(I’m distracting myself from the election results. Successfully?)
Our YPAR project is at the point where we’re working on disseminating our findings. A month or so ago, we brainstormed all the ways we wanted to use the information which eventually led to sharing the information with legislators and the Governor of Minnesota. But, before we get to that place we talked about sharing the information with our peers (other young people as well my peers in the sex ed field) and creating ways for them to use the data. To get started with this, we applied to present at QQuest, a local festival-conference for queer young people, and will be presenting at the middle school day.
Ok. So. Our research was young people’s opinions about sex ed in Minnesota. There is quite a range of experiences middle school students have with sex ed, with probably a lot of them not receiving much sex ed. The question for us has been how we translate our findings into an interactive presentation that is relevant to middle school aged folks.
We’ve worked on a presentation that focuses not so much on specific questions related to content (e.g., “Did you learn about consent?”) as on broader questions about how teachers and sex ed should work for queer young people. As an expert of sorts about teaching middle schoolers, I brought up the importance of asking questions and having activities that are concrete rather than abstract and having activities that engage a variety of learning styles. Rather than going through results from our research, we are asking the participants their opinions and, true to our mission of engaging the people who it’s impacting the most, hearing their suggestions about how to improve sex ed. I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes!