Gendering the foundation: teaching sexuality amid sexual danger and gender inequalities
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Date
2015
Authors
Bhana, Deevia
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of Education, University of the Free State
Abstract
How might Life Skills be conceptualised in the Foundation Phase of schooling when a
tradition of feminist literature has revealed the regulation, denial and the silencing
of both gender and sexuality in early childhood? This article presents one Grade 2
teacher’s perspective of addressing sexuality education in an impoverished township
primary school. Disrupting the tradition of sexual silencing, the teacher indicates that
her teaching of sexuality focuses on bad touch and sexual danger, about and against
violent masculinities, while promoting respectable and equitable gender relations.
The disruption is an effect of the teacher’s recognition of the gendered patterns
of boys and girls classroom practice operating amid the broader climate of brutal
township poverty, overcrowding, sexual violence and cultural norms that constrain
women’s and girls’ agency. Nonetheless, the ability of the teacher to say ‘sex’ and to
address cultural norms that tie women and girls into bonds of inequalities suggest
limits to transforming gender relations and inequalities through sexuality education
in the Foundation Phase without recognition of broader context. As such, it provides
warrant for supporting teachers in the Foundation Phase to build on disruptive
potentials in Life Skills sexuality education which is gender-focused, interrogative of
the personal, locally relevant and disruptive of cultural norms.
Description
Keywords
Foundation Phase, Life Skills, Sexuality education, Teachers, Sexual innocence, Gender inequalities, Social context
Citation
Bhana, D. (2015). Gendering the foundation: teaching sexuality amid sexual danger and gender inequalities. Perspectives in Education: Life Orientation sexuality education in South Africa: gendered norms, justice and transformation, 33(2), 77-89.