Teaching Human Sexuality

Sprecher, S. and Pocs, Ollie. (1987). Teaching Sexuality: Two Techniques for Personalizing the Large Class. Teaching Sociology. Vol. 15. No.3 pp. 268-272


Since the lesson plan that I am currently working on is focused on human sexuality, I thought I would review a relevant article for this week. However, the article was hit and miss. Two major drawbacks were that it was written for university professors lecturing 300 or more (My classes are capped at 50). The second drawback was that it was written for a professor teaching a human sexuality course (I am just teaching the topic briefly in an intro class). With that stated, it did offer some useful techniques.

First, it recommends re-action/application papers that are revised by the professor and returned throughout the semester weekly (in line with Bain's ideas of learning being a work in progress/providing student feedback). I have already decided to include weekly response papers i my sumer courses, however in larger course it can be incredibly time consuming. The Authors state that they address this problem in the abstract, however they just state that its really not that time consuming. My guess is that they both had TA's reviewing the paper's and providing feedback, which is fine but community college teachers do not have that luxury.

They also propose critical reading assignments. In this assignment students find their own article concerning sexuality and critically analyze it. What messages does it send? What does it assume? How is our cultural norms around sexuality represented in the article? etc. They aso mention doing a response paper topic on "How would you respond to someone close to you coming out of the closet", which I think would be a great discussion started.