There are plenty of studies on sex education in the U.S. But most of them look into what should be taught in classrooms, not how.
So, teachers often go by the best practices outlined for science and health educators.
University of Delaware assistant professor Sarah Curtiss said she wants that to change. Her research primarily focuses on autism and intellectual disability, and one of her specialty areas is in sex education for people with disabilities.
Curtiss and her team looked at a teaching approach called Universal Design for Learning, which focuses on students’ educational and emotional states in the classroom. They found it makes classes more accessible for all students.
“One of my passion projects is helping kind of raise this awareness overall…” Curtiss said. “One of my take homes, I guess I would say, is that thinking about UDL, [it’s] not intimidating of itself. It is an instructional framework for which you can get lots of support.”
Curtiss said the UDL approach is effective in several areas in education. Rather than individualizing education to every student, under UDL students learning to read would have the same literature but be offered multiple ways to digest and dissect the text.
“How can we use, perhaps, multiple ways of presenting information to help level the playing field for all the students in the class?” Curtiss asked. “So, we might have a text that students have the choice or we do both. We have the option to read it yourself, or read it with a partner, or read it out loud.”
While the report did not find a difference in knowledge gained from traditional and UDL approaches, focusing on students’ holistic wellbeing left students more confident with the information they learned.
“It's just kind of easy when you're in this kind of environment to overly rely on more didactic, more explaining, all-group discussion where people have to raise their hands,” Curtiss said. “That's always going to privilege the students who have the quickest processing speed and the highest comfort with speaking out loud.”
Curtiss added many students with disabilities receive individualized instruction, but taking more of a class-based approach can help all students become more comfortable with the information they’re learning.
“So [the Individual Education Plan is the] legal document that individualizes students with disabilities’ education…” Curtiss said. “Just even walking away with like, ‘I know that certain parts of my body are going to get bigger. I know that I'm going to have changes in my mood. I'm going to have differences in the kinds of fronts. I'm going to have to start wearing deodorant.’ These are things that I hope students walk away with at the end of the workshop.”
Teaching puberty and sex education using UDL meant using computers more in class.
“When we're teaching puberty, the students are embarrassed,” Curtiss said. “They're excited, they're scared, you know?... We have a structured emotional check in before we jump into the content of the lesson. We're helping provide space to process the emotions that are connected to the content.”
That looked like allowing students to ask questions anonymously on their computers, which lessened student’s anxiety of having to ask questions in front of the class. Curtiss said instructors could also keep track of what topics students struggled with most and go back to those without embarrassing or stressing students.
While this study is over, Curtiss continues to work and study sex education for students with disabilities. Curtiss’s paper in progress looks at sex educators who teach students with intellectual disabilities.
Curtiss publishes sex education resources at her website asdsexed.org.
