This sexuality curriculum draws on Critical Sexuality Studies and Queer Theory to expand our understandings of what sexuality education can do through lessons that explore nuance, intersectionality, pleasure, agency, and power.
Questioning Normalcy is meant to foster participants’ abilities to speak about sexuality with nuance, self-awareness, and critical understanding. It consists of a number of questions that help to answer the larger question: How might our identities, positionalities, and environments influence our understandings and experiences of sexuality?
I used Wiggins and McTighe’s (2005) backwards design to guide my planning of this curriculum. Backwards Design starts with basic questions and foundational understandings, then moves to a consideration of assessment. Once the final assessment and understandings are established, the curriculum can be fleshed out in order to build the necessary skills and understandings.
-Speak about sexuality with anatomically correct and gender-affirming language
-Make connections between race, class, ability, gender, and sexuality
-Explore and interrogate their own experiences with sexuality through the lenses of identity, positionality, and environment.
-Sexuality is an expansive topic, and can be found in many areas of our lives.
-People have different access to pleasure and reproductive rights based on where they are situated in relation to power and oppression.
-Individuals have agency within systemic oppression, and sexuality can be a space to explore that agency.
-There is no “correct” way to have sex or experience sexuality.