Teachers' Perspectives on Sexual Health Education in Ontario Catholic Schools

In 2015, the Ontario Ministry of Education (2015) released the new Health and Physical Education Curriculum (HPE) for grades 1-8 and 9-12 including the updated Sexual Health Education (SHE) strand. Research studies have not explicitly examined how teachers’ personal religiosity affects their moral or ethical duties to present sexual health education. My central research question was: how are Ontario Catholic grades 3-8 teachers experiencing and negotiating the implementation of the new 2015 Sexual Health Education curriculum strand through a Catholic lens? Three Catholic teachers of grades three and four, six, and eight, in Southern Ontario were interviewed about their experiences implementing the new SHE curriculum. Five themes emerged from the interviews: the teachers felt sex education was necessary in Catholic schools; they did not understand the public controversy regarding the topics covered; they did not have any formal training and support varied from school to school; the teachers used their varying levels of religiosity and Catholic perspective to handle controversial topics; and the teachers felt that compassion for students was more important than enforcing Catholic doctrine. These findings suggest that Catholic school boards and the Ontario Ministry of Education should invest in positive publicity for SHE in religious contexts. Furthermore, Catholic school boards and educators would benefit from further support understanding how Catholicism impacts SHE and its delivery. Lastly, educational researchers should investigate educators’ religiosity as a spectrum rather than a binary. Key Words