Integral Sexual Education: thinking about institutional experiences in High School

Abstract

In this article, I put in dialogue different experiences of Sexual Education that took place in two different High Schools. One of these was in a private management institution while the other one was in a Popular High School. In the first school, there are teenagers between the age of 12 and 18, most of them from middle and upper-middle socio-economic sectors. In the second school, some young people and adults go through deep material and symbolic vulnerabilities. Both schools are secular and are located in different municipalities of the Province of Buenos Aires. These experiences have happened in the last four years. I was able to access in these schools by developing two different roles. In the private management school as a guidance teacher with Integral Sexual Education tasks in charge. In the Popular High School, as a researcher during the fieldwork of my doctoral thesis. My thesis is focused on scholarship and the relations that eight young people, which has experiences of motherhood and from popular sectors, have with their mothers. Its methodology is the biographical approach. Currently, I am writing my research. In both institutions, I have seen as a guidance teacher and as a researcher, that several students and their families reject Integral Sex Education, especially the treatment of two of its main dimensions: respect of diversity and the exercise of respect sexual rights. However, the conflicts associated with these rejections are addressed institutionally in different ways. In the private management school, the directive conduction tries to avoid any type of controversy by silencing the rejected topics. In the Popular High School, conflicts are considered as part of the conditions of teaching sexuality in school and, from there, pedagogical spaces are enabled for deployment.