When it comes to providing effective education on respectful relationships, Australian schools are at a crossroads, writes author and cartoonist Sara Yan.
Besides teaching standard academic subjects, schools are required to teach students about safe, happy and respectful relationships. This includes things like body safety, consent and navigating relationships where there is an imbalance of power.
However, there is wide variability in how schools interpret the curriculum, what topics they choose to address and how much detail is provided. This means that kids have received education that varies in content and quality, leading to an uneven and ultimately unsatisfying experience, while impacting student outcomes.
Australians spend a great deal of their lives at school. It is here that they learn things that influence their future achievement and happiness. Alongside their peers, friends and family, schools play a significant role in shaping children’s perception of relationships. It would therefore behove schools to make the most of their influence by ensuring that respectful relationships education is consistent, comprehensive, engaging and relevant.
But is this currently happening?
In recent years, the Australian government has created various resources, one most notably, Moving the Line. The aforementioned video features a young couple drinking milkshakes. The resource was designed for teens, and the beverages were supposed to act as a metaphor for consent in intimate relationships.
However, the video received widespread criticism, as many found it bizarre and confusing. Disappointingly, the video’s message was portrayed in a vague and contradictory manner. Adults struggled to understand it, which boded poorly on its appropriateness as a resource for teenagers.
What can Moving the Line teach us about designing effective educational resources?
The muddled metaphors and mixed messaging of the video highlight the importance of designing resources that are clear, direct and easily understandable. Doing so ensures that kids will actually absorb what we teach them and use it in their own lives.
After acknowledging the unsuitability of Moving the Line, Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth announced the intention to conduct healthy masculinity trials to combat harmful gender stereotypes. The trials will target school-aged boys, and will be delivered over a range of mediums, including sports clubs and community organisations.
Despite targeting school-aged boys, unfortunately there has been no confirmation that these trials will be implemented in schools.
What can the nascent trials teach us about delivering respectful relationships education?
In addition to designing clear and intelligible resources, education must be readily accessible to those who need it. It makes no sense to disperse this crucial data across scattered locations. Instead, it needs to be embedded where all young people can easily receive it. In other words, it must be implemented in schools.
What else do we need in order to design effective resources?
Many agree that teaching respectful relationships to students is extremely important. But exactly how it should be taught remains highly debated. Research has found that the way students prefer to be taught about relationships differs greatly from how teachers are teaching it.
With this in mind, some educators have moved towards using art to create educational resources, at great benefit to students. This novel approach involves using art as a ‘hook’ to engage students in learning other content, especially content which might otherwise be confusing and overwhelming.
One notable example is the Flat Stanley Project. The US-based project has kids mail copies of the eponymous cartoon character to a school, family member, politician or even a celebrity, who then photographs Stanley in various locations and chronicles his travels in a journal. It builds children’s literacy skills, while promoting an interest in learning about different people and cultures. A phenomenal success, the Flat Stanley Project has been implemented in schools all over the world.
What can we learn from this?
Like in the above example, the arts have been used successfully to teach other curriculum areas. Therefore, there’s no reason that it can’t be used to teach respectful relationships. Considering that most efforts in this space have been absent or unsatisfactory, now would be a great time to rethink the approach to resource design.
Young people are a diverse bunch. Like all of us, they have different learning styles, strengths and abilities. It is therefore imperative that we diversify our pedagogical approach so that we meet students at their level and ‘speak their language.’ The arts speak a universal language. They provide a highly accessibly entry point to learning, making it ideal to incorporate in lesson plans.
Young people must be taught how to have safe, positive, fulfilling relationships. If our educational resources are overwhelming, dull or difficult to comprehend, then students will miss out on these crucial lessons.
With gendered violence on the rise, and the deaths of women by intimate partner rate following suit, we can’t afford for any students to miss them.
About the author
Sara Yan is an author, cartoonist, writer and entrepreneur. She has published comic books and created educational resources on gender-based violence, toxic masculinity and sexism. Her work has been used to hold guided discussions about unsafe relationships, and has aided support and early intervention efforts for child victims of domestic abuse.
