Saving Sex Education During COVID-19

[CouldnoT]

 

 

With the pandemic-fueled pivot to online education, experts are hoping sex ed won’t get lost in the fray.
 

MONTHS INTO A GLOBAL pandemic with no end in sight, many college professors and K-12 teachers have pivoted to online instruction, moving classes on subjects ranging from physics to phys ed into virtual classrooms.

 

But Karen Rayne, a veteran educator in the Austin, Texas, area, worries a subject she specializes in – sex education – will be left behind.

Exhibit A: The reluctant coach at a school she advises in the region. Before the pandemic, she says, he regularly called in a substitute to teach on scheduled sex ed days; now that schools are prioritizing what gets taught online, she wouldn't be surprised if the subject is simply dropped.

 

"There's lots of cultural stigma around something like saying the word 'penis' in a room full of people who are under 18," says Rayne, who teaches human sexuality at the University of Texas at Austin and is the executive director of UN|HUSHED, a nonprofit that offers sex ed lessons for schools and aims to remove the stigma from sexuality and reproductive education. Amid "hard decisions" about what to prioritize, she says, teaching homebound teenagers and college students attending class from their childhood bedrooms about the birds and the bees can seem superfluous.

 

Yet even in the midst of an overhauled education landscape, Rayne says she and her colleagues who teach reproductive health are determined to make sex ed more than an afterthought. Schools that ignore the subject, they say, shortchange students on valuable life skills, such as the dynamics of a healthy relationship, how to say no when being pressured, what constitutes sexual or emotional abuse, and how to navigate same-sex attraction.

 

Like other teachers whom the pandemic has forced into online classrooms, though, they worry much is getting lost in translation from the real to the virtual world.

"What we know about sex education so far (during the pandemic) is really the story of education overall, which is that some people have just been able to make the best of it better than others," says Leslie Kantor, chair of the Department of Urban-Global Public Health at the Rutgers University School of Public Health.

 

"The age of young people on the other side of the camera, one's actual support and connectivity – all of these factors, they end up playing into whether you can give people a reasonable educational experience on any topic," Kantor says.

 

Lindsay Fram, a freelance sex educator who works primarily with K-12 students, agrees. And the need, she says, hasn't gone away.

"Hormones and puberty don't stop just because we are in a pandemic," she says.

 

When the novel coronavirus swept into the U.S., reproductive health educators joined other teachers who scrambled to adapt their curricula for the online classroom. Arguing that the topic shouldn't be deprioritized, Kantor and colleagues published a paper in June that in part spells out why teaching reproductive health during a pandemic is critical.

 

Studies of other large-scale social disruptions – specifically, Hurricane Katrina and the Great Recession – suggest the coronavirus pandemic "will have serious and sustained effects on young people," the paper states. Shelter-in-place orders, school closures and other shifts "have disrupted (young people's) romantic and sexual relationships, as well as their access to affordable and confidential health care services and resources."

Yet while in-person hook-ups likely are down, the paper says, the youth of today are "digital natives" with the means of sexting, online dating and virtual sex often readily available. At the same time, "sex education, which was already limited in many areas of the country, has likely not been included in the national shift to online learning," the paper states. "Even when in‐person schooling resumes, missed sex education instruction is unlikely to be made up, given the modest attention it received prior to the pandemic."

 

Kantor says at least one indicator of the pandemic's effect has already emerged: HPV vaccines, recommended for preteens through young adults to protect against a sexually transmitted infection that can cause cancer, "dropped off precipitously" from February to April. Her paper calls for "the availability of both in‐person and online instruction in response to school closures caused by the pandemic."

 

This sense of urgency led educators to come up with "some innovative ways to translate what we learned about effective, in-person sex education into the digital environment," Kantor says. "That's what a lot of my work was in the past: What can you do through apps? What can you do through videos? What can you do through text? What can you do through bots?"

 

Not long after the pandemic hit, Rayne, the UT-Austin professor, created a manifesto of sorts, outlining 10 tips for teaching online sex ed. They include being mindful of students' developmental stages, expecting some awkwardness and looping in parents.

Her No. 1 point to sex ed instructors: Teaching the topic online is really hard. But teaching something to young people about sexual health – even if it's uncomfortable or imperfect – is better than not teaching it at all.

 

"People dread sex ed," she says. "It can be a terrible class – based in fear and, you know, terrible pictures of diseased genitals. It can be awful." But innovative lessons paired with real talk, she says, increase the odds a young person won't make a decision that could carry lifelong consequences.

Delivering quality, fact-based information means asking, "How can we be really innovative and really fun, and have people get really excited about doing this online?" Rayne says. "That was my approach" in the classroom.

 

Fram, the freelance educator, says teaching in a virtual classroom offers a benefit and an opportunity for students – particularly in grades K-12 – that in-person education doesn't.

 

"For some students, the fact that they are not in the same room as their classmates and can turn their cameras off during class helps them feel less awkward and they're more likely to participate," she says, particularly in breakout-room, role-playing exercises focused on healthy relationships.

"The overwhelming feedback I've received from students is that they really like the option of having their cameras off during class, the sense of anonymity or confidentiality that comes from it," Fram says.

 

Prerecorded mini-lessons also are helpful tools that students can watch on their own time, Fram says. "That means they're getting the information at a time their brain is ready to receive it, not just when it happens to fit into their school schedule," she says.

 

Nevertheless, educators say there are drawbacks to online ed. It can be difficult to tell which students are paying attention and which ones are scrolling through Amazon.com, for example. Making teacher-student connections in a virtual classroom also is more challenging than it is in real life.

Rayne additionally worries that, despite her best efforts, some students are in fact being left behind – particularly along the digital divide between affluent and poor schools. And as the novelty of online education wears off, she says, students become prone to checking out.

 

"After so many months (online), we are beginning to lose some kids in a way that I wasn't really concerned about in March or April," she says. "It might be that for some kids, sex ed is not where they need to spend their limited online learning hours. But what sex ed does offer is contextualization of relationships."

 

Moreover, "In the same way that we're losing kids academically, we're also losing them in terms of their capacity to form bonds and understand themselves and understand each other in relationships," says Rayne. She worries that young people like her teenage son are missing out on meaningful, in-person connections – eye contact, hand-holding, deep conversation and perhaps even a first kiss – that are important in the sexual development of kids his age.

 

But as the pandemic grinds on, "I don't think we're ever going back to only having sex ed in person," she says. "It might be that people go back and forth (between in-person and online instruction), or some do it one way and others do it another way. But we are never going fully back to in-person learning."

"I think that we have this whole new world ahead of us," Rayne says. "And I've been really trying to find the beauty in it."

 

usnews.com

Edited October 30, 2020 by CouldnoT
picture corrected