Ideas to incorporate CSE in the English class

In this section you will find ideas and resources to bring CSE into your lessons. The activities proposed integrate English and CSE content, and are aimed at young learners and teens with varied proficiency levels. You will notice that it is not always necessary to start a CSE project from scratch. Most of the ideas suggested here can be used to enrich coursebooks or lesson plans that you have already prepared.

Consent

Why is consent education important?

Consent is an important concept for children to become familiarized with from an early age. It can help to build better relationships with others, including family, friends and eventually romantic partners, and it helps to prevent sexual abuse. Consent includes knowing and respecting our own boundaries as well as the boundaries of others and learning to manage rejection.

In terms of the five intertwined axes mentioned before, this topic can be framed mainly within the following axes: value affectivity, because it aims at avoiding coercion. exercise our rights, since children and adolescents are subjects of law.

Consent with young learners Beginner level

A very common topic when teaching young learners is parts of the body, which makes an ideal opportunity to bring the topic of consent into the English class.

Grammar: Yes/No questions with verb be, imperatives, can for permission, Yes/No questions

Vocabulary: parts of the body, trusted adults

After having worked with parts of the body, you can introduce the idea of private body parts. You can do so by telling children that our private body parts are the ones covered by our bathing suits/underwear and are off limits to others, because we can’t touch or show our private body parts in public places and neither can others.

You can use a simple picture like this one. Find the photocopiable version on page 24 of this booklet.

You can also teach the names of the private body parts. When doing so, it is of the utmost importance that you use the correct anatomical terms. If you don’t, children might get confused as each household has a different nickname for the private parts. By changing the names, you are reinforcing the culture of secrets and shutting down communication. Abusers rely on this culture of secrets and silence for cover.

You can work with Yes/No questions and have students ask and answer questions such as:

Is the hair a private part?

Is the mouth a private part?

No, it isn’t.

Yes! Our mouth is a private part!

Besides teaching the private parts of the body, you can help young learners understand the difference between ‘Yes’ touches (‘OK’ / ‘thumbs up’ touches) and ‘No’ touches (‘not OK’ / ‘thumbs down’ touches). In this case, you can teach action verbs that can be considered ‘Yes’ touches or ‘No’ touches, for example: shake hands kick hold hands hit give hugs push give high fives touch private parts give pats

Yes! touches No! touches

Students classify the actions by drawing arrows. They may also draw a chart. As we cannot assume that the other person likes the same touches that I do, even when they are ‘Yes!’ touches, you can also teach permission, using can/can’t, for example:

Can I give you a hug?

Yes, sure!

Can I give you a kiss?

Yes, I like that!

Mmm… not now.

Children must know that some secrets should not be kept. If they have experienced a ‘No!’ touch or something they considered a ‘No!’ touch, they must tell a trusted adult. A trusted adult is a person who the child has chosen as a safe figure that listens to them without judgment and whose words and actions make the child feel safe. An example could be a teacher, a neighbour, parents, grandparents, among others.

Ask children to draw the outline of their hands and invite them to write the name of a trusted adult on each finger. Make sure that they understand the concept of trusted adults and make it clear that one of those five trusted adults must not be a member of the family, for example, a teacher, a neighbour, a family friend, etc.3

Students can also prepare posters with information about what to do if they experience a ‘No!’ touch or any other situation that may make them feel unsafe.

This may become part of a safety campaign if the posters are displayed around the school.

You can also work with children’s books to deal with these topics from a different perspective. For example, author Jayneen Sanders has published two very interesting books: Some secrets should never be kept and My body: What I say goes!

Consent with teens Elementary level

Primary prevention is about reducing the underlying causes of violence and building protective factors that help encourage healthy behaviours. That is why it needs to be addressed at all ages. One way of doing so is through the topic of consent. It is important that talking openly and respectfully about consent with friends and partners becomes second nature to young people.

Expressing permission: Can I …?

Invitations: Do you want to…?

Lexical chunks to accept or refuse invitations: Cool, see you soon! / No, not really.

The following video focuses on the importance of understanding what consent means and looks like in everyday life. This is a good resource to listen to conversational English: https://youtu.be/n6X5I7xoxEY

What is consent?

• Consent is a clear and enthusiastic ‘Yes’.

• Consent is an active, voluntary and verbal agreement.

• Consent is a process and a conversation.

• Consent can always be withdrawn.

Consent with teens Intermediate or Upper intermediate level

In the case of students with a higher level of proficiency in the language, the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty is a great way to naturally introduce the topic of consent. You may show students an image of the famous kiss and have them discuss if that is OK or not. In terms of language, you can:

Practise the second conditional: What would you do if you were the prince?

Discuss different ways in which Aurora can be woken up, for example: If I were the prince, I’d throw a glass of water.

Practise a more complex structure like should have/could have to express criticism and possibility in the past, for example: The prince should have thrown a glass of water to wake Aurora up.

Gender perspective

The achievement of gender equality is one of the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) included in the Sustainable Development Agenda for the year 2030. Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. (UN, Sustainable Development Goals)

Gender perspective allows us to analyze how social representation, prejudice and stereotypes operate in the different social contexts, which makes the systematic mainstreaming of the gender perspective crucial in education and central to our teaching practices.

To read more about the UN Sustainable Development Goals, you can visit the following websites: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/ https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/

Gender perspective with teens Elementary level

The topic of ‘Jobs and professions’ is very common in the English classroom. This opens up a welcome opportunity to include gender perspective whether you are planning to adapt a ready-made lesson plan or to supplement a coursebook.

In the materials we use, it is common to find units on occupations which tend to be heavily gendered. Also, some occupations are generally associated with a certain gender (nurses are women, mechanics are men) and children unwittingly assimilate these gender stereotypes. Exposure to a limited range of models influences young people’s opinions about the areas in which they see themselves working and this eventually influences their study and career choices. Education plays a crucial role in creating opportunities to counter stereotypical jobs and professions. The following are ideas to incorporate gender perspective into our lesson plans or to supplement coursebooks.

You can use the poem ‘Who’s who’ by the poet Benjamin Zephaniah to introduce the topic and to have students reflect on gender stereotypes and jobs. You can find the poem here: https://benjaminzephaniah.com/rhymin/talking-turkeys-5/ In terms of language, you can use this poem to work with used to or past simple.

Alternatively, you can introduce the topic by watching this scene from the film Meet the parents (2000), in which the main male character is a nurse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP1yFNc4alw

After watching the video, ask students why the family is laughing at the main character’s job.

Once you have pre-taught vocabulary on jobs and professions, you can have students do the following technology-mediated task: Tell the class that they are going to use their phones (or tablets/computers if they can access one). Divide the class into two groups. Ask one group to do a search on the ‘Images’ tab, type ‘babysitter’ and count how many boys/men there are among the first 15–20 images that appear. Ask the other group to type ‘footballer’ and count how many girls/women there are among the first 15–20 images that appear.

Ask students why they think almost all the images of babysitters are girls/women and almost all the images of footballers are men/boys. The idea here is to reflect upon the influence of social media in creating and perpetuating stereotypes. If you want to do a cross-curricular activity, have students search for images for heavily gendered jobs such as mechanic, secretary, plumber, construction worker, etc. and count the number of women and men in each. In tandem with maths, students can create pie charts and bar graphs to illustrate and visually organize the results. The graphs can be displayed in posters around the school.

Another low prep task to bring into the class is the ‘gender light-bulb moment’ activity. A gender light-bulb moment is a time you become aware of being treated differently because of your gender. After having dealt with vocabulary and grammar, you can take some time to explain what a ‘gender light-bulb moment’ is and share some experiences that students (and you) may have had. These are possible questions you can ask students:

Do you know any female scientists?

Do you know any male babysitters?

Do any of the girls in your class play football?

Do any of the boys in your class do gymnastics?

Then you can ask them if they have ever experienced a ‘gender light-bulb moment’ and reflect upon this with the whole group. All the previous activities aim at problematizing gender stereotypes. When dealing with any CSE topic, reflection is key. Sometimes our students’ level of competence in English does not allow them to engage in discussions, so it is important that we do not dismiss these opportunities for reflection but give students the chance to share their views and opinions using their L1. The nature of CSE content demands systematic reflection which cannot be circumscribed to sporadic occasions. These spaces for reflection are essential to help students develop and use critical thinking skills, which go beyond the use of the foreign language.

You can learn more about the strategic use of L1 in our classrooms by watching this interview with Analia Duarte, specialist in Second Language Acquisition: https://youtu.be/HMSvrJuJ_X0

After reflecting with students on how we tend to link certain professions and genders, a possible wrap-up activity is the production of a poster, either digital or on paper. You can ask students to imagine that a university or technical college is designing new posters to promote their courses. Their task is to challenge assumptions on gender expectations and jobs. Below you will find an example of a poster inspired by a real one created by a secondary student in Argentina.

Carola Building Courses And Tutorials

Monday to Friday 5 pm to 8 pm

ADDRESS: WALTER 34

We accept women and men from 17 to 65 years old.

Women in STEM

Gender perspective in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) area is another issue to problematize. The representation of women varies widely across STEM occupations. Women make up a large majority of all workers in health-related jobs but remain underrepresented in other job clusters, such as the physical sciences, computing and engineering. Therefore, there are fewer role models for girls to inspire their interest in these fields. There are even fewer black and indigenous women role models in maths and science.

Being exposed to relatable role models is essential for children and adolescents, since this has the power to maintain their interest and makes it more likely for them to innovate in the future.

Along the lines of supplementing ready-made material (lesson plans or coursebooks), the following ideas aim at addressing the lack of gender perspective in STEM.

Women in STEM with young learners Beginner or Elementary level

A low-prep activity to challenge gender stereotypes is to ask students to draw a scientist and give them a name so we don’t assume a gender when we see the drawing. This is actually a test carried out in the 80s to investigate children’s perceptions of scientists. The results showed that most children drew male scientists and when the test was replicated twenty years later, the results did not change much.

Once students have drawn their scientists, count how many men and women there are and discuss with them the elements that surround them: Where is their scientist working? Is it a lab? Are they outside? Are they wearing a white lab coat and glasses? Why are there more men than women in science? This is a wonderful opportunity to also reflect upon the fact that scientists do not only work in a lab or wear a lab coat. You can take advantage of this discussion to introduce more vocabulary in context. Next, you can ask students to make a list of inventors/scientists and their inventions and/or discoveries.

Women in STEM with teens Elementary or Pre-intermediate level

To introduce the topic, you can have the whole class brainstorming on science and its different areas of studies. Brainstorming is a good starting point because it involves everybody who wants to participate, nobody feels forced to be part of the activity and it is a good way to check and share prior knowledge. Then, make a list with all the areas of study, which can be used to work with word building/transformation (see table below).

In terms of language, students with an elementary level can make sentences about each of the people mentioned using the past simple, for example: Marion Donovan invented disposable diapers. Students with a pre-intermediate level can make sentences using the passive, such as The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. It is highly probable that students will mention male inventors or scientists. This can, again, trigger a discussion about gender stereotypes and allow you to present women inventors or scientists who have been historically overlooked and neglected in science, for example: Did you know that the first computer program was written by Ada Lovelace in the 19th century?

Below there is a list of websites where you can find more information about gender stereotypes in STEM: https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12223 https://ideas.ted.com/history-overlooked-these-women-scientists-but-not-anymore/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/130519-women-scientists-overlooked-dna-history-science

This opens up the possibility of working with biographies. Usually, coursebooks include one biography but this is frequently about a male scientist or inventor. In this case, you can always either change it or bring another one about a woman inventor or scientist. In terms of language, biographies allow us to work with past simple, linkers and adverbs of time, among others.

Women in history

Along the lines of what we have been discussing in terms of gender perspective, the study of history is another field in which women have traditionally been invisibilized. Jane Austen once said in Northanger Abbey that history is boring because it is all about ‘the quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any woman at all.’

It is always a good idea to take every opportunity to make women visible in our lessons. Below there are some ideas that serve as starting points:

Outstanding women: women on TV and cinema, women leaders, women in business, women in politics, women in literature, women in arts, women in sports, among others. Some names are: Angela Merkel, Eva Perón, Virginia Woolf, Oprah Winfrey, Katherine Bigelow, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Rosa Parks, Rosalind Franklin, Queen Boudicca, Mary Anning, Artemisia Gentileschi, among others.

First woman to do: Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean; Marie Skłodowska-Curie, who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize – twice; Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to go to space; Junko Tabei, who was the first woman to climb Mount Everest. Also, you can always include the first woman to do something in your own country or area.

Women and their fights/struggle: Marsha P. Johnson, who fought for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community; the Mirabal sisters, who were assassinated for opposing the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic; the suffragists in the suffrage movements in the different countries; ecofeminists like Berta Cáceres and Bertha Zúñiga in Honduras; women who participated in revolutions and independence wars, like María Remedios del Valle, among others.

The following video shows how few women are in powerful positions around the world. Photos of political gatherings were photoshopped to remove all men. It shows there are too many instances where women are represented by a single female –in business, music, art and media, women rarely outnumber men: https://youtu.be/GEKo22ryWxM This short video can be used in different ways: as a trigger to introduce the lack of representation of women in powerful positions. as a resource to work with a specific genre, for example, biographies. In this case, you can ask students who of these women they know and what they do, and then do some research and write a biography. as a round-off activity in a project about gender perspective in which students watch the video and reflect upon its meaning.

Students’ productions can include: biographies, timelines, digital or paper posters, infographics, etc.

Songs and CSE

Most of us have a favourite song and a favourite/best-loved singer or band. Many of us listen to music every day to relax, express ourselves, come to terms with our emotions and generally improve our well-being. Considering that music is an agent of socialization, which means that it arises out of our values as a society and in turn contributes to them, it is important to start paying attention to what the lyrics of songs say as some of them contain considerable violence.

Bringing songs into our classrooms and going beyond fill-in-the-gap activities is a nice opportunity to develop critical thinking skills. Teenagers need to be provided with tools to detect and confront this violence. Encouraging a critical understanding of the lyrics empowers students to negotiate, resist and counteract the messages loaded with different types of violence that some songs contain.

Gender-based violence refers to harmful acts directed at an individual based on their gender. It is rooted in gender inequality, the abuse of power and harmful norms. It can include sexual, physical, mental and economic harm inflicted in public or in private. It also includes threats of violence, coercion and manipulation. (Source: https://www.unhcr.org/gender-based-violence.html)

Below there is a list of songs that you can use to address the issue of gender-based violence:

• ‘Every Breath You Take’ (The Police): This song is about jealousy and possession. It is an example of psychological violence, where a person becomes obsessed with their former lover and stalks them.

• ‘I Usewd to Love Her’ (Guns N’ Roses): Even though it was said that Axl Rose wrote this song about his dog, still the song’s lyrics can be used to reflect on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and femicide too.

• ‘Blurred Lines’ (Robin Thicke): This song is about sex and non-consent, which can be used as trigger to discuss what consent is, and what is not; and what ‘blurred lines’ means. In this link, you will find important information about consent that can be shared with students:

• https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2019/11/feature-consent-no-blurred-lines

• ‘Gold Digger’ (Kanye West): In this song, the singer perpetuates the misogynistic ‘gold digger’ stereotype which has been especially linked with black women. Using this song with your more advanced students opens up the opportunity to work with the term intersectionality, as the stereotype usually involves – though not only – black women in poverty.

• ‘Kim’ (Eminem): This song is a clear example of gender-based violence and femicide. Kim was Marshall Mathers’s (Eminem) wife at the time the song was released. The lyrics explicitly depict a fight the couple have in the car and his intention to kill her, which he finally does at the end of the song. You can use this song with adolescents and adults in order to discuss IPV and femicide.

You can find more information about IPV and femicide in these websites: bit.ly/43TRJTA https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/77432/1/WHO_RHR_12.36_eng.pdf

This list is very short but there are many more songs with misogynistic and violent messages. Some songs in our own language are also a powerful resource to address violence. For example, the music genre reggaeton in Latin America, now famous worldwide as well, is known for the sexist lyrics and video clips that many songs have.

Music video clips that are used to promote these songs can also be used to critically analyze the symbolic violence that they usually contain.

Symbolic violence is a concept coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1970s to refer to a type of nonphysical violence that is exercised upon a social group with their complicity. For example, gender relations in which both men and women agree that women are weaker, less intelligent, more unreliable, etc.

Many music videos contain symbolic violence, for example, those which sexualize and objectify women, while men are shown as hyper-masculine and sexually dominant.

On the other hand, there are also songs that send a strong message against sexism and violence which are also powerful resources to bring into our classrooms. Some examples include:

• ‘I’m OK’ (Christina Aguilera)

• ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ (Dua Lipa)

• ‘Can’t Hold Us Down’ (Christina Aguilera)

• ‘Hands Clean’ (Alanis Morissette)

The links below contain lists of songs about feminism and empowerment: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a18832473/best-feminist-women-empowerment-songs/ https://www.equality-empowerment.com/post/songs-about-sexism

Once you have listened to the songs and analyzed their lyrics, you can use them as conversation starters. If you are working with songs about violence, you can have students rate the songs according to how dangerous the messages in the lyrics are.

Considering that sometimes songs give us the perspective of the singer or the main character in the song, you can suggest students write a response from the point of view of the person the song is about or another character in the story. It is not necessary that they write it in the form of lyrics as students might practise other genres such as letters, diary entries, dialogues, among others.

Another option is to write another verse of the lyrics, keeping the style and mood of the original songs but changing the message. Here is a great example of the song ‘Blurred Lines’, where the lyrics have been changed to make it about seeking consent in sexual encounters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2u9HWlQQuA

A great idea for group work is to have students plan a music video for the song. They can decide on the characters, the setting and what happens. They may write a script which will be shared later with the other groups and, together as a class, they can vote on the best one. They can even shoot the video!

If you want students to practise written skills, you can propose that they write a diary entry for a character in the song. Have them examine the feelings and thoughts of the character in the lyrics.

Children’s literature and CSE

The relationship between Literature and English Language Teaching has been extensively researched (Carter 1988, 1989; Lazar 1993, Carter and Long 1991, among others). There are many reasons to include literature in the English class among which we can mention the fact that it offers a meaningful and motivating context to learn the foreign language and contributes to the emotional development of the child, fostering positive interpersonal and intercultural attitudes.

In terms of language itself, it can stimulate oral and written skills as well as foster the development of vocabulary in context. Also, literature can promote academic literacy and thinking skills such as predicting and guessing meaning, hypothesizing, drawing inferences, explaining cause-and-effect relationships, etc.

Finally, literature can function as a change agent. As Ghosn (1998) states, good literature has the power ‘to transform, to change attitudes and to help eradicate prejudice while fostering empathy, tolerance and an awareness of global problems.’ This is closely related to CSE aims.

Below there is a list of diverse picture books that address a variety of CSE-related themes. In some cases, the titles are accompanied by a link to a YouTube video, where you will find Griselda Beacon4 reading the story.

• A song of frutas – Margarita Engle (Diversity, interculturality)

• And Tango makes three – Justin Richardson (Diverse families, LGBTQ+)

• I am Jazz – Jazz Jennings (Diversity, trans childhood)

• It’s OK to be different – Todd Parr

• Julián is a mermaid – Jessica Love https://youtu.be/-SrgEBbFTMc (Diversity) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyLYsxPnxa8 (Diversity, LGBTQ+)

• Just ask – Sonia Sotomayor (Diversity, Disabilities)

• Kind – Alison Green (Kindness)

• My body: What I say goes! – Jayneen Sanders (Consent)

• My princess boy – Cheryl Kilodavis https://youtu.be/Av-8j97_b-c (Diverse families, (LGBTQ+)

• Perfectly Norman – Tom Percival (Inclusion)

• Pink is for boys – Robb Pearlman (Gender and colours)

• Some secrets should never be kept – Jayneen Sanders (Consent, secrets)

• The day the crayons quit – Drew Daywalt (Empathy, respect)

• The family book – Todd Parr https://youtu.be/3is_na1_IpA (Diverse families)

• The Suitcase – Chris Naylor-Ballesteros (refugees, starting a new life, identity)

• Tough Guys – Keith Negley (Gender and social expectations)

• We are all wonders – J.R. Palacio https://youtu.be/czCYHV4X1Hc (Diversity, bullying)

• What happened to you? – James Catchpole (Diversity, Disabilities)

• Yo! Yes? – Chris Raschka https://youtu.be/QFWuRI2RInc (Diversity, interculturality)

4 Griselda Beacon is a teacher educator and specializes in literature & art in ELT. Her interests include literature, young learners, CLIL, creativity and critical interculturality. Passionate about art in education, she follows a creative, artistic and play-based approach to English language teaching. Griselda holds an MA in Literature and Foreign Language Teaching from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, and has been working in the field of teacher education and Primary curriculum development for over 20 years. She has been sharing her experience as an in-service teacher trainer and curriculum developer in Latin America, Europe, Africa & Asia. She is a co-editor of the book International Perspectives on Diversity in ELT (Palgrave, 2021), and she has taught Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Creativity & Drama at Teacher Training Colleges in Buenos Aires. At present, Griselda lives between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and works as a consultant for educational institutions, visits schools to share literature with a creative twist with all learners, lectures in American Literature at Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) and is a consultant trainer at NILE (Norwich Institute for Language Education) in the UK. In her spare time, Griselda loves dancing, getting lost in bookstores and taking drama classes.

Congreso de la Nación Argentina. (2006). Ley Nº 26150: Programa Nacional de Educación Sexual Integral. Buenos Aires. Retrieved from: bit.ly/3e30qiY

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Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical Applied Linguistics: A (critical) introduction. New York: Routledge.

UNESCO (2018). Why comprehensive sexuality education is important. Retrieved from bit.ly/3mODzNR.

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