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Jos: Introducing Jos and The Sense Project | Producing Youth : Producing Media
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Jos: Introducing Jos and The Sense Project

Transcript: 

Jos:
My name is Jocelyn Porter, and I’m the health animator at Head & Hands as well as the Sense Project co-coordinator.

Miriam: Can you tell me about the program that the Sense Project did this year?

Jos:

Okay, well the Sense Project was in the planning stages for the last couple of years, and then this past fall, the fall of 2007, we finally got it into schools, so what that looked like was we trained up a group of volunteer animators who were all, for the most part, young people themselves, and sent them into six high schools in Montreal; some were private, some where public. All of them were anglohone, and they did a series of three workshops with students in these schools, so mostly grades nine and ten.

So, every student involved got three hours of sex ed. The sex ed is not very traditional, depending on I guess what your definition of traditional is, but we do talk about contraception, and we do talk about safer sex practices. We really push condom use, and are quite insistent about handing out condoms in classes, so we don’t go into classrooms where we can’t do that if the schools have a problem with it.

Our sex ed tends to be quite queer inclusive because we don’t believe in isolating that, if it’s only one kid in the classroom, it’s worthwhile to talk about it. We try to be as gender inclusive as possible as well. So talking about men and women certainly, but also introducing the idea of people who are transgendered or people who might not identify as the gender which they were assigned at birth, so yeah.

And then also talking about healthy relationships, and communication, and negotiating condom-use, etc. So that’s what the Sense Project looked like in schools this year.

And then that was followed by peer-education component, which we started up in the winter. We ran a training that started in late January. It went over five Saturdays. It was a total of thirty hours in which we trained up eight peer educators who were high school students we recruited, who were interested in becoming sexual health peer-educators in their schools among their peer groups and friends, so yeah, they spent, like I said, four Saturdays here at Head & Hands, and then a fifth doing media training, so with the Digital Literacy Project at Atwater Library and another group went to CKUT radio station.