Sunday, March 13, 2016

Sex Talk on the Carpet




I decided to do this week’s blog on transgender education because I have always been interested in LGBT studies.  I think the article Sex Talk on the Carpet was a fascinating read and as someone that is not a teacher I wondered how a teacher would respond to these types of inquisitions. The article I chose was short and to the point but I thought that it made a large impact and could be extremely useful information for teachers, parents, and for the general public. 

I found myself thinking of many of the authors we have read thus far in class. They are all over this short article. Valdine Ciwko is a fifth grade teacher in Vancouver that took on a pilot teaching program to teach her students sexual education.  Most schools (my elementary school included), have nurses that break the students up by gender and teach the basic knowledge of Sex Ed.  This separation and once a year class, applies a stigma on Sex Ed.  Ciwko had a question box in her classroom and sat her students on the floor and answered the questions together. Ciwko used Lisa Delpit ideas on opening up a dialect in her article by stating “We need to open up the doors to talk about gender, sexuality, sexual identity, and acceptance of people for who they are” (Sex Talk on the Carpet).  In the classroom, they all sat together on the floor, which is Delpit! Instead of the teacher standing over them, she joins them and opens up a discussion with her students.  “The teacher cannot be the only expert in the classroom. To deny students their own expert knowledge is to disempower them” (Delpit, 32-33).

Sex Talk on the Carpet, reminded me of Armstrong and Wildman’s theory of colorblindness vs. color insight.  Though this article is not about race, I believe we can apply the same theory to teaching about the LGBT community. Transgender has become a talked about topic over the past year because a famous Olympian in our country came out as Transgender. But it is still new for many people; people that are simply uneducated on the subject or turn a blind eye.  Ciwko is doing exactly what Armstrong and Wildman are fighting for with color insight.  Stop ignoring a person’s, race, gender, sexual orientations (among other categories) and talk about it. 


Wildman and Armstrong used the following four steps to promote racial equality.
             1.    Considering context for any discussion about race
             2.   Examining systems of privilege
             3.  Unmasking perspectivelessness and white normativeness
             4.   Combating stereotyping and looking for the “me” in each individual

So, let’s apply these steps to LGBT
     1.  Considering context for any discussion about LGBT
      2.   Examining systems of privilege
      3.  Unmasking perspectivelessness and straight normativeness
      4.   Combating stereotyping and looking for the “me” in each individual


I think back to Alan Johnson’s article and the quote “if we dispense with the words we make it impossible to talk about what’s really going on and what it has to do with us. And if we can’t do that, then we can’t see what the problems are or how we might make ourselves part of the solution to them” (Johnson , 2). Opening a dialogue with children about LGBT will allow students to knowledge on the subject, which I hope brings awareness on the subject and will eventually allow for equality for this community. As Johnson said “these groups can’t do it on their own, because they don’t have the power to change entrenched systems of privilege themselves” (10).



I would be interested to know more about Ciwko’s classroom… is this a mostly white privilege classroom? Does she teach affluent or poor students? I wish she had mentioned some of these things in her article because it had me asking these questions when I read that one of her student’s parents was not able to directly ask her about the Sex Ed classes but she was able to ask about her sons math/ reading classes.  Was this because she was an oppressed person? Or was Ciwko able to teach her students this way because they are from the executive elite or maybe affluent professional groups that Anyon studied.

5 comments:

  1. Bethany you did an awesome job connecting the article to authors we have encountered in class. I liked how you modified color insight into LGBT. Great article!. I agree with the author when she wrote "As teachers we make choices every day. What we leave in a lesson, what we take out. What we make time for, what we make disappear." I liked how the teacher took the time to answer the students question and open up a conversation. By taking the time to answer one question she created an environment where the students were comfortable to talk in her clas....something that probably was not on her lesson plan for the day.

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  2. I agree with Alicia, I thought your connections to our other authors were all very insightful and thoughtful. As I was reading your post, I found myself wondering, skeptically, if this type of frank approach to sex ed really was best. To learn more, I read the entire article. Now, I'm definitely seeing it more from the teacher's perspective, and I agree--the traditional way of teaching kids about sex ed and LGBT issues seems oddly outdated.

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  3. Beth. Great job this week I also really liked the way that you related Widman and Armstrong to your interpretation of the article. I have never really though that you could apply those way of combating racism to combating Homophobia and sexism. It is so great to see how you relate all of the readings to your blogs. I would like to learn more about sex talks in schools, since where i went to school we didnt really talk about it.

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  4. Beth. Great job this week I also really liked the way that you related Widman and Armstrong to your interpretation of the article. I have never really though that you could apply those way of combating racism to combating Homophobia and sexism. It is so great to see how you relate all of the readings to your blogs. I would like to learn more about sex talks in schools, since where i went to school we didnt really talk about it.

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  5. I'd love to know more about the students and their backgrounds, the school and it's socioeconomic status. I also wonder why the parent could not ask questions directly about the sex ed class. I can barely remember the classes I had in school - they were that insignificant, but I do remember being separated by gender and then the girls would ask the boys what was discussed. I loved that Ciwko realized she was not the only "expert" in the room, too - that she also valued the students' expert knowledge as well. Good job this week!

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