Sex education meets interculturality – German biology teachers’ views on the suitability of specific topics and their personal competencies

ABSTRACT

Current developments such as globalisation, migration and the movement of refugees have led to an enhanced cultural diversity of learners globally. Consequently, teachers in schools are faced with the growing demand to integrate interculturality into their teaching practices. Fifteen biology teachers in Germany were interviewed regarding the opportunities and challenges presented by sexuality education, especially taking into account learners’ cultural diversity, to assess the resources available to them for managing the intercultural dimensions of sexuality education topics. Interview data were analysed using a mixed methods approach that combined qualitative content analysis and quantification of codes. The results revealed a high degree of homogeneity in the assessment of sexuality education topics’ intercultural potential among teachers who attached the highest level of importance to sexual self-determination. However, a comparison between teachers’ attribution of the topic’s intercultural potential and their corresponding self-assessment revealed the opposite. The implications for future teacher education are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Culturally responsive teaching
• sexuality education
• intercultural education
• teacher education

Acknowledgments

We thank all the teachers and coders who participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

We declare no potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1. Here, cultures are understood as living environments (including religion) created by the actions of members through interaction with their surroundings. Cultures are constantly changing and are neither completely separate from each other nor internally homogeneous. The term ‘intercultural’ refers to a process of interaction between individual members of different living environments (Bolten 2012).

2. This does not overlook the fact that through these developments and new forms of communication, cultural entanglement and interdependency also exist, as Welsch’s (1999) concept of transculturality implies.

3. This includes all independent teaching activities in biology at secondary schools, as well as Sachunterricht at elementary schools connecting topics from natural and social sciences.

4. The content of the cards was in the German language. All interview data were first transcribed verbatim in German and then translated to English.

5. Using the Coding Agenda (Table 1), five of the 15 interview segments were coded by a second person. Coding differences were then discussed (see ‘subjective assessment’ [Guest, MacQueen, and Namey 2012]). For some texts, agreement on one or more codes was reached, while for other texts, a different code remained. After this process, intercoder reliability was calculated (using Cohen’s kappa due ordinal scaling (Kuckartz 2016).

6. The coding agendas in Tables 2 and 3, as well as all the justifications identified by the first author, were given to another second coder to discuss coding differences. The given intercoder reliability reflects the percentage agreement following this process (Guest, MacQueen, and Namey 2012).

7. The term ‘intersectional’ describes approaches that ‘simultaneously consider the meaning and consequences of multiple categories of identity, difference, and disadvantage’ (Cole 2009, 170).