This workshop explores sexuality education with a feminist materialist framework in a practice-based research project. The research project is a four-year study on sexuality education in Swedish secondary schools and focuses on both classrooms teaching and collaborative research circles with teachers. The aim of the project was to examine how sexuality education is taught, experienced and can be developed. For this paper and workshop, we focus on the research circle meetings and the collaborative methods put to work there. We explore how these methods were co-constructed in relation to a feminist materialist framework and how they affected the collaboration and the teaching.

Sexuality education is an integrated part of Swedish secondary school and referred to as a particular knowledge content by the Swedish Agency of Education. In 2018, when the Swedish Schools Inspectorate published its quality review of sexuality education it highlighted a range of different problems. For example, it showed a lack of equality in the teaching. The review also stressed the need for competence development among teachers. This applies to knowledge about norms, LGBTQ issues, and honour-related violence. Many teachers did not consider themselves up-to-date with current social trends and several teachers felt uncomfortable teaching about controversial issues in the subject area (Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2018, 2022). In 2022, the curriculum on this knowledge area was revised and made more coherent. Following societal trends and shifts such as the #metoo movement, the name of this area was changed to ‘Sexuality, consent and relationships’. The curriculum and materials produced in relation to this knowledge area are working with norm awareness as a central perspective (Ceder et al. 2021).

Working within this educational-political context, the research project was grounded in feminist materialisms. This theoretical framework addresses the relationality of discourses, affectivity and materiality which is central for teaching on sexuality, consent and relationships. Further, this framework offers productive views on knowledge production for interdisciplinary topics such as sexuality education which entangle biological and social aspects. In line with this, Haraway (1988) pursues a critique of essentialist or objectivist knowledge production and argues that all knowledge is situated in relation with participants. Herein, intra-action (Barad, 2007) becomes a productive notion to emphasise that in a research process, the producer of knowledge is always a part of the production of knowledge. Hence, feminist materialists argue against the idea of distance and separation as a requirement for knowledge production. Rather, it is argued that knowledge is produced collaboratively through the intra-action of the many diverse and co-producing participants.

Over the last decade, a growing number of studies within sexuality education have put a feminist materialist framework to work (cf. Allen 2018; Renold 2019; Ringrose et al., 2020; Pasley 2021; Planting-Bergloo et al., 2022). Although there are a range of different labels, this framework “acknowledge education and sexuality as assemblages of transformative relations and doings that include both humans and more-than-humans” (Gunnarsson, 2023, p. 2). As such, it affords to push sexuality education research in the direction of the inventive and ambiguous.

This workshop draws from a four-year practice-based research project focusing on sexuality education. The research project consisted of five researchers who all previously worked as teachers in different subject areas. Besides us researchers, the project involved 5-13 teachers at four secondary schools. These teachers were specialising in a variety of school subjects such as Civics, Arts, Music, English and Physical Education (P.E.), Science, and Science and Mathematics (e.g. Planting-Bergloo & Arvola Orlander 2022). As such, the project regarded sexuality education as an interdisciplinary knowledge area emphasising entanglements of biological, social and aesthetic aspects. Together with the teachers we organised 5-8 research circle meetings at each school. The meetings responded out of a joint engagement with how to address sexuality education within different school subjects. Although the research group was responsible for planning, the themes of the meetings were co-constructed through collaborations with the teachers. In the meetings different activities such as short presentations and elaborations with teaching materials such as exercises, short films and pictures took place. The main purpose of the meetings was to critically and creatively explore how sexuality education could be enacted at the school in question. Since the conditions at each school were unique, a collaborative approach was used in order to explore sexuality education from what was already there. In this workshop, we will apart from elaborate on aspects of Swedish sexuality education within a feminist materialist framework, also explore some of the teaching materials and collaborative exercises. Working with a feminist materialist framework, Gunnarsson (2018) discusses how practice based research implies to acknowledge how knowledge production emerges “in relation with the worlds“ (p. 668). Therefore, research circle meetings strived towards decentering the researchers’ positions in order to challenge divisions of known, knowers and knowledge. Accordingly, the researchers are always entangled as well as becoming within the research process. As such, it produces “a relational experiment with messy and fluid co-becomings of both researcher and practice (Gunnarsson, 2018, p. 669).

In the workshops, we have studied the collaborative activities put to work in the research circle meetings. We have explored how these activities, become vital playmates in relation to a feminist materialist framework and how they affected the collaboration, the research and the teaching. As discussed earlier, the research circle meetings were organised as collaborative workshops. Therefore, a variety of exercises were engaged with at the different schools. One exercise that was used at three out of four schools aimed at mapping the ongoing teaching on sexuality and relationships at respective schools. Here, the teachers wrote down the range of different doings concerning how sexuality education took place and then structured their notes linearly. This way we could trace the teaching the students would encounter during schooling. As sexuality, consent and relationships is an interdisciplinary field and the teachers taught different subjects, this exercise highlighted the multitude of activities going on. It was also an exercise in shifting the knowledge from the individual teachers to the collaborative mapping. Based on this mapping, a plan for the whole school’s sexuality education could emerge. Other central aspects that were addressed in the project in relation to the feminist materialist framework were the entanglement of materiality, space and affectivity. For example, when the research circle meetings had to take place online due to the pandemic, there were shifting power dynamics taking place within our collaboration. Feelings such as frustration and confusion were at times displayed when teachers or researchers did not understand each other, or when they had different views on a particular question. To conclude, the feminist materialist framework afforded us to acknowledge the relationalities of the collaboration. Together with teachers, school subjects, exercises, film, art work, and materialities, the knowledge production became vibrant and productive.

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