by Brian Flaherty, Partners in Sex Education
One of the truly enjoyable things about the CSE conference is that the programs tend to be created and presented by professional educators – by people who spend a good amount of time thinking about the best way to present information so that they reach a variety of learning styles all at once. Most of the presentations I went to were done using engaging activities that had participants moving around, learning from each other as well as from the presenter.
For example, “Sex and Nature: Lessons on Diversity from Animal Sexual Behavior,” one of the many highlights of the conference, began with pairs of participants being given slips of paper. Some of the slips described sexual traits and peculiarities of particular animals, &other named the animals themselves. We the participants had to get up – in pairs – and find the pair who had the slip that matched ours. Ours – my neighbor and I – described a soft animal with a penis as long as it’s body, whose mate chewed off the penis after sex; we hunted around for the pair with a slip of paper that read “banana slug.” Once we found the slip of paper that matched ours, we had to describe it to the group. The genius of this activity: it got us moving around, talking to and learning from one another. Another activity in this workshop was a creative visualization of the production of a “swollen ovary” of a tree –culminating with our eating a piece of that ovary: an apple slice. The presenter , Marlene Pray, was fantastic –varying the ways in which she brought us great and useful information. Sure: we all learned about the great diversity of nature, that “no species has been found in which homosexual behavior has not been shown to exist”(providing a great retort to too many quick-to-judge students). But we also had a great time while learning these things, reinforcing what we took away.
