Sex Education

Preparing Educators for Relationships and Sexuality Education: Critical Perspectives on Teacher Education and Professional Development

 This special issue of Sex Education journal focuses specifically on dedicated teacher education and professional learning programmes in relationships and sexuality education (RSE). We welcome contributions that examine formal preparation routes, continuing professional development programmes, and practice-based pedagogic innovations specifically designed for those who teach RSE as a distinct subject or area of work. This includes pre-service and in-service, short-term professional development initiatives, school-based professional learning communities, and community-engaged approaches. What unites these diverse forms of learning is their explicit engagement with efforts to prepare educators for the relational, ethical, and contextual complexities of what it means to be and become an RSE educator.

Despite growing recognition of the importance of RSE,  limited attention has been paid to the unique aspects of teacher education and professional learning in supporting educators as they navigate the relational, ethical, and contextual complexities of teaching RSE. Educators tasked with delivering RSE often report feeling unprepared, under-supported, and constrained by training models and teaching traditions that prioritise content delivery over critical pedagogical engagement. Too often, RSE teacher preparation and continuing development is reduced to prescriptive content-focused workshops with little attention to the relational, affective, and ethical dimensions that make RSE teaching both challenging and transformative.

Recent scholarship has begun to explore what it might mean to move beyond dominant competency-based training models. This work recognises RSE educators not as implementers of externally mandated curricula, but as curriculum-makers who actively negotiate and co-construct meaning in dialogue with young people, communities, and the wider sociocultural and institutional contexts in which learning occurs. Teacher education has a critical role to play in supporting this work, yet limited attention has been paid to how teacher education might cultivate the imaginative, ethical, and context-responsive capacities that RSE teaching demands.

This special issue of the journal responds to this gap by foregrounding teacher education and professional learning as vital sites for reimagining the purpose and practice of what it means to be and become an RSE educator. Drawing on critical, queer, feminist, posthuman, and decolonial theories  of education the issue invites contributions that rethink how teacher education (across the continuum from pre-service preparation to ongoing professional learning) might cultivate teachers' capacities to work relationally, navigate uncertainty, and engage young people as partners in curriculum-making.

We are particularly interested in work that examines how dedicated RSE focused teacher education programmes and initiatives address critical dimensions of RSE teaching, such as working with the diversity of young people’s lived identities, what it might mean to engage critically with the affective and relational dimensions of learning in RSE classrooms, and how to navigate wider level controversy, resistance and backlash.

Aligned with Sex Education journal's commitment to publishing research across diverse educational, community, and cultural contexts, this special issue welcomes contributions from multiple disciplines, including education, sociology, youth studies, public health, cultural and media studies, and psychology. We welcome innovative, empirical, conceptual, and methodological submissions from a wide range of geographical, cultural, and policy contexts, particularly work that engages with the queer, Indigenous, postcolonial, and intercultural dimensions of teacher education.

Possible topics for inclusion are:

• Pedagogical approaches which engage  educators in a critical consideration of the  relational, ethical, and contextual complexities of teaching RSE 
• How identity, positionality, and reflexivity shape teachers and teacher educators professional learning and practice
• Teacher educators' experiences of navigating complexity, uncertainty, and relational ethics when preparing RSE educators
• Affirming diversity, inclusion, and social justice in RSE teacher preparation across different cultural and geographical contexts
• Creative, arts-based, embodied, and participatory orientated pedagogical approaches to RSE initial education and professional learning
• School-based and/or community-based initiatives that offer unique insights into the sites of, and for, RSE professional learning
• Navigating policy contexts, institutional cultures, and community expectations in RSE teacher education
• International and comparative perspectives on preparing teachers to teach RSE