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Mediating Young People’s Knowledge: Framing School-Based Sexuality Education in New Zealand and Canada

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Play and Recreation, Health and Wellbeing

Part of the book series: Geographies of Children and Young People ((GCYP,volume 9))

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Abstract

The news media play a critical role in shaping the places, social ideologies, and practices that constitute everyday life. This influence encompasses understandings of spaces such as the school, elements of curricula (including sexuality education), and the construction of what it means to be a young person. This chapter takes a framing approach to examine the ways in which recent news media stories in New Zealand and Canada represent and position the school as a place for educating young people about sexuality, thereby constructing this population, their sexuality and sexual health in specific ways. A range of framings related to school as a place for sexuality education within six examples of media episodes are discussed, and the claims-makers appearing in each episode are identified. The discussion highlights the ways in which the rights of young people, their voices, and the realities of their everyday lives are rendered invisible in debates about school-based sexuality education.

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Correspondence to Tara M. Coleman .

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Coleman, T.M., Collins, D., Kearns, R.A. (2016). Mediating Young People’s Knowledge: Framing School-Based Sexuality Education in New Zealand and Canada. In: Evans, B., Horton, J., Skelton, T. (eds) Play and Recreation, Health and Wellbeing. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 9. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-51-4_35

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