(Play)Building Sexuality Education: Using participatory drama as queer pedagogy to explore youth experiences of sexuality education

Abstract

The recent sex education curriculum update in Ontario sparked controversy in the media, reflecting a moral panic around sex education in Canada. Since its introduction in 2010 and implementation in 2015, debates ensued over the content of the curriculum, however, little attention was on the form through which it is delivered. This study explores experiences of sexuality education to critically reflect on the ways adolescents navigate discourses of sexuality through formal and informal education. In this thesis, I review discourses of sexuality education and argue that queer pedagogies can be used to foster critical, and queer spaces to negotiate sexuality. I conceptually frame playbuilding (Belliveau, 2006; Norris, 2009; Weigler, 2001), a drama-based research methodology, as a queer pedagogy and mobilize it in this study to co-author a play with participants based on our collective experiences. This participatory drama-based research process involved an exploration of themes and constructs in sexuality education, translating these into dramatic forms, and performing the co-authored scenes to an audience. Through playbuilding, this research tells critical stories of six individuals negotiating their experiences of the discourses of sexuality education. I explore the ways queer pedagogies in sexuality education and playbuilding, in particular, can create spaces wherein youth can exercise agency as sexual subjects and critically reflect on adolescent sexuality.