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An analysis of the National Curriculum Statement indicates a strong focus on the promotion of knowledge in local context, whilst being sensitive to global imperatives. This implies that learning experiences must reflect local realities first; a call which compels teachers to adapt their teaching with the purpose to make learning relevant and meaningful for the learner. It is therefore an appropriate time to ask the key question: Do Life Orientation teachers (re)connect their teaching-learning on social and environmental responsibility with learners' living environments to adhere to curriculum requirements of relevance and meaningfulness? The qualitative data obtained from 13 structured classroom observations, with specific reference to the topic social and environmental responsibility, revealed that Life Orientation teachers experienced challenges. Based on these qualitative findings the researchers propose place-based education as an appropriate teaching-learning strategy to (re) connect social and environmental responsibility with the learner's living environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learners living in challenging socio-economic circumstances face limited opportunities for further education and employment. In this context, formal career guidance which merely provides information about specific jobs and how to access them may be of little use. This article explores the usefulness of participatory visual strategies as a pedagogical tool for teachers to help learners think more critically, realistically and hopefully about their future life opportunities. Analysed through a resilience lens, findings indicated that the strategies inspired hope in learners; helped them identify assets and barriers in their social ecologies; develop a sense of agency and responsibility for deciding on their futures; and care more for other people, all of which will help them make more constructive choices for life after school. The findings might help teachers make their career education more relevant for children who live in contexts of adversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life Orientation sexuality education in South Africa faces many pedagogical challenges, not least among which is that it is sometimes perceived as irrelevant to learners' real interests and concerns. Learners report that the content is repetitive and that they learn more from peers than from the reiterated lessons of risk and disease avoidance that permeate sex education messages. In this article we describe the world of the study site - a 'single sex' school - as consisting of diverse informal student sexual cultures in which repertoires for the development of learner sexual identities are developed, negotiated and transmitted. The study is based on detailed ethnographic immersion in the study site which generated rich data drawn from in-depth interviews, focus groups, observations and solicited narratives. We argue that even the enlightened, tolerant 'best practice' form of sexuality education that takes place at the study site fails to take diverse learner identities, lifeworlds and experiences seriously as a pedagogic starting point, but rather tends to homogenise learners and to impose on them what they need to learn. A more empowering form of sexuality education would take seriously how young people understand themselves as sexual subjects located in unequal ('raced' and classed) social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Progressive policies protecting women's rights to make reproductive decisions and the recent increase in literature exploring female sexual agency do not appear to have impacted on more equitable sexual relations in all contexts. In South Africa, gender power inequalities, intersecting with other forms of inequality in society, pose a challenge for young women's control over their sexual and reproductive health. The article focuses on a group of young Coloured South African women's understandings of their sexual agency, in an attempt to explore how it is explicitly and implicitly shaped by school Life Orientation (LO) sexuality programmes. We found young women constructed their agency as simultaneously enabled and constrained in complex ways: on the one hand, the explicit communication was that they should have agency and take responsibility for themselves sexually, whereas the implicit communication seemed to convey that what they really thought and felt about sex and sexuality was not important. In addition, heteronormative gender roles, in which men are assumed to take the lead in sexual matters, appear to be reproduced in LO sexuality education messages and further complicate young women's constructions of their sexual agency. The implications of these findings for LO sexuality programmes are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face-to-face adult communication with young people about sexuality is, for the most part, assigned to two main groups of people: educators tasked with teaching schoolbased sexuality education that is provided as part of the compulsory Life Orientation (LO) learning area, and parents. In this paper, we report on a study conducted with Further Education and Training College students in an Eastern Cape town. Using a discursive psychology lens, we analysed data from, first, a written question on what participants remember being taught about sexuality in LO classes and, second, focus group discussions held with mixed and same-sex groups. Discussions were structured around the sexualities of high school learners and the LO sexuality education that participants received at high school. We highlight participants' common deployment of a 'discourse of disconnect' in their talk. In this discourse, the messages of 'risk' and 'responsibility' contained in adult face-to-face communications, by both parents and LO teachers, are depicted as being delivered through inadequate or non-relational styles of communication, and as largely irrelevant to participants' lives. Neither of these sources of communication was seen as understanding the realities of youth sexualities or as creating habitable or performable sexual subject positions. The dominance of this 'discourse of disconnect' has implications for how sexuality education and parent communication interventions are conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares two forms of sexual socialisation to which learners are exposed: the sexuality education components of the Life Orientation (LO) manuals and the lyrical content and videos of popular songs. We performed a textual analysis of the sexual subject positions made available in, first, the LO manuals used in Grade 10 classes and, second, the two songs voted most popular by the Grade 10 learners of two diverse schools in the Eastern Cape. Of interest in this paper is whether and how these two forms of sexual socialisation - one representing state-sanctioned sexual socialisation and the other learners' chosen cultural expression that represents informal sexual socialisation - dovetail or diverge. Against a backdrop of heterosexuality and an assumption of the 'adolescent-in-transition' discourse, the main sexual subject positions featured in the LO manuals are the responsible sexual subject and the sexual victim. A number of sexualised subject positions are portrayed in the songs, with these subject positions depicting sex as a site of pleasure, tension and complexity. Although these two modes of sexual socialisation use different genres of communication, we argue that learners' choice of songs that depict fluid sexual subject positions can help to inform LO sexuality education in ways that takes learners' preferred cultural expression seriously and that moves away from the imperative of responsibilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]