Busy April!

Hello again! April was a busy, exciting month for me. (And, yes, I realize that May is almost over too!). There's been so many moments in the past month and a half where I've had the thought that what is happening is something awesome to share. Here's a couple of the awesome April-May events of my life...

I got to see Peggy Orenstein speak. Some of my co-workers presented at a really cool event on supporting teens. We did workshops on healthy relationships for teen participants and It's That Easy workshops for parents/caregivers. Peggy Orenstein was the keynote speaker at the event, which I was really excited about. I have read two of her books,  Cinderella Ate My Daughter and Girls and Sex. Both were insightful and compelling reads that I'd recommend, especially if the socialization of female-bodied folks is not a topic you've explored much. The points and stories she shared in her talk resonate with what I have experienced, seen in my research and in classrooms. We need to really assess the messages we are sending to all young people around sexuality. If you haven't read her books, heard her on public radio, or seen her TEDTalk, you should check them out.  

I've been doing a number of parent/caregiver workshops myself, which have been such wonderful experiences. As I mentioned above, we use the It's That Easy approach for these workshops. I really view my role as a facilitator to do just that - to pose questions, lead activities, and provide responses that support participants. I have felt so honored to hear the stories, concerns and questions from the parents who have attended, honored that they have trusted such a personal part of their lives with me and my coworkers. Parent and caregivers play an enormous role the sexual decision-making of young people, but that doesn't mean that it's easy for them to have conversations with their children about sexuality. 

Programming to Address teen pregnancy prevention through youth development

When I first started at the Annex, I was a facilitator of an evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention program, the Teen Outreach Program (TOP). Given that I had just finished my MPH where we spent a great deal of time discussing the value of evidence-based programs, I was pretty jazzed to be involved with one myself. We were implementing TOP through federal funding for teen pregnancy prevention, yet the TOP program is a youth development program that had little sexuality content. I hadn't spent a great deal of time prior to starting at the Annex thinking about the intersection of positive youth development and sexuality education, and so facilitating TOP was a big learning experience for me as I integrated the two. I think I was a little confused early on about how I could possibly be working to improve sexual health without ever talking about sexual health. But now, imagining implementing and facilitating sexuality education without doing it through a positive youth development lens seems as silly as not thinking of sexuality as a birth to death, complex, holistic concept. 

These days we're no long implementing TOP, but we are funded to implement a different evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention (and broader sexual risk-taking prevention) program called Project AIM. The program uses focuses on middle-school aged youth imagining a positive potential future self, and then building motivation to safeguard that imagined self. Myself and my coworkers, as well as others in Hennepin County, are currently in year 2 of our implementation of Project AIM. While I have spent a lot of time thinking about youth development and sexual health promotion, I find myself still learning and reflecting about this through our implementation of Project AIM.

I'm very excited because the program and our work is being highlighted in an article on Healthy You, Healthy Hennepin, an online public health magazine. And, it just was published! It says a lot about the program as well as the work Better Together Hennepin and the Annex have been doing, which is great! I hope that more people get engaged with our work, and expand their understanding of the range of programming designed to decrease sexual risk-taking behavior. 

Sex ed through a positive youth development lens

The longer I work in sexuality education, the more I realize both the complexity of the work and the exciting opportunities myself and others in the field have to challenge ourselves to grow, adapt, and problem-solve. When I started working at the Annex, I was challenged to not only broaden my understanding of how adults engage with young people, but to also walk to the talk. I truly believe that having authentic partnerships with young people and framing our work through a positive youth development lens makes sexuality education more engaging, effective, and enjoyable. Which is why we decided to submit our proposal for SXSWEdu on facilitating sexuality education through a positive youth development lens. Today, March 8, we'll be facilitating a conversation about folks about positive youth development, sexuality education, and what that means for young people. 

For me, positive youth development means celebrating the strengths and contributions of young people right now and supporting them in taking control of their lives during the tremendous growth of adolescence. It's about future thinking, but does not designate achievement, importance, and contribution to solely adulthood. The strengths-based focus of positive youth development integrates perfectly with a holistic conceptualization of sexuality, where sexuality education focuses on far more than simply the prevention of unwanted outcomes like sexually transmitted infections. Because, as the WHO said, sexual health is about more than the absence of illness and infirmity, it's also about the possibility of safe and pleasurable experiences. Facilitating sexuality education in this way means that opportunities are provided for young people to share their expertise, to explore their values, develop decision-making skills, and plan for their future based on their understanding of their own lives. While we, as sexuality educators, do have expertise, each person's sense of their self as a sexual being and their life is unique. We can provide facts and resources, but ultimately as young people continue their lives they have to be the ones evaluating their goals, experiences, and lives in order to make decisions about their sexual health. That can take a great deal of work and skill. Facilitating sex ed through a positive youth development lens can help young people develop these important life skills that are essential through the rest of their lives. 

If you're not able to be part of our SXSWEdu conversation, check out our slides! 

Learning and Connecting at SXSWEDU 2017

Well, I'm in Austin! Have been for a couple days actually. It was great having a day before SXSWEDU to just explore the city, and get a feel for it. We checked out the Hope farmers market and a pop up market. More importantly, we have had a some tasty food, including like 5 pounds of crawfish. It was a whole experience, relaxing outside munching on some lil mudbugs. Even with it being a little rainy and overcast, the weather has been super pleasant for us Minnesotans. 

Monday was the first day of SXSWEDU and we were excited to see the range of topics covered and meet others passionate about education. I think both of us were particularly struck by how prevalent tech, design thinking, and makers spaces are. Maybe this is something others who are more wholly working in the education field are already aware of, but it was interesting to see how people are innovating to use tech processes and products in education. I'd like to learn more about how tech could help with addressing some of the structural, institutionalized problems in the education system.

In the spirit of trying to stretch ourselves and learn new things, we attended a workshop on how to build an education app. It was super engaging going through the process of creating a persona and putting together an app that, if I do say so myself, might really be a stellar way for young people to access sexuality information and local resources. It's only four sticky notes right now, but I'm going to put Mathias on it (since he's actually capable of doing something with it). 

We also.....

• learned about is how educators can design and use escape rooms, which we are totally going to experiment with. 
• attended a panel on using tech to increase parent engagement. There are some people out there who are really leveraging data and tech, but I think we'd need to think a little more about what this means for our work. 
• a discussion about race in higher education, and why we need to talk about it with students, administrators, and policy makers

We're excited about all that's to come! Especially the part when we get to present....

A good thing to be trending downwards

There's some new research from the Guttmacher Institute out on non-permanent contraceptive failure rates that I wanted to share.  When someone decides what method of contraception is best for them, an important factor for a lot of people is likelihood of failure. Using data from the National Survey of Family Growth, the researchers found that while there are some things that haven't changed (like LARCS still have lower failure rates than condoms), the rate of failure for all methods has decreased. That includes condom use, which is particularly interesting given that condoms also protect against sexually transmitted infections, over the counter, and accessible to male-bodied people. Reduced rates of contraceptive failures means increased numbers of people who have better control over their sexual health and lives.

There are a couple possible explanations. One could be that more people are using LARCs, which are more effective. Another is increased knowledge about contraception and improved, consistent usage. The researchers suggest some interesting avenues for future research and public health efforts. The researchers noted some disparities based on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. As with many things, while this research is very encouraging and yet, there is still a lot of work to do.

Moment of reflection for you...

Research by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy shows that teens identify parents as the biggest influence on their sexual health. At work, we do great workshops with parents and caregivers of teens using a wonderful approach developed in Minnesota by some smart, talented people called It's That Easy. The workshops provide support to and empower parents, caregivers, and families to have conversations with the young people in their lives about sexuality topics. One of the activities at the start of the workshops has participants reflect on their experiences with sexuality education. We have them line up along a spectrum, like in the picture below.  It's really interesting, the range of experiences and feelings people have about how they learned about sexuality.

So, today, take some time and think about where you'd be. What was your sexuality education like? Who told you about it? Do you feel like you got everything you needed? What was missing?

And, what would you want the young people in your life to say? How do we get there?

Talking about love on Valentine's Day

I'm not one to super celebrate Valentine's Day, but there was a story on NPR today that I wanted to celebrate. It's a great interview with a school counselor, Phyllis Fagell, about why and how we talk with young people about love and relationships that hit on so many of the points I want people to understand about teens and the scope of sexuality education. Love and navigating relationships are super important to teens (which shouldn't seem surprising if you were a teen once) and something that should be part of how we talk with them about sexuality. Young people learn about relationships from a variety of places ranging from their families to the media. And the messages they receive also range, from healthy to unhealthy.

The majority of sexuality education focuses on prevention. Prevention of pregnancy and sexuality transmitted infections, not the prevention of broken hearts. I think part of that is the limitations of how people conceptualize healthy sexuality, and part of it is how adults think about teen relationships. Based on conversations with adults and teens, it seems like adults often think teen relationships are temporary or not serious. A dangerous thing about thinking that way is that it ignores how sexual decision-making is influenced by relationships, and it can lead to dismissal of concerns young people have about unhealthy or abusive relationships. Talking about relationships and love also just plain honors the intelligence and independence of young people, as Fagell points out. Fagell also has some wonderful advice about how to talk about the topic without infringing on family values, talking with younger teens, and for parents on how to broach the topic of relationships. Check it out!

positive youth development

In the past few weeks, I've facilitated training and discussion about positive youth development, and I've been thinking a lot about it.  There are many similarities between the goals of positive youth development and those of high quality, fact-based sexuality education. I am a big fan of the keys to healthy youth development identified by Gisela Konopka , the "mother of social work," who provided leadership in and made huge contributions to the field of youth development. I'd recommend looking into Konopka's life and work, it is really extraordinary. (I will give you a fun fact to get you interested: May 24th is Gisela Konopka Day in Minnesota.) Konopka's (1973) requirements for healthy youth development include:

• Participate as citizens, as members of a household, as workers, as responsible members of society
• Gain experience in decision-making
• Interact with peers, and acquire a sense of belonging
• Reflect on self, in relation to others and discover self by looking outward as well as inward
• Discuss conflicting values and formulate one's own value system
• Experiment with one's own identity, with relationships to other people, with ideas; try out various roles without having to commit oneself irrevocably
• Develop a feeling of accountability in the context of a relationship among equals
• Cultivate a capacity to enjoy life

Sexuality education should provide opportunities for all of these things. We always try to provide opportunities for skills practice around communication skills, decision-making, and values clarification. It's also about young people interacting with their peers, reflecting on their self, developing empathy for others, and reflecting on norms. I think one of the most important things we can do as sexuality educators is to show that there are nonjudgmental, open people out there who are willing to talk about what is often deeply personal and unfortunately uncomfortable. That is a key way to get at the last thing on the list, cultivating a capacity to enjoy life. For so many people, especially young people, sexuality is only framed as negative and risky. Obviously, it is important to understand safer sex practices, but it is also important to develop a healthy understanding of one's self and body especially in the context of culture and relationships. And, it's important for us, as educators, to remember that sexuality is about so much more than prevention. More on this in the future!

Konopka, G. Requirements for the Healthy Development of Adolescent Youth in Adolescence, VIII, 31, Fall, 1973.

It's about motivation

Because I <3 motivational interviewing.

Heading to SXSWEdu

Exciting stuff! My talented colleague and I will be at SXSWEdu in March to talk about the importance of positive youth development in the implementation and facilitation of sexuality education. Our presentation is Wednesday, March 8. If you're looking for more information, check out the SXSWEdu website. We're looking forward to talking about our work and connecting with others about what they're doing. There are a lot of challenges in education today, but there are also a lot of great people doing innovative work!

Why sex ed?

Why sex ed? you might be wondering. Sex ed can often seem like a sensitive, awkward topic. Well, I'll just say that that sentiment is often so culturally rooted. I am working in sexuality education, or sex ed, because while we all have familial or cultural values that are important, there is some basic information that all of us deserve to know. I'm a public health professional, and someone who cares about the social emotional development and positive development of young people. A lot of people think sex ed is purely about pregnancy prevention or the prevention of sexually transmitted infections. Of course those are important topics to cover,  but high quality fact-based sexuality education is also about sexuality as a much broader topic that encompasses social emotional learning, media literacy, communication skills, and many other topics. This is because we are all sexual beings from birth to death, and being a sexual being is about more than simply the prevention of negative or undesired health outcomes. It's about who we are! It's about feeling good about our bodies, being in healthy relationships, recognizing when something is wrong, among other things.

I am passionate about sexuality education because I think, when done right by great professionals, it can have a hugely important impact on the overall wellbeing and development of young people. Why and how to do this is what I'll be writing about in upcoming posts!