Sex education: teachers’ and future teachers’ conceptions and social representations: what relevance for teachers’ training?

Abstract

School-based education programmes are particularly good at providing information and opportunities for skills development and attitude clarification in more formal ways, through lessons within a curriculum. To public health, school sex education is nowadays an important public health issue as it concerns not only youth AIDS prevention (and other sexually transmitted infections) and adolescent pregnancy prevention but also interpersonal relationships and psychosocial issues. So it’s very important to well know the obstacles to sexuality education’s implementation. Therefore school sex education contributes to promote better citizenship. Various researches show the importance of social representations on teachers’ individual conceptions and practices. In this communication we analyse teachers’ and future teachers’ conceptions about sex education by using a questionnaire from 12 countries of Europe, Africa and Middle East, focusing on differences in conceptions related to controlled parameters (e.g. social context, religion, gender). It was applied to 5189 teachers and future teachers and we used standard statistical multivariate methods to investigate the structure of this complex dataset. The results show that teachers’ conceptions and future teachers’ conceptions clearly correlate to social representations linked to the countries’ culture, to religion, and in individual conceptions, especially to the level of belief in God and the level of religious practices. It was also found that the level of teaching (primary versus secondary school) and the training level correlate to individual conceptions on sex education. Detailed results will be presented and discussed at the meeting and we will conclude on their incidence on teacher’s training program.