Reconsidering and Repositioning HIV and AIDS Within Teacher Education

Using the Higher Education HIV and AIDS module as an example of current HIV education practice, this article analyses contemporary orientations towards HIV and AIDS education in initial teacher education programmes. There is a need to refocus HIV teacher education to take cognisance of where people are at in their own contexts and also to consider the inclusion of orientations that disrupt dominant approaches that often assume a virus infecting a decontextualised body. The latter leads us to motivate for a move towards a pedagogy informed by a holistic framework, in which curriculum content and the context of learning are held in concert with each other, and where little in the pedagogic act is taken for granted

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

‘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