Sexual health education is safety education

Teaching comprehensive sexual health education is everyone’s responsibility

By Jannika Nyberg (she/her), teacher, Burnaby

You’ve likely seen the infamous scene of Coach Carr delivering the sexual health lesson from the film Mean Girls. The coach says, “Don’t have sex; you will get chlamydia and die.” I am sharing this pop culture reference with you not to scare you, but to (rather dramatically) highlight how limited our cultural view of sexual health education can be.

When I tell people that I work in sexual health education promotion, it is often met with raised eyebrows, giggles, and questions like, “You spend your days putting condoms on bananas?” Demonstrating barrier methods to prevent sexually transmitted infections/sexually transmitted blood-borne infections and conception is an aspect of sexual health education, but the vast majority of work is grounded in safety education. I use “safety” here to refer to gender-based violence prevention, exploitation prevention, and sexual violence prevention—both online and offline.

Comprehensive sexual health education (CSHE), widely considered the gold-standard of sexual health education, does include these safety aspects as well as the socio-cultural and political intersections. Unfortunately, in BC, we only subscribe to half of the required benchmarks to meet the CSHE standards (see left; please refer to www.sieccan.org/shebenchmarks for detailed information on the benchmarks). As you can see in the benchmarks, the CSHE curriculum is not limited to a physical health class. It is inherently multidisciplinary because human sexuality is multidisciplinary (see Circles of Sexuality, below, by Dennis Dailey).

Circle of Sexuality, Dennis Dailey.

I want to propose something bold, potentially contentious: all teachers can and should teach aspects of the CSHE curriculum. For if we are to truly prepare our students for healthy, fulfilling relationships both on and offline, then it behooves us to empower them with the social-emotional learning and critical-thinking skills to navigate the complexity of being a sexual being in our digitized world.

Why then, is the CSHE curriculum not widely delivered? It is a multipronged answer.

Sexual health is couched under physical health education (PHE) only; PHE teachers are mandated to teach this curriculum. Ironically, preservice PHE teachers are not trained in the CSHE curriculum specifically, and in-service training is uncommon and never mandatory. There are no clear lines of accountability. The problem is that we’ve decided (the Ministry of Education and Child Care that is) that the entirety of human sexuality should be taught through the lens of physical health only. Human sexuality cannot be disentangled from emotional/mental health and the social systems governing bodies. PHE teachers deserve adequate training and resource access. More pressing is that students deserve an evidence-based, comprehensive curriculum that enables them to understand all bodies, orientations, and expressions so that they can co-create healthy, respectful relationships.

We can achieve this by championing non-PHE classroom teachers to teach aspects of this robust curriculum. The BC curriculum already incorporates many of the safety aspects of CSHE. Social studies, English, career education, social-emotional learning, and science all hold tenets of safety education. Big ideas also lend themselves beautifully to teaching key components of CSHE, such as con-sent via personal and social competencies.

BC PHE teachers are not Coach Carr. The majority I’ve worked with are willing and curious to teach this curriculum. When we know better, we do better. We can begin to know better when teachers, education assistants, and support staff are given proper training and support. The good news is that excellent training is on its way this fall!

This January, PHE Canada is launching its first online, self-paced course for teachers to learn both the theory and practical tools of CSHE. The course provides lesson plans, activity ideas, strategies and assessment tips. The second resource, available in October, is Fraser Health Authority’s Sexual Health Toolkit. This huge set of resources was assembled by public health nurses and will be available at bctf.ca/classroom-resources.

Lastly, starting October 1, the BCTF will offer an introductory workshop for districts/schools on the fundamentals of teaching this curriculum, previously titled Sexual Health Education: It’s Fun, now called Comprehensive Sexual Health Education 101 (see bctf.ca). A follow-up workshop focusing on teaching sexual health to students with complex needs and disabilities is in the works. Both courses/workshops are inclusive of 2SLGBTQIA+ people because one cannot accurately teach human sexuality without speaking to all genders, orientations, and sexes. You read that right—teaching only heterosexual sexual health is scientifically and culturally inaccurate!

Reports of sextortion have skyrocketed, social media usage has worsened cyberbullying, and rates of sexual assault have not gone down. Equipped with the proper tools, we can reverse these trends. This work is messy, hilarious, humbling, and wholly worth it.

About the author

Jannika Nyberg (she/her) is an English and social studies teacher in Burnaby. She is also a trained sexual health educator who supports teacher training both through her role as a BCTF facilitator and as an independent educator. She co-wrote the PHE Canada course on comprehensive sexual health education and the BCTF’s workshops on sexual health education.