The Provision of Reproduction Knowledge: Policy and Politics of Sexuality Education

My dissertation studies the provision of reproduction knowledge in school-based sexuality education from a comparative European perspective, with a specific focus on German-speaking countries. Sexuality education is a key channel through which knowledge is transmitted and remains a primary source of reproduction information for the majority of pupils. What is more, people’s knowledge about reproduction plays a crucial role in shaping their reproductive experiences and trajectories. Not least due to this, discussions surrounding sexuality education persist as a significant cultural battleground where debates revolve around notions of sexuality generally, but also around the level of state involvement in the provision of reproduction knowledge. Central to my dissertation is the notion of the “curriculum as policy”, locating school curricula as documents that embody deliberate rationales for knowledge provision. Consequently, I analyse sexuality education curricula from a policy perspective, focusing on expanding research on sexuality education which currently lacks consistent conceptualisations and thorough comparative empirical applications. My research centres on the German-speaking countries of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Their close similarity in education systems and socio-political structures allow for employing a most-similar-systems-design approach. Through this framework, I aim to comprehensively explore three fundamental aspects of sexuality education: a) sexuality education curricula as such, b) differences in curricula between countries and over time, and c) the politics of sexuality education (curricula). I approach these aspects in the three articles of my dissertation and outline them below.

First, I investigate systematic differences in types of knowledge as provided in sexuality education curricula. As a first step, and given a lack of thorough conceptualisations, this article introduces a policy perspective to conceptualise sexuality education curricula, employing two dimensions: prescriptiveness (the level of predefined content) and comprehensiveness (the number of topics covered). This approach quantifies curriculum content and evaluates the degree of state control and teacher discretion, resulting in four ideal-types of reproduction knowledge provision: residual, selective, broad, and extensive. Empirically, the article applies this framework to currently applicable sexuality education curricula in the 16 German federal states. With this, normative implications arising from different levels of state responsibility in the provision of reproduction knowledge are emphasised, offering critical insights into the ongoing discourse on state involvement in reproductive processes and the significance of school curricula in social policy.

The second and third parts of my dissertation focus on the politics of sexuality education and are based on a novel database of school curricula from Austria, the German federal states, and Swiss cantons, covering the years 1970 to 2020. I apply computational text analysis methods – a novel endeavour for the analysis of curricula – thereby contributing methodologically to approaches for analysing large numbers of school curricula. The dataset thus allows me to systematically observe how sexuality education has changed both over time and across and within countries during a period marked by significant changes in the regulation of reproduction and sexuality. Analytically, changes in sexuality education policy lie at a particular research intersection: While it has been and continues to be a contested issue, similar to other “gender” issues, it is also inherently embedded in education policy. To understand the dynamics of change in sexuality education policy, I approach the topic from two perspectives: First, I utilise the morality policy framework and ask how religion and government ideology can explain changes in sexuality education policy. Second, I take a gendered perspective on sexuality education and ask whether and how feminist advances, and specifically the increased political representation of women, has translated into different topics being included in sexuality education curricula.