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Abstract
Sex education is principally dealt with as part of the combined subject of Biology and Geology in the Spanish school curriculum. Teachers of this subject are not specifically trained to teach sex education, and thus the contents of their assigned textbooks are the main source of information available to them in this field. The main goal of this study was to determine what information Biology and Geology textbooks provide with regard to sex education and the vision of sexuality they give, but above all to reveal which perspectives of sex education they legitimise and which they silence. We analysed the textbooks in question by interpreting both visual and text representations, as a means of enabling us to investigate the nature of the discourse on sex education. With this aim, we have used a qualitative methodology, based on the content analysis. The main analytical tool was an in-house grid constructed to allow us to analyse the visual and textual representations. Our analysis of the combined Biology and Geology textbooks for Secondary Year 3 revealed that there is a tendency to reproduce models of sex education that take place within a framework of the more traditional discourses. Besides, the results suggested that the most of the sample chosen for this study makes a superficial, incomplete, incorrect or biased approach to sex education.
Notes
Cross-curricular themes are of a globalising nature because they cut across, link and interconnect a number of subjects in the curriculum. This makes them an instrument for covering subjects and themes, fulfilling the goal of obtaining a general overview, in the case in question as part of the content of Health Education. Cross-curricular themes are so-called because they are not intended to be another classroom subject, but to be developed across the length and breadth of the whole educational process, permeating all the other areas of the curriculum or schooling that are designed and delivered on a year-by-year basis.
The full Spanish title of the law being Ley Orgánica 2/2010, de 3 de marzo, de salud sexual y reproductiva y de la interrupción voluntaria del embarazo.
Galicia is one of the several self-governing regions that together make up Spain, a status that grants it, amongst other circumstances, independence as far as educational policy is concerned. Galicia has full regulatory and administrative powers in the education sector as a whole, regardless of levels, modalities and specialisations. The Galician government is responsible for staff appointments and school organisation.
Spanish textbooks were subjected to rigid ideological censorship for more than 40 years. However, towards the end of the Franco regime, in its last regulations governing school textbooks (dated 20 July 1974) the Ministry of Education stated that once textbooks had been officially approved by the Ministry schools were free to choose those that they considered to be the most suitable for the purposes of the teaching and learning process (Puelles, Citation2007). From 1998 onwards, there has been no prior intervention by the authorities regarding the content publishers include in their textbooks, and schools are at complete liberty to choose the textbooks they consider to be the best. The educational authorities can only impose sanctions if a textbook runs counter to the values and principles enshrined in the Spanish constitution.
Ley Orgánica de Educación 2/2006, of 3 May.
This study is part of the research project Los modelos de educación sexual presentes y ausentes en los libros de texto de Educación Secundaria: una mirada al área de Ciencias Naturales (models of sex education present in and absent from secondary school textbooks: a look at the area of Natural Sciences), carried out in 2009 by Belén García-Cabeza within the framework of her PhD studies in Innovation and Research in Education.
A study published in 2001 concluded that Santillana, Anaya, SM, Vicens-Vives and Ecir were the publishing groups whose textbooks were used the most in Spanish classrooms, a conclusion that does not greatly differ from the reality of school classrooms in A Coruña at the time of writing. For further information, see Prats, Trepat, Peña, Valls, and Urgell (Citation2001).
Knowledge acquired through the learning process can be of a conceptual, procedural or attitudinal nature. The word conceptual refers to information (facts, data or concepts) that is presented in a merely declaratory manner, with no need to establish any kind of meaningful relationship between the individual parts. Procedural content is oriented towards the acquisition of knowledge as ‘know-how’ or how to perform certain actions. Attitudinal content guides the learning of conceptual and procedural content and is directly related to the development of attitudes, values and norms that enable a person to relate appropriately to his or her environment.
When referring to the depth of textbook content we follow the classification proposed by Mantilla de Ardilla (Citation1986), which distinguishes between three levels: operative, logical and critical, corresponding to the questions what, how and why, respectively.
