Nancy Lesko

Feeling abstinent? Feeling comprehensive? Touching the affects of sexuality curricula

This interpretive study draws on interdisciplinary scholarship on affect and knowledge to ask: toward what feelings do abstinence-only and comprehensive sexuality education curricula direct us? A methodology that is attuned to double exposures is discussed, and one abstinence-only sexuality education curriculum and one comprehensive sexuality education curriculum are reviewed. The interpretation provides an alternative to the usual representation of these curricula as oppositional. Both of the curricula direct knowers to feel sure, optimistic, and free. Both curricula evidence longings for stable knowledge and guaranteed meanings. Finally, learners are directed to feel that knowledge can solve all problems smoothly and happily. Mistakes, negativism, and confusion are excluded from both sets of sexual knowledge. Implications of this interpretation for changing sexuality education are discussed.

The “Leaky Needs” of School-Aged Mothers: An Examination of U.S. Programs and Policies

ABSTRACTWhat do school-aged mothers need in order to become independent? What curricula are best for young women who are secondary school students and also single mothers? The pursuit of answers to these questions leads to an examination of U.S. programs for school-aged mothers, which are located within the politics of the New Right and the battles for public resources. According to feminist theorist Nancy Fraser (1989), public policy battles begin with the interpretation of needs and the establishment of relations between a defined need and specific resources required to meet it. If a need is contained within the domestic or economic sphere, where womens needs have historically been located, then public resources can be legitimately denied or severely limited. Frasers framework of needs interpretation is used to examine school-based programs for young mothers. In general, U.S. programs define the needs of young mothers as narrow and short term, that is, as prenatal needs. However, radically different n...

Talking about sex: the discourses of loveLife peer educators in South Africa

loveLife is a high profile, expensive and controversial nationwide awareness and prevention campaign that has been addressed at young South Africans since 1999. This paper examines the discourses 20 Black youths used to narrate their involvements, satisfactions and difficulties as peer educators. The primary data sources are individual interviews with the peer educators along with a review of printed materials in English and visits to one loveLife Y‐Centre in KwaZulu‐Natal and to the loveLife provincial office in Durban. The analysis develops four themes in the talk of the groundBreakers: knowledge and self‐knowledge, personal development, generational conflict with parents over talking about sex and poverty. These themes are discussed in relation to broader discourses on representations of youth, the pushes and pulls of modernity and tradition, agency and dependency.

Feeling jumpy: teaching about HIV/AIDS

Sexuality education and HIV/AIDS education are arenas of strong feelings. Emotions make sexuality and health lessons peculiar, ‘thrown together’ lessons, and emotions stick to ‘childhood innocence’, ‘growing up too fast’ and even ‘jump’ in response to visuals, say a used condom on an elementary school playground or a pregnant sophomore in a classroom seat. Our analysis foregrounds the teachers’ emotional circuitry around HIV/AIDS lessons, and describes the jumps to and away from sexuality and health education. Curriculum is portrayed as a series of affective jumps, slides, and relays tracked through the circulation of objects of feeling and words of feeling. This analysis contributes a specific focus on the affective dimensions of teaching HIV/AIDS, a topic largely elided within curricular and teaching research. We draw implications for inquiries into thrown togetherness in curriculum and teaching through careful attention to teachers’ vulnerabilities and other feelings.

Scout’s Honor

Scouting is an institution akin to the flag and the constitution as a commonplace representation and evocation of “America.” The statistic that 20 percent of all American boys2 are scouts may underplay its considerable cultural weight as a shaper of citizens and the nation. The intimate relations of “America” and the Boy Scouts (BSA) were aggressively promoted by Theodore Roosevelt and youth policymakers in the early 1900s as an antidote to urban devirilization of young men (Macleod 1983). The first Boy Scouts of America Handbook promoted the organization as necessary to “combat the system that has turned such a large proportion of our robust, manly, self-reliant boyhood into a lot of flat-chested cigarette smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality” (quoted in Shapiro 1997, 22). Outdoor life was prescribed to strengthen individuals’ physical and moral health and to rescue the nation. The current Scout Oath maintains this emphasis on love of country in its opening lines: “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law” (www.scouting.org).

Conceptions of Youth and Children in the Theory Into Practice Archive

Conceptions of youth and children are central to educational practices of teaching and learning, as are the tacit ideas of socialization and development with which they are closely intertwined. But youth and children can stand-in for many dimensions of society and many processes. A recent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City portrayed “the child” as representing families, nations, and the future; young people are also connected with play, experimentation, and health (Museum of Modern Art, 2012). Twentieth-century children and childhood became a paradigm for progressive design thinking, in and out of formal education. Idealized views of children and youth also call up the past in nostalgic recollections of other times and spaces. Thus, youth and children are ready resources for talking about many topics, and they are simultaneously stuck to complex feelings about change, newness, creativity, tradition, optimism, morality, domesticity, and national orderliness. This article reviews 33 selected articles from the Theory Into Practice (TIP) archive with an eye to their assumptions, images, theories, and investments about young people. I am especially interested in the construction of public feelings around young people, as objects of promise, fear, worry, derision, and solicitude. In what ways are elementary and secondary educators and researchers drawn to youth and children, and how might those attachments shape educational research, practice, and policies? I read the articles from TIP as forms of knowledge, with particular topics and kinds of arguments, and as articulations of public feelings about children and youth. I close with some possibilities and challenges for scholars of youth and children.

Algorithmic Noise: Ed Reform 2.0 and Work/Think/Playing With Methods of the Present

As we become more and more algorithmic subjects, algorithms shape the news we access, our political and social views, how and what we buy, as well as the emotional tenor of our lives. Tracking how algorithms work on and with our senses and activate our bodies in different ways requires experimental approaches. To explore affect, algorithms, and method, we work/think/play via two reassemblages of algorithmic tools borrowed from the corporate and art worlds: Moodlens and the Listening Machine. Our algorithmic play with educational reformers’ images and tweets suggests a strategy for fattening our methods and theories to respond to ever-increasing data flows and thinking additively, fractally, and exponentially.

Intimate Possibilities: The Beyond Bullying Project and Stories of LGBTQ Sexuality and Gender in US Schools

In this article, Jen Gilbert, Jessica Fields, Laura Mamo, and Nancy Lesko explore the Beyond Bullying Project, a multimedia, storytelling project that invited students, teachers, and community members in three US high schools to enter a private booth and share stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) sexuality and gender. While recent policy making and educational research have focused on links between LGBTQ sexuality and gender, bullying, and other risks to educational and social achievement, Beyond Bullying aimed to identify the ordinary stories of LGBTQ sexuality and gender that circulate in schools and that an interventionist framing may obscure. After offering an overview of the method in Beyond Bullying, this article connects narratives of LGBTQ desire, family, and school life to the intimate possibilities—who students and teachers are, who they want to be, and the social worlds they want to build—available to them in schools.

Tending toward friendship: LGBTQ sexualities in US schools

In 2014, Beyond Bullying, a research project examining LGBTQ sexualities and lives at school, installed private storytelling booths in three US high schools. Students, teachers, and staff were invited to use the booths to share stories about LGBTQ sexualities—their stories often invoked the pleasures and disappointments of being and having a friend. This article analyzes narratives of friendship as told in the Beyond Bullying storytelling booths. Drawing on Foucault’s (1996) interview, ‘Friendship as a way of life,’ we explore participants’ stories of friendship as heralding ‘new relational modes’ that chart a liminal space between family and sexuality. These relational modes of friendship disrupt the familiar trope of the ‘ally’ in anti-bullying programs and complicate what empirical research on LGBTQ youth calls, ‘peer social support.’ Theorizing friendship allows LGBTQ sexuality in schools to reside in an ethics of discomfort, which accommodates complex social relations and varied forms of desire, intimacy, and yearning.

The Promises of Empowered GirlsEmpowered girls

Everyone loves empowered girls – those “can-do” girls who succeed in school, postpone motherhood, have a voice, star in athletics, and believe they can have it all. Empowered girls solve social problems from intergenerational poverty to traditional gender imbalances in leadership, residual sexism in occupations and schooling, and work-family tensions. Successful girls, and the women they will become, make us happy. This chapter inquires into girl success as a global object of desire and into what empowered girls promise. This analysis explores the ideas of girls that are mobilized and the affective connections around girls, gender, poverty, and success through an examination of two transnational campaigns, Stand Up For Malala and She Can, You Can, to inquire into the conceptualizations of specific girls’ empowerment.