Jessica Fields is an associate professor of sociology at SF State and the author of a new book, Risky Lessons; Sex Education and Social Inequality. Fields offers progressive research on sex education in middle schools, particularly in North Carolina where she conducted her research while completing her PhD. at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Risky Lessons closes the text books standards of the current academic platform for sex education and places youth at the center of its lesson plan. In analyzing the racial, economic and gender dynamics in her research, Fields came up with a dialogue that might help all of us communicate a little better; whether its about erections, politics or what to wear to Saturday nights party.

“I remember I was really curious, like what they hell is that? I should look in the mirror or something,” Diana Sylvan, a senior, said on her experience with sex education in middle school.

It’s the little inquiries about our bodies that started the progression of Fields study in Risky Lessons. She admits the book gave her new guidelines about what and how to teach for each semester.

“All that comes out of my understanding of the meaningfulness of that for middle school students,” Fields said on maintaining an open and honest dialogue in the classroom. “I think that that’s true for college students and its true for me as a professor, and the moments where I can participate and trust that my participation is valued are the most meaningful, whether it’s a classroom or a meeting or thanksgiving dinner.”

Fields began the book as her dissertation at the University of North Carolina after she gained interest in a law requiring abstinence-only sex education in North Carolina schools.

The law, according to Fields, could supplement abstinence-only education with additional lessons if schools decided within a local review process to do so. A process that required the involvement of both conservative and liberal voices in the community.

In the school board meetings she attended, Fields said, the law became a political space for conservative and liberal advocates to discuss their views on children and sexuality.

“It wasn’t so much about the work for teaching, she said. “They weren’t focused on what teachers could do given the restraints of the classroom.”

After sitting in on teaching trainings, Fields became involved in classroom discussions to see how teachers were implementing sex education.

Sex Education in middle school usually requires lesson plan and video. Sometimes the boys are separated into one group, the girls in another. It’s no surprise that the experience is uncomfortable, or just humorous for most 12 or 13 year olds.

“I had a teacher that taught me how to play with the cliterous.” Garrett Lea, a second year student at State said. “He was like, oh yeah, when you have a wife she will teach you how to play with the cliterous.”

In the book, Fields shows how sex education differed depending on the economic resources of the school. The public schools offered less engaging material for children, while the private schools used more innovative and pro-active materials.

The economic resources of these schools reflected upon the community. The more local meetings Fields sat in on, the more she found both sides were focused on the topic of “children having children.”

Those interested in comprehensive research used the words “children having children” as a way to show sympathy for girls who were shown as unsympathetic, according to Fields. The rhetoric reversed the depiction of these girls as overly sexual kids to show misguided children.

While the abstinence-only advocates used the same words, “children having children,” as a way of insisting on the innocence of girls that the schools were violating by not implementing abstinence-only education.

Many of these advocates, Fields said, were “people who were concerned that the schools were interfering with the moral system that they were trying to implement at home,” Fields said. “So they were at home really insisting that their kids be sexually chaste and then be worried that television and magazines and music and now the schools were undermining that message.”

The book elaborates on how both abstinence only education and comprehensive education miss the opportunity to give an open dialogue to students by reducing sex education to pregnancy and disease control without bringing up the questions about who you are as a person and address questions about your sexuality within that context.

As Jessica Diamond, a first year graduate student pointed out, her sex education revolved around showing the size of condoms in high school, “They encouraged us to blow it up, like making condom balloons in sex ed! It was awesome.”

Fields was concerned that too much of sex education revolves around an adult curriculum without elaborating on the interests of the students.

“The adult has the teacher edition of the book, the adult has the handouts, the adult grades the test, the adult decides what video to show, everything comes from the adult.”

One alternative way to teach sex education in middle schools is through an exercise called the fishbowl. Sex educators often use the exercise to open the conversation to students who would otherwise be too timid to speak up.

Students are encouraged to write questions concerning the opposite sex. The teacher is only required to read the questions aloud, while one group sits in the so called “fishbowl,” and openly discuss the question, the other students sit outside act as observers.

“It’s very strange, you’d think that it wouldn’t work because the boys of course know that the girls are watching them because that’s the way we differ from fish, right? But it works and there’s something about the pretense that frees people.

Fields believes having the students be the source of information and having determining the topics makes them responsive to what they really need.

“What I talk about with students in sexuality studies is that its so rare that people come together with their peers to talk about sexuality and to talk about their bodies and their experiences and that in an of itself changes your relationship with your body and you experiences,” she said. “It’s kind of awe-inspiring to be blunt and a little hokey and I don’t ever want to squander that.”