Feeling jumpy: teaching about HIV/AIDS

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• HIV/AIDS curriculum
• sexuality education
• emotions
• education

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Albert Cousins for his many contributions to this study, and we are grateful to the special issue editors and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and help.

Notes

1. Some exceptions to this general neglect include: Boler (1999), Fine (1988), Hargreaves (1998), Zembylas (2002, 2003); their bibliographies provide additional work on emotions. Using phenomenological perspectives, Maxine Greene (2000) has long interrogated the feelings involved in learning and teaching the arts. Diane Ravitch (2003) collects numerous claims about the detrimental emotional effects of particular words and topics on students.

2. Scott Stringer has become a more powerful local politician; in 2006 he became the Manhattan Borough President.

3. The source of these figures was a presentation by a representative of the NYC Department of Education and NYC Health Department collaboration to the HIV Prevention Leadership Summit, 2008 (Calloir, Benson, and Bedell 2008). In representing ‘immigrant’ students in terms of non‐English speaking homes, the statistics also mobilize the conservative politics of English‐only advocates.

4. ‘[T]he link between migration and increased HIV incidence and vulnerability has been demonstrated in a variety of contexts and locations, ranging from seasonal laborers in southern Africa to immigrant populations in the USA and mobile sex workers in many different regions’ (Corrêa, Petchesky, and Parker 2008, 139). However, the links we suggest are ones regarding ‘otherness’ rather than poverty and cultural dislocation.

5. During another period of peak immigration, 1910–1930, when an average of half a million immigrants entered NYC each year, a curriculum of social hygiene was introduced to correct school, occupational, and community failures, since the ‘unsocialized immigrant child was considered a threat to the future of modern society’ (Rousmaniere 1997, 56). Teachers monitored posture and vision and transmitted the dangers of alcohol and tobacco and the benefits of a good diet. By 1920, high school biology teachers taught sex education to separate groups of boys and girls in which morality and sexuality were firmly linked (Rousmaniere 1997, 61). Health, then as now, strove to nip problems in the bud, civilize new arrivals, and protect ‘native’ residents. Working class people, along with immigrants, prostitutes, and gays, almost by definition require additional health education, because they are recognized as lacking sufficient self‐control; they are ‘risk takers’ in contemporary public health language (Lupton 1995).

6. At the time of the study, New York State (NYS) was the second largest recipient of federal monies for abstinence only until marriage programs; NYS received $13,156,824 in 2007 for abstinence only programs (http://www.siecus.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageId=671&grandparentID=478&parentID=487, accessed 18 January 2009).

Thirty‐five states and the District of Columbia require the provision of STI/HIV education and NYS is one of them (http://www.guttmacher.org/statecenter/spibs/spib_SE.pdf, accessed 18 January 2009).

7. Internationally this curricular approach is known as ‘ABC’ for the emphasis on abstinence, being faithful, and using condoms. Several statements from the General Introduction to the NYC HIV/AIDS curriculum evidence the abstinence plus approach, such as this one:

They [students] need to know that abstinence from sexual intercourse is the healthiest, most appropriate sexual choice for young people. At the same time, they should know that correct and consistent use of a latex or polyurethane condom reduces some of the risks associated with sexual intercourse. (http://schools.nyc.gov/Academics/FitnessandHealth/StandardsCurriculum/HIVAIDScurriculum)

Several pages later in the General Introduction, the NYS Board of Regents (the state governing body of schools) affirmed the centrality of abstinence:

The requirement that HIV/AIDS instruction must ‘stress abstinence as the most appropriate and effective premarital protection against AIDS’ means that written and oral instruction on AIDS prevention must devote substantially more time and attention to abstinence than to other means of avoiding HIV infection. It also means that such instruction must always make it clear that no other method of prevention can provide the same 100 percent protection against infection as abstinence can. (http://schools.nyc.gov/Academics/FitnessandHealth/StandardsCurriculum/HIVAIDScurriculum)

8. Trudell’s ethnography of a ninth grade health class is one exception, because she explores the, ‘dilemmas and contradictions created by institutional constraints, student classroom responses, and her [the teacher’s] own social positioning by gender, marital status, and motherhood’ (1992, 204). Other studies that address the conflicts within lessons include: Brantlinger 1992; Farquhar 1991; Fine 1988; Fine and McClelland 2006; Schoepf 2004.

9. There are many perspectives on and theories of emotions. For us, emotions do not reside in persons/objects nor in the social world exclusively, nor are they drives or automatic responses. We consider emotions relationally, as ‘affective economies’ in which the accumulation of affective value (or intensification of feeling) is an effect of the circulation of objects and signs (Ahmed 2004).

See Flatley (2008) for a review of the affective turn across disciplines. There are widely varying views of the distinctions between affect, feeling, and emotions. See Flatley (2008), Ngai (2005), and Probyn (2005) for introductions to the distinctions that some scholars make. We use the terms interchangeably, sidestepping the idea that emotion and affect, for example, ‘follow different logics and pertain to different orders’ (Massumi 2002, 27).

10. In their review of changes in US sexuality education, Darroch, Landry, and Singh (2000) note that a dominant practice is that teachers do not initiate topics, but rather ‘respond to students’ questions’. Teachers at every grade level talked about responding to students’ questions.

11. Kids Say the Darndest Things was an American comedy series hosted by Bill Cosby that aired on CBS from 1998 to 2000. It was based on a popular feature of Art Linkletter’s House Party, a series that aired five days a week for more than 20 years, in which Linkletter interviewed schoolchildren between the ages of five and 10 (Brooks and Marsh 2007).