(gentle music)
-: In Mississippi, there are hundreds of regulations
dictating how public schools should teach sex education.
Until recently however, we had very little research
examining how teachers deal with this very regulated
and very sensitive material.
This is an important gap to address
because we know from existing literature,
that some ways of teaching sex education are more
effective than others at keeping kids safe
and preparing them for healthy relationships.
My thesis addresses these questions.
How do teachers carry out sex education instruction
in their classrooms?
And how do teachers make sense of sex education
in youth sexuality?
I conducted interviews with 20 sex education teachers
around the state of Mississippi.
And I used qualitative analysis techniques
to determine what themes emerge from these interviews
about how teachers teach and think about sex education.
I found that to varying degrees, every teacher departed
from the formal approved curriculum in some way.
And I call this, going off script.
My key finding is that the ways
in which teachers go off script
are shaped about how they think about sexuality.
So for example, many of the teachers I spoke with
disagreed with the state's ban on condom demonstrations
in the sex education classroom.
Teachers would carry out these demonstrations
but would use socks instead of condoms
in order to skirt around the regulation.
By going off script, teachers often introduce
stereotypical ideas about race and gender
into their classrooms.
For example, one teacher taught her students
that girls should take responsibility for preventing rape
by carrying a safety pin with them on dates.
She taught them that girls should prick their fingers,
create a blood stain and pretend to be menstruating
in order to escape
an unwanted or aggressive sexual situation.
And she presented this material alongside
the formal curriculum.
What we can take away from these findings
is that the ways teachers think about sexuality
shape the way they teach about sexuality.
It's not enough to only examine policy and curriculum
when we are researching sex education.
Instead, we must consider what teachers think
about sex, about social equality and about education
in order to develop a fuller picture.
(gentle music)