We live in an over-sexualised culture where sex and sexuality have become part of the public domain. This sexual revolution challenges Judeo-Christian and Islamic norms and boundaries. As such, sexuality education is a sensitive and extremely important issue, and its current implementation in schools has raised public concerns. This book explores the subject, contextualising it within the matrix of Islamic beliefs and practices. Islam binds sexuality and sexual education to a moral grid with rights and obligations, justice and equity. There is a dominant discourse and stereotype around ‘Islamic sexuality’, which presents sex and sexuality as the biggest taboo, fraught with fear and seldom discussed. This book dispels such myths and misconceptions, providing an overview of sexuality education in the modern world and the need for such education.

An exemplary team of professionals provides a comprehensive look at sex education, the heated debate over federal controls, current research and practice, programs, politics, legislation, and cultural and religious issues related to sex and sexuality education. In the groundbreaking Sexuality Education: Past, Present, and Future, the history, practices, and politics of sexuality education are explained. Respected educators, counselors, and therapists marshal both research and educated opinion to offer insights into exactly what is meant by "sex education," what the various approaches are, what "age appropriate" lessons are supported by most professionals, and the impact of government policies. Noting that the need for sexuality education has expanded to adults, from new parents to senior citizens, this unique work also takes readers into classrooms and makes them privy to conversations representing everyone from elementary school students to nursing home residents. These comments reveal the range of unanswered questions about sex—questions that are important for psychological, as well as physical health. In addition, the contributors explore ongoing issues in sexuality education, such as how to present "culturally competent" lessons that include consideration of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The experts also examine sexuality education in other countries, the challenges those countries face, and their victories over unplanned pregnancy and STDs in the global effort to preserve sexual health.

Pleasure and desire have been important components of the vision for sexuality education for over 20 years. This book argues that there has been a lack of scrutiny over the political motivations that underpin research supportive of pleasure and desire within comprehensive sexuality education. In this volume, key researchers in the field consider how discourses related to pleasure and desire have been taken up internationally. They argue that sexuality education is clearly shaped by specific cultural and political contexts, and examine how these contexts have shaped the development of pleasure’s inclusion in such programs. Via such discussions, this volume incites a re-configuration of thought regarding sexuality education’s approach to pleasure and desire.

This book aims to explore what queer thinking and new materialist feminist thought might offer the field of sexuality education. It argues that queer theory in education might be queered further by drawing on feminist new materialism and extending itself to subjects beyond sexual and gender identities/issues, including a focus on ‘things’. Allen explores how new materialism as a form of queer thinking, might be brought to bear on other important issues of social justice such as, classroom cultural and religious diversity.

This authoritative, state-of-the-art Handbook provides an authoritative overview of issues within sexuality education, coupled with ground-breaking discussion of emerging and unconventional insights in the field. With 32 contributions from 12 countries it definitively traces the landscape of issues, theories and practices in sexuality education globally. These rich and multidisciplinary essays are written by renowned critical sexualities studies experts and rising stars in this area and grouped under four main areas: Global Assemblages of Sexuality Education Sexualities Education in Schools Sexual Cultures, Entertainment Media and Communication Technologies Re-animating What Else Sexuality Education Research Can Do, Be and Become Importantly, this Handbook does not equate sexuality education with safer sex education nor understand this subject as confined to school based programmes. Instead, sexuality education is understood more broadly and to occur in spaces as diverse as community settings and entertainment media, and via communication technologies. It is an essential and comprehensive reference resource for academics, students and researchers of sexuality education that both demarcates the field and stimulates critical discussion of its edges. Chapter 2 is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

This book engages contemporary debates about the notion of secularism outside of the field of education in order to consider how secularism shapes the formation of progressive sexuality education. Focusing on the US, Canada, Ireland, Aotearoa-New Zealand and Australia, this text considers the affinities, prejudices, and attachments of scholars who advocate secular worldviews in the context of sexuality education, and some of the consequences that ensue from these ways of seeing. This study identifies and interrogates how secularism infuses progressive sexuality education. It asks readers to consider their own investments in particular ways of thinking and researching in the field of sexuality education, and to think about how these investments have developed and how they shape existing discourses within the field of sexuality education. It hones in on how progressive sexuality education has come to develop in the way that it has, and how this relates to conceits of secularism. This book prompts a consideration of how "progressive" scholarship and practice might get in the way of meaningful conversations with students, teachers, and peers who think differently about the field of sexuality education.

This book seeks to re-envision the purpose and pedagogy of sexuality education, disrupting its conventional instrumental and health related aims. Predominately theoretical in nature, it presses at the traditional limits of sexuality education’s thought by drawing together ideas from disparate disciplinary fields including education, geography, sound studies and new materialist theory. The philosophical thought of Sharon Todd provides an anchor throughout, and is employed to reconceptualize sexuality education as sensuous event. The author calls for a reframing of the relationship of education and ethics, and explores what this means for sexuality education classrooms and relationships between and amongst teachers and students. The book explores pedagogies that invite new forms of student sensibility and open possibilities for engagement in sexuality education in currently uncharted ways. It will appeal to students and experienced academics conducting research related to sexuality, education, educational philosophy, queer studies and new materialisms.

This volume draws attention to and moves beyond the traditional methodological frames that have governed knowledge production in the academic study of Islam. Departing from Orientalist and largely textual studies, the chapters collected herein revolve around three main themes: gender, the political, and what has come to be known as "lived Islam." The first involves ascertaining how to read gender and gender issues into traditional sources. The second encourages an attunement to the often delicate intersection between the spheres of religion and politics. The final provides a corrective to our traditional over-emphasis on the interpretation of texts and a preoccupation with studying (mainly male) elites. Taken as a whole, this volume encourages a multi-methodological approach to the study of Islam. Contributors include Abbas Aghdassi, Aaron W. Hughes, Eva Kepplinger, Taira Amin, Betül Avcı, Ali Abedi Renani and Seyyed Ebrahim Sarparast Sadat, Meral Durmuş and Bahattin Akşit, Walid Ghali, Isabella Crespi and Martina Crescenti, Brian Arly Jacobsen, Pernille Friis Jensen, Kirstine Sinclair, and Niels Valdemar Vinding, Magdalena Pycińska, Zahraa McDonald, Emin Poljarevic, Abdessamad Belhaj.