Teaching Capstone Blog Post

4/14/2022: Sex Work

I participated in the Undergraduate Teaching Scholars Program to fulfill my Capstone requirement for the Texas A&M University Honors Program. The course redevelopment is a unique experience that I chose to do rather than designing a new curriculum like other individuals in the program. I knew I wanted to develop a class on reproductive and sexual health but needed a faculty mentor for my program. After discussing with my Epidemiology professor, I contacted Dr. Rhonda Rahn from the Health and Kinesiology Department and she readily accepted me as her mentee. She even had a project ready for me to work on! She explained that she was looking to re-do her syllabus and modernize it, and asked if I was up for the task. I jumped on it, eager to get my hands wet in the teaching part of academia.

In the Fall 2021 semester, my task was to go over the current syllabus and make changes to the curriculum, powerpoints, and assignments as needed. I had complete control over the re-design and could add and change whatever materials I thought was necessary. Looking back at it, I find it crazy that Dr. Rahn put all of her trust in an undergraduate Honors student, but I am honored to have been given the experience. Previously, the class was research-oriented and trained students to research the field. It now reflects a pedagogical perspective, asking students to teach human sexuality topics to school-aged children. The redesigned course aims to empower the new generation of educators to discuss sex and sexuality comfortably with their students. A defining feature of the new curriculum is the discussion-centric material compared to the previous lecture-based material. Students are encouraged to share their thoughts over the material and learn from their peers to better prepare themselves for conversations they might encounter in their future careers. I ensured the content included perspectives from all genders, sexualities, and racial and ethnic groups while curating material. Students needed guidance from multiple points of view, as inclusivity is a value I champion. Not every student taking the course has interacted with LGBTQ+ or non-White individuals and might not be as comfortable with the material as other classmates. I addressed this in the material and discussions, with explicit warnings about the content. I also prompt students to recognize they might need to step outside of their comfort zone to answer student questions, promoting open-mindedness to the material presented.

After Dr. Rahn approved the new syllabus, we began implementing it in the Spring 2022 semester. I changed one of the assignments and the project. The Sex and Pop Culture assignment previously focused on a set list of movies and asked students to reflect on them. I modified it to any piece of pop culture the student recently consumed, whether it be books, movies, TV shows, or music. This allowed students to critically reflect pop culture they interact with commonly and look at it from a health educator's perspective. The class project used to be a research paper over a human sexuality topic. But I changed it to a lesson plan that health educators can implement among a specific age range of children. This challenges students to take material they learn and properly teach a younger generation the concepts without dumbing it down too much or overshadowing important parts of the topic. I also implemented some participation assignments to keep students engaged with the material and find ways to include aspects of the lessons, like communication styles and challenging their biases, into their lives. I was also able to distribute condoms and other sexual health products during the Contraceptive lesson, even encouraging students to use the condoms as bingo tokens during a game of Contraceptive Bingo in class. Dr. Rahn taught most of the lessons and I got to teach 4.5 lessons: Abortion in the Contraception lesson, Variant Sexual Behavior (AKA kinks), Sex Work, Commercialization of Sex, and Sexual Coercion (attached above is a video of me teaching Sex Work). All 5 topics are near and dear to me, as they have been constant concepts in my work for FREE as well as interests for research and program development in the future. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching and feel more comfortable standing in front of people that might be uncomfortable with the topic I am talking about and guiding them through a lesson. I now know for sure that I want to be a teaching assistant while pursuing my MPH and PhD.

In the future, Dr. Rahn and I are hoping to present our syllabus and lessons learned to a conference. We hope that our experience can help other educators focus on empowering younger generations to become more literate about their health and spread that literacy through the community. I have also developed a strong mentor/mentee bond with Dr. Rahn and I am grateful to her for all the lessons she imparted on me. Participating in the Teaching Capstone program has helped me develop leadership skills within health education and has proven to me that the work I am doing makes an impact on peoples' lives. I am grateful for this experience and ready for preparing for grad school experiences!

Images of the lessons I taught