We are hesitant but excited to say that the Queer Sex Ed Community Curriculum is undoubtedly growing, and fast! In the 3 months that this platform has been up and running, we’ve established a community of almost 600 people, with multiple collaborations and partnerships already underway. We are so grateful for the expansion, for the feedback, and for the future which feels closer than ever.
Our goal of creating a living, breathing, evolving educational community is coming to life before our eyes. With the actualization of this living community, our own ideas of what we can transform and create through this platform are also evolving, and getting bigger every day. Watching the follower count rise and seeing people benefit from and interact with the content we’ve created has sparked some amazing conversations among us as creators and educators about our goals, mission, and the future of Queer Sex Ed Community Curriclum.
With this rapid growth and heightened interest, we thought it would be a good time to properly introduce ourselves as a project. This week we got to work on creating some official documents that will serve as a concrete foundation to this project. We drafted a mission statement, community guidelines, collaboration protocols, core values, partnership agreements, and more. In true Queer Sex Ed Community Curriculum fashion, of course, we made a little zine about it.
We think it’s important to start off with the basics of:what is a community curriculum? A community curriculum is a living, breathing archive. It is constantly updated in response to new information, voices, and perspectives. The knowledge embodied by the community curriculum fluctuates continuously, in tandem with the guaranteed fluctuation of meaning. This means that the curriculum will ideally never be completed, and will ideally never be authored by just one person.
The large majority of the knowledge we consume in traditional educational settings (think: public schools, big colleges and universities, even the news and TV shows) have to go through a rigorous and outdated process of evaluation and validation. This process tends to squash voices and perspectives of people who do not have access to the means of climbing this hierarchy of epistemic authority. Epistemic authority is basically the authority to create knowledge or truth about a subject (think: doctors, scientists, professors, politicians, etc). To that extent, Queer Sex Ed Community Curriculum (QSECC) is an expansive platform that is committed to reimagining the ways that knowledge is created, collected, and validated. In other words, we want to disrupt the hierarchy of knowledge.
A big part of this mission is creating and dispersing knowledge that is free and accessible. There are many factors that contribute to the inaccessibility of knowledge, and a big one is price! We are constantly striving to create a curriculum that is free, written in language that can be digested regardless of educational background, and inclusive of many forms of communicating knowledge, like visual art and storytelling. We aim to purposefully uplift the voices and knowledge of those who may not have access to institutions of higher education, degrees, years of experience, the body, or background typically endowed with epistemic authority. This community curriculum should represent the needs and assets of the people foundational to its creation.
So what do we do? The QSECC project has two platforms; a website and a social media presence. Our website is home to our blog, zine archive, curriculums, and other resources like a glossary. Our Instagram and Twitter accounts are our way of reaching out and connecting with sex educators, students, youth, adults, and everyone in between. The development of the curriculum is our primary initiative, and the majority of our work centers around creating and collecting knowledge surrounding sexual health, relationships, pleasure, consent, and more. And the zine archive is an ever-changing collection of homemade zines that are free for anyone to download. The zines correspond to longer blog posts, which can both be found at our site www.queersexedcc.com.
How do collaborations work?
The community curriculum wouldn't exist without collaborations; they are essential to this project. There are an endless amount of ways to get involved, and we want to be flexible to each new collaborator, but we also have a few established frameworks for collaborations. These look like:
We create together
We find a topic of common interest, and create some educational materials together. These get published on our platform, and credited to you.
We interview you
We interview you about your work, product, brand, account, journey - really anything! We create some content about you, publish it on our platform, and cite you.
We co-promote
We find some mutually beneficial ways of co-promoting each other. You become part of the Queer Sex Ed Community, and we both spread awareness and engagement for each other!
Our collaborations are influenced by our community guidelines, which we want to make explicit before any kind of work together occurs. Our guidelines are:
Any community member is welcome to collaborate, providing their explicit perspectives, work, content, or brand are aligned with our core values.
Any realm of information is welcome, whether it falls in the fields of sexual health, social sciences, or outside of traditional academia altogether.
Any information, materials, or artworks published on the platform will be credited and cited to the original creator.
Any material published on the platform will be available for free download on the Queer Sex Ed Community platform.
Finally, what can you expect from QSECC in the future? Although we are still young, we have a ton of ideas and momentum. Here are a few things you can expect from us: By this Spring (2021) you can expect to have access to multiple 1 - 5 hour trainings and workshops available for free download. These will center on: pleasure activism (see: amb), LGBTQ+ inclusive sex ed, gender and sexuality, relationship structures, and more! By next year (2022) you can expect to have access to free virtual trainings and webinars conducted by different sexual health educators, relationship experts, coaches, and more!
Thank you for reading! We appreciate your support. If you want to contribute to the curriculum or just learn more about us, feel free to reach out to us at queersexedcc@gmail.com