'You need to have some guts to teach': Teacher preparation and characteristics for the teaching of sexuality and HIV/AIDS education in South African schools.

Using in-depth interviews, we asked sexuality educators in South Africa about their own professional preparation and what they believed were necessary educator characteristics for teaching Sexuality Education. Our findings show that our teachers taught Sexuality Education without any appropriate qualification or preparation, but because they had a lighter teaching load and had room to take on more teaching hours. Nevertheless, they all mention that 'not anybody can teach Sexuality Education'. Drawing on Shulman's taxonomy of knowledge and Freire's concept of critical consciousness, we attempt to make meaning of the teachers' responses and their relevance for the teaching of Sexuality Education.

South African life orientation teachers: (not) teaching about sexuality diversity.

Although South Africa is one of the most progressive countries in the world in terms of constitutional and legislative rights for LGBT individuals, education is one of many social arenas where these ideals are not carried out. Interviews with 25 practicing teachers revealed very little description of practice, but widely divergent understandings around sexual diversity that drew on various authoritative discourses, including religious teachings, educational policy, science, and the powerful human rights framework of the South African constitution. Implications for teacher education include directly engaging with these discourses and providing training, teaching materials, and practical guidelines based on existing policy.

Silence, nostalgia, violence, poverty : what does 'culture' mean for South African sexuality educators?

In in-depth interviews with 25 Life Orientation teachers in South Africa, we found that teachers spontaneously drew upon notions of culture to explain and justify people's sexual beliefs and behaviours and their own role as educators. Drawing upon a Bakhtinian understanding of discourse, we apply critical semantic analysis to explore how culture is deployed as a discursive strategy. Teachers draw upon particular understandings of culture available to them in their social contexts. Furthermore, the substitution of the word 'culture' for a series of other phenomena (silence, violence and poverty) affords these phenomena a certain authority that they would otherwise not wield. We argue, first, that systems teacher education and training needs to (re)define culture as dynamic, interactive and responding to, but not determined by, socio-historical realities. Beyond this, teachers need to learn how to critically engage with cultural practices and perceptions and to be provided with some basic tools to do so, including more sophisticated understandings of cultural and training in dialogic methodologies. Teaching sexuality education in multicultural societies such as South Africa will require meaningful engagement in intercultural dialogues that may need to include voices that have traditionally been excluded from school spaces.