Book Description

Teaching Safer Sex may be the most important contribution the CFLE has made to the pedagogy of sexuality education. It was 1988 when most HIV/AIDS education was about epidemiology and the function of T-cells that the CFLE created its groundbreaking first edition of Teaching Safer Sex. Ten years later, many of the innovative strategies from that manual were classics in the field and had been incorporated into hundreds of curricula that aimed to develop the motivation, knowledge, comfort and skills essential for safer sex behaviors. It was time for a second edition, and The NEW Teaching Safer Sex aimed to expand the scope of safer sex education to include the social context of people's sexual behavior. Paulo Freire's ideas put forward in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed were important in the development of the new manual, which recognized that in a society so dangerously ambivalent about teaching its young people about their sexual safety, they needed to learn about the powerful societal, as well as personal, barriers to healthy sexual behavior. Twenty lessons were designed to promote critical consciousness about social messages as well to create a climate where communication about sexuality is normal and the use of safer sex is the expected behavior.