Smellwalks as sensuous pedagogy in sexuality education

ABSTRACT

In our conversations about sexuality, Kathleen Quinlivan and I mused over how a subject as potentially vibrant and life-enhancing as sexuality education could so often be taught in uninspiring and disembodied ways. Students’ existing critique of much sexuality education is that it is typically disease and danger focused, marginalises the sensuous body and fails to address their lived experiences. Motivated by the wildness and adventure that Kathleen inspired in her work, this paper is offered as a provocation that attempts to attend to sexuality education’s pedagogy differently. Employing the idea of ‘smellwalks’ as an educational activity, it proposes a reconceptualisation of the subject in ways that endeavour to engage the body and the sensuous. The notion of smellwalk pedagogy challenges the conventional aims of sexuality education and how these are mobilised in the classroom. In the spirit of Kathleen’s interest in unruly aspects of sexuality and gender, smellwalks seek to reconfigure the purpose and pedagogy of sexuality education and the nature of sexuality itself. The point of thinking about such a pedagogical experiment is to capture the sense of playfulness and adventure currently missing from most sexuality programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Smellwalks
• pedagogy
• sensuous education
• sensory studies
• multi-sensory methodology
• multi-sensory pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).