Over the last several years, a paradigm shift in gender politics has led to many countries incorporating discussions on gender roles into their sex education curricula. Sex education is often defined as teaching about health, sexuality, sexual activity, sexual reproduction, and both intimate and interpersonal relationships. Comprehensive sex education, conversely, goes beyond this scope and explores sexual orientation, gender roles, and gender relations while developing skills such as critical thinking and decision-making (Haberland & Rogow, 2015). This paper offers detailed investigation of the provision of sex education in relation to gender roles by focusing on the ideologies, discourses, and perspectives of teachers at Armenian public schools.

Sex education was first introduced in Armenian public schools in 2011, when the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Armenia mandated that 15 academic hours a year would be assigned to a ‘Healthy Lifestyle’ program which was integrated into the students’ physical education classes. The course is intended for 8th to 11th grade students with ages ranging from 13-17. The content of the Armenian sex education bears some resemblance to comprehensive sex education, as it has several sessions on gender roles and gender equality. A handful of international reports and media articles have argued that the teachers are poorly prepared to teach the course due to inadequate teacher training and resistance to discussions on gender and reproductive rights. However, a more detailed exploration of these areas of improvement was lacking. Some questions remaining to be analyzed included: How are gender roles within a society and in a family depicted in classroom? Does the knowledge on gender comply the curriculum the teacher’s are obliged to teach? Do teachers construct subjective meaning when discussing gender in the classroom? The literature on Armenian sex education had mostly come from international and local organizations, while academic and feminist analyses had largely been neglected.

Gender roles differ by culture and are generally defined as the attitudes and behaviors prescribed on the basis of gender, as well as how women and men are expected to fill feminine and masculine roles in social contexts (Lindsey, 2016). Armenia has a patriarchal political-social system where traditional gender roles predominate (Khachatryan et al., 2015; Durand & Osipov, 2015). The typical man must be the family’s main breadwinner and decision maker, while women must be caregivers and housekeepers. Both these roles are continuously reinforced in Armenian society (Tadevosyan, 2015). One of the main objectives of this research is to detail how sex educators in Armenia respond to discrepancies between the mainstream beliefs which reinforce unequal gender roles in society, and the course content of equal gender roles they are obliged to teach.

To achieve this objective, this research was an interdisciplinary project embedded in different fields including the social sciences, education, and gender studies. I used feminist poststructuralist theory to examine discourse as the mechanism through which knowledge is produced and reproduced (Weedon, 1987). The study was based on a social constructionist epistemological lens that define gender roles as socially arranged everyday practices where a binary system of womanhood and manhood is constantly reproduced (Lorber & Farrell, 1991). 

This presentation aims to provide an overview of how Armenian sex educators discuss gender-sensitive issues in classrooms and deal with the challenges of teaching gender equal lessons. To explore the research questions, this qualitative study used ethnographic participant-observation methods to effectively become immersed in the target population’s culture and understand their behaviors and beliefs (Wolcott, 2008). From August to October 2016, I conducted a research trip to Armenia during which I interviewed teachers who conduct sex education classes in the Armenian public schools. I also interviewed two of the three authors of the ‘Healthy Lifestyle’ curriculum; they helped me to get a thorough understanding of the main goals of the ‘sex education’ program and its relation to gender topics. These interviews were helpful in generating research questions and focusing on discussions surrounding the major research topics. To provide detailed account of sex education classes, I conducted participant observations at two Armenian public schools during January and February 2018, when the subject of “Healthy Lifestyle” is taught at Armenian schools. Both schools were located in the capital of Armenia, Yerevan. This fieldwork data brought the emic perspective to viewing the participants and examining cross-case commonalities and differences among them in regard to gender roles. To analyze classroom group discussions while focusing on how the teachers presented the information, I used the documentary method – a well-known method in the field of school research and in practical empirical enquiry (Bohnsack, 2014). This method was pioneered by Mannheim (1952), who shifted the narrative from “what” question to “how” the knowledge is produced. Analyzing the data with this technique allowed me to reconstruct the discursive knowledge and reflect on what the teachers voiced as well as what they left unsaid (Bohnsack, 2018).

The preliminary data suggests that sex educators tend to deviate from original lesson plan by focusing more on traditional social norms and shifting emphasis to moral duties. To illustrate, during the lesson on “Unintended pregnancy,” the teachers asked questions based on the traditional moral norms – thus linking unintended pregnancy to stigmatization and a “miserable accident” rather than addressing health and emotional consequences of unintended pregnancy as stated in the curriculum. This was particularly true when referring to females. Sex educators also tended to equate marriage with parenthood considering the first to be an inevitable part of the second. When the students answer expressed that they were not yet ready to have children, this was used by the teacher to argue that they were unprepared for marriage. Although sex educators reinforced traditional gender roles during different conversations and discussions, it is also interesting to note how some teachers expressed their negative attitude towards the double moral standards that predominate in the Armenian society for ‘females’ and ‘males.’ This illustrates how sex educators – although engaged in gender equal lessons – can consciously and unconsciously reproduce traditional gender roles by assigning specific “appropriate” roles to sexes while talking negatively about the stigmatization. The data also demonstrates that the extent to which the teachers tend to gender-equal versus traditional familial gender roles is to some extent dependent on the pupils’ reactions and answers to discussion questions. This presentation will delve into how these sex education courses provide a platform for discussing the crucial but challenging questions sex educators are dealing with worldwide. Finally, it will examine the unique hurdles to exploring gender sensitive issues in a country where traditional gender roles predominate.

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