Get Real About Sex: The Politics and Practice of Sex Education : The Politics and Practice of Sex Education

What are the different values and perspectives on sex and relationship education within a single (secondary) school?

What are the challenges facing the provision of good sex and relationship education at the classroom level and at the political level?

How do young people think sex education should be taught?

How do ideas about masculinity and femininity operate in the classroom?

This book explores how young people negotiate gender in school and in relation to ideas about education.

It examines how cultural ideas about masculinity and femininity play out in the classroom, particularly in relation to sex and relationship education in the context of developments in citizenship and personal education.

New material from a detailed study locates the dynamics of the classroom within those of the school: what do the different parties in teaching and learning - that is, both staff and pupils - say about how gender enters the classroom? And what different agendas and perspectives are revealed in the views of teachers, PSHE coordinators, school nurses and head-teachers?The complex picture that emerges of forces at work within a single school is, in turn, situated within an analysis of the broader cultural forces at work in contemporary Britain.

How are attempts to provide clear and helpful sex and relationship education affected by our cultural ambivalence and awkwardness about sex, by Government welfare agendas and by the mixed messages young people receive?This book: looks critically at cultural constructions of gender and sexuality and examines how they play out in the classroom; considers the challenges for best practice in sex and relationship education; examines sympathetically how young people today experience and negotiate masculinity and femininity in relation to schooling and education, employment and parenthood; examines the views of young people alongside those of their teachers, school nurses and head-teachers therefore contrasting different perspectives, values and agendas within individual secondary schools; situates a detailed study of gender in schools in England in the context of feminist and critical analyses of gender, of educational and of social policy; and applies feminist theoretical understandings of subjectivity, sexism and gender performances and performativity to the classroom.