Risky forms of knowledge: configuring pedagogical practices and their excesses in a sexuality education programme in South Africa

Abstract

Within the context of sexuality education as an HIV prevention strategy, much attention has been given to what content should be taught and the effectiveness of that content in achieving desired goals. While some research has problematised how curricular content is understood or taken-up, what remains largely unquestioned is a pedagogical imaginary of knowledge as a fixed and stable object that can be transmitted from teacher to learner. This paper builds on feminist readings of pedagogy, and in particular the work of Elizabeth Ellsworth, to interrogate what might happen within sexuality education by thinking about knowledge as continually being made. Drawing on data from a year-long ethnographic research study conducted with loveLife, a national HIV prevention programme for young people in South Africa, the paper problematises the perceived boundaries of what is taught and explicitly engages the pedagogical approach as a constitutive part of what can/should/must be known as well as what kind of relation is offered to that knowledge. The question then is how sexuality education might be re-articulated to engage with ongoing and power-laden struggles within configurations of knowledge, and how a pedagogical approach might open those configurations to ways of knowing, and being known, that are more just for more people.

Keywords:

• Youth
• gender
• pedagogy
• South Africa
• HIV prevention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The data presented in this paper are part of a broader ethnographic study conducted from 2012 to 2013, that aimed to explore the experiences of South African educators and youth as they teach and learn about gender, gender relations and empowerment in the context of sexuality education as a strategy for HIV prevention. As such, feminist readings of pedagogy were used in order to explicitly attend to gendered power relations.