Pushed to the margins – sex and relationships in Greek primary textbooks

The politics of youth sexuality: Civil society and school-based sex education in Croatia

“…Challenges to the effective implementation of school-based sexuality education, which seem to be present throughout the southeastern European region (Gerouki, 2008; Parker et al, 2008), are vividly present in the Croatian case. The absence of prior sex education programs fostered the conditions for culture wars that significantly contributed to the government decision to abandon school-based sex education.…”

“…Despite heightened global attention to the importance of sex education, the development of national school-based programs has been far from universal. Over the last several decades, sex education has been highly controversial in many countries, including Eastern European nations (Kon, 2005), EU countries in the Balkans (Gerouki, 2008), African countries (Bloom, 2004), Australia (Gibson, 2007), and the USA (Irvine, 2002). The available analyses describe the clash between the proponents of abstinence-only and those of comprehensive sex education, arguing that in most of the countries where battles over sex education have been fought, religious values played an important role in shaping one of the contesting positions.…”

‘Teacher, will you marry me?’ Integrating teachers' stories and self-reflective texts for exploring sexuality discourses in school settings

“…The overall aim of the research project was to understand why proper introduction and dissemination of the subject is inadequate within the Greek educational system, despite a range of emergent problems in the sexual health of the population and a number of recent changes on the educational policy level (Gerouki 2008(Gerouki , 2009. A further aim was to offer suggestions on overcoming such problems.…”

Diversity in sex and relationship education – limitations and possibilities in Swedish biology textbooks

“…To prevent discrimination and advance the human rights of people with diverse bodies, genders and sexual orientations, it is of crucial importance to examine SRE critically. Textbooks are important in this respect, since they influence how teachers organise their teaching (Gerouki 2008). Textbooks also offer particular interpretations of the curriculum (Røthing and Svendsen 2011), and may act as 'conveyors of the hidden curriculum' (Táboas-Pais and Rey-Cao 2012,311) that provide legitimacy and status to particular categories of people, since the relationships represented in them may be perceived as 'natural and proper' (Shaver, Bello, and Provenzo 2010).…”