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In my second last year if high school I had the immense privilege of participating as a student representative in a joint research project between the county district boards of public health and education. The goal was to train student facilitators to run student focus group discussions about the relevance and effectiveness of the sexual health curriculum.
I was trained to be one of the facilitators but was unable to participate in the groups due to the misfortune of an enthusiastic bout of chicken pox at the age of seventeen (yeah, not an experience I recommend for anyone). Being on the committee overseeing the project, however, I was also part of the sorting and collating the following fall and of searching for ways to utilize and implement the findings.
The students were amazingly open and honest with us about how they felt and perceived things. The short answer, they didn’t feel the curriculum was relevant enough to their actual needs. Rather than lessons solely about anatomy or abstinence they wanted training in the actual life skills they needed for navigating their lives and the challenges facing them.
As one participant so eloquently put it, where the fallopian tubes are located doesn’t really come up all that often at the drive-in. Nor is it…