An interactive workshop titled ‘Safeguarding Classrooms' -Comprehensive Sexuality Education’, was conducted by Pratisandhi Foundation on 26 June 2024. Ms Niyati Sharma, Founder and Executive Director and Devanshi Jalundhwala, Associate Head of Peer Education (Pratisandhi Foundation) led the workshop for the day.
Sexuality education can often seem like a concept distant from so called Indian traditions and values. Pratisandhi Foundation, established in 2017, is an ode to the rich history of Indian culture and the place that positive sexuality holds with it. Its mission is to make judgement-free and medically-accurate sexuality education accessible for adolescents and young adults across India. Its aims to empower the youth to make informed decisions about their sexual health without fear.
The workshop commenced with an interactive activity, where the teachers were asked to recall their own favourite teachers and explain what made them feel so. From this activity, Ms. Niyati Sharma moved on to explain how teachers make an impact in their students’ lives and leave a lasting impression in their minds.
The discussion proceeded with a comprehensive overview of what we understand by sex education, and how we must understand that it is not taboo, and children as well as teachers should be aware of age appropriate knowledge about sex and sexuality.
The resource persons indulged the participants in self reflection and asked them to contemplate how they would use descriptive words for gender expressions and sexual orientation. The activities focussed on how ingrained gender stereotypes are and how we don't even realise how such biases are reinforced even unintentionally by teachers in the classroom. A video clip by BBC was shown, whereby it was demonstrated that gender stereotypes start as early as at birth and how unconsciously people around the child create a restrictive environment, where the child acquires certain socially and culturally constructed attributes.
Ms Devanshi Jhalundwala then introduced the Pygmalion Effect. The significance of the concept was highlighted and the strategies for implementing the it, such as setting high expectations by communicating belief in each student's potential, creating a supportive environment, positive reinforcement, addressing biases and ensuring equitable treatment of all students, were discussed.
Through another interesting vocabulary activity, the understanding of terms such as sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, sex, intersex, bisexuality, asexual etc. was discussed. The misconceptions and confusion regarding these terms and their exact meanings were cleared by Ms Sharma adding to a better and enriched understanding of the teachers about queer terminology.
Further, an engaging group activity was organised, where the teachers were divided into groups and diverse classroom situations were presented to each group, wherein they had to come up with strategies to tackle various scenarios relating to the students' sexual awareness and education as they grow up.
It led to a plethora of strategies for dealing with issues that children face while going through puberty, such as providing a safe environment for them, sensitisation, giving examples from real life situations, counselling of students, teachers and parents, healthy digital access, etc.
The workshop concluded with another fun hand gesture activity, which helped the teachers learn a few more techniques to handle sexual curiosity and the evolving phases in children in their growing years, and how becoming a positive role model and building positive relationships are some of the most important factors to help students navigate through the phase. It was established that providing safe and inclusive classroom strategies was the first and foremost step towards safeguarding classrooms.
The workshop proved to be an extremely enriching and enlightening experience for all the teachers and offered a great opportunity to learn about encouraging healthy sexual awareness and hygiene in classrooms.
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