need to give advance warning so that students can opt out of seeing it. It’s also best practice to tell parents too. Then if students are opting out (or want to opt out) you might want to think about whether there is a better RSE resource that can include everyone.

It’s important to think about the process of RSE as much as the content. If we show a video that is all about consent, but then don’t give students the option to not watch the RSE video, or even further, traumatise students as a result, then what are they really learning about consent?

Top tips for teaching about consent

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Diversity

The difficulty with videos with people in them is that you can only be as diverse as those people who are in them.

So I know everyone loves Screwball (meh) and yes it has a black character and a white character, and yes it’s not entirely about penis in vagina sex (which can exclude a lot of people), but it doesn’t say a lot about the different oppressions that people of colour face, or anything on disability, or LGBTQ folk, or asexual folk, or intersex folk…. I’m not having a go at Screwball here (I think it’s funny and has a nice tone and the actors were great) I’m just pointing out the limitations of showing one story line in one film. If we spend most of our lessons showing videos like this, then it’s on us if we’re just teaching about the heterosexual experience.

Tips for inclusive RSE teaching

The region of the characters can make a difference too. One of my favourite videos, back in the day, was the Weird and Wonderful World of Billy Ballgreedy by FPA. Everyone had quite thick Northern Irish accents, which is probably great for its intended audience, but did nothing for the lads I was working with in Derby. Which is a shame because I thought it was great.

For this reason, when I make video for BISH (which are not for showing in classrooms, they’re for young people to watch in their own time) I use images and animations so that I can try to make them as diverse and inclusive as possible. It’s hard to do, so they are not very long, and they are also not very good!

Creates more work

Putting a video on shouldn’t be the RSE equivalent of putting Peppa Pig on when we are trying to have a five minutes sit down babysitting our niece (ahem). We need to watch the video to make sure that we don’t run into the consent issues above. Also we should check that it’s making the point we’re wanting it to make. I’m not a huge fan of instilling ‘key messages’ into young people, but what are the key messages of the video you’re showing? Do they need unpacking? How are you going to do that? Also it’s good to critique who is making the video, why it’s being made, and what might be some of the underlying assumptions of the video. Videos are rarely values neutral . They rarely give students the opportunity to consider their own values and to build on them.

It’s a faff

For a start it can be hard to find the video you want. Maybe it’s gone off iplayer, or YouTube has taken it down, or it now has a load of adverts on it, or it’s really expensive, or you don’t have a licence to show it in school, or it takes ages to buffer, or it’s really low resolution. That time might better be spent finding some more interactive and inclusive RSE resources.

Also, it’s a faff making the videos work in the classroom. Turning the lights off, closing the curtains, making sure everyone can see. Also we need to make sure it’s loud enough and has audio descriptions, or subtitles for those that need them.

5/10 minute clip

This might sound like we’re fun sponges! We occasionally use video clips ourselves. Using shorter clips can help avoid some of the above problems – also it’s less work to watch the video. Use the clips as an injection of humour, or something to help you shift from one topic to another, or to introduce something really powerful like a Hollie McNish poem. https://www.youtube.com/user/holliemcnish/videos

Make it interactive

Instead of watching an RSE video passively you could make it more interactive by stopping the video at key points. Ask them about a character in the film, what might they feeling, what might they be thinking, what previous life experiences have got them to this point, what’s their biography, how is this likely to play out, what should they do, what can their friends do.

You could put students in small teams and have them follow a character, making it more creative by asking them to draw outlines of their character and write words or draw images around them.

Maybe you could put all this in a worksheet and ask students to be filling this in as they go. You could also do a simple observation quiz to keep them engaged.

I did a video about consent and negotiation which has various stopping points so that students can do some small group work to generate ideas.

Developing videos with students

This can be a lot of fun and really useful too, particularly if the video is about local services. You could arrange a visit to a local sexual health service to show everyone how to get there and what to expect. I’ve done that myself (though I had to do the editing) and in your schools you will have technology and students to be able to turn it into a cross-curricula project. They could also film themselves doing talking heads, interviews, point of view shots. They could edit a bunch of vox pops of different young people’s views on a topic. Perhaps you could get students to do my talk for a minute activity which I have in my Consent Teaching pack, for example.

Students could bring in their own video clips

One way of showing RSE videos, but still making it about the students not us, is to ask students to bring in videos or clips to show everyone. Obviously you would have to either trust your students a lot to not bring in anything inappropriate (the group agreement is your friend here), or you would have to vet everything. Some students asked me to play them a video from the inbetweeners once when I was teaching them about sexual scripts, which was absolutely perfect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HDzfuYHz6U

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DO…

DO is DONE, sadly. But the resources are available to download at this page.

Training

I offer a DO… training course which I developed for teachers who are new to RSE. Sex and relationships can feel like a very big topic to teach. It’s very personal: it’s about values, emotions, personal experience. Our own experience of sex and relationships education means some people can talk about sex frankly, whilst others might feel inhibited and a bit uncomfortable.

In the classroom you need to be able to call on your experience and teaching skills, but this can be difficult when teaching SRE if we haven’t had the chance to reflect on these topics for ourselves.

This is the equivalent of a one day course which could be delivered over 2 half days or 3 or 4 twilight sessions (location dependent). For more details head here

Coaching

I can offer one-to-one coaching via video link for individuals who wish to get some more tailored advice for their practice. Whilst it’s not really possible to offer training outside of a group setting, practitioners tell me that they really value a two hour conversation. They leave with ideas, resources, and links to key research and best practice guides.

Teaching

I’m a specialist relationships and sex educator with young people over 14 and have been since 1999. I have worked with thousands of young people over this time and they rate my lessons highly. They tell me that my sessions are fun, informative and thought provoking. They like my matter of fact manner when talking about sex but they most value that I use interactive activities that promote discussion.

I can offer specialist teaching sessions on any RSE topic. I can also run Q&A sessions about and I can also offer one-to-one drop ins. You can see my approach to answering young people’s questions at bishuk.com which is one of the leading sex and relationships advice websites for young people.

Resources

In addition to the above I also have a range of specialist RSE resources covering porn, safer sex, relationships, consent, bodies, alcohol. There’s also the brand new Bish Activity Book which has over 50 pages of fun and thought provoking worksheets for students. These resources are all available for immediate download and are available in a bundle pack called ‘Big Bish Download’ which offers even better value for money.

I also have a blog for practitioners where I promote best practice and evidence based approaches to RSE.

The post How I Can Help With Your RSE appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

As you can see there is something in each lesson which is relevant to these topics. So running the whole DO… programme would be a great example of feminist activism (whilst also being engaging and great RSE for all genders).

In lesson one students can explore how they feel about themselves and how we all feel about ourselves is in a large part shaped by the messages we receive from society, our communities, the people around us as well as our own self-perception. Of course, discrimination is one of the factors that can have a huge affect on how we feel about ourselves. Also the unrealistic beauty standards of how people are supposed to look can affect everyone, and particularly women. Given all this is can be quite difficult not to be critical of oneself, so we included an activity for students which is all about self care. The importance of self-care in tackling oppression (particularly racism) is an idea from Audre Lorde.

If you’re already an RSE practitioner, you might want to come on my new Advanced RSE Training course.

In lesson two we make the whole thing about gender expectations and the rigid rules that society has about how to be a woman. This lesson has a fun creative element allowing students to draw rich characters with different backgrounds, races, disabilities/abilities, classes, names, hobbies all of which can bring in different intersections. So this is a way for students to learn about intersectional feminism (shout out to Kimberlé Crenshaw). One of the things that this lesson raises is to think about is to what extent so-called ‘feminine’ traits such as being caring and sharing might valued less in society (and certainly paid less) than ‘masculine’ traits such as being dominant and independent.

Lesson three is about love and relationships which is all about critiquing why romantic relationships are all too often regarded as being the most important kind of relationships, usually at the expense of friendships. If we could treat our friendships as being as important (or even nearly as important) as romantic relationships then how might that help women to create more space, time and resources for other women?

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Lesson four is all about consent. The sobering statistic from the latest Natsal study shows how consent is an issue for all genders, with 1 in 10 women reporting having had sex against their will, compared with 1 in 71 men. There is also now a greater awareness of the violence that trans folk face on a daily basis, particularly thanks to the work of activists like Paris Lees.. Consent and power are at the heart of DO… and in the post #MeToo world there is a huge opportunity for all schools to centre these issues in their RSE — we have got you.

Safer sex is a subject that affects all genders but we try to tackle this differently in lesson five by specifically framing different sexual activities that people may choose to do or not. Getting away from the message that sex = intercourse, opens up many more possibilities for women to negotiate different kinds of sexual activity that they may find more enjoyable but also are more safe from unplanned pregnancy or STIs.

The final lesson features real life scenarios for students to answer. Armed with their 5 weeks of best in class RSE; their mobile phones; and links websites like Brook, FPA, The Mix, Bish and Scarleteen; the students get to answer questions that are likely to affect them or their friends at some point in their future. Questions about: unhealthy relationships, painful sex, access to services, coercive sexting, abortions, and contraceptive services are of course all relevant to all young people but will resonate with a lot of women especially.

And yes, there is an International Men’s Day and I will post a similar thing on 19th November.

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