Sexuality in Religious Education : Teachers of Religious Education's Perceptions and Experiences

In June 2022, the Swedish curriculum was revised and the school's responsibility to communicate knowledge about sexuality to pupils was emphasized. Although the field of sexuality is not new in the Swedish curriculum, teaching sexuality has gone through a significant development in its content since it first became a part of the Swedish curriculum. Now that society is becoming increasingly more digitalized and informed, new challanges follow, and perhaps it is now more important than ever that young people gain more knowledge in matters of sexuality, relationships, and consent. As an effort to meet these challanges, the National Agency for Education delegates the field of knowledge to teachers in all common subjects, including religious education (RE). With its association in cultural norms and gender identity, RE may be considered partucularly appropriate for discussing and teaching sexuality. The purpose of this study is to investigate how teachers of religious education percive to what degree they can contribute knowledge about sexuality in their teaching. This study also aims to find out what approaches teachers use in sexuality as a part of their religious education. This survey is a qualitative study, and the materials have been collected through semi-structured interviews with teachers in religious education in south Sweden. The study shows that teaches have positive attitudes towards including sexuality in religious education and that they find teching sexuality important. Nevertheless, it is not exactly clear for the interviewed RE teachers how and what to include regarding sexuality when teaching RE due to many difficulties that may arise. Consequently, teachers in this study describe different individually based strategies to include sexuality in their teaching, depending in personal interest and experise.