Sexualitet, samtycke och religioner : Didaktiska förändringar efter Skolverkets revidering av Sexualitet, samtycke och relationer i undervisningen

Sammanfattning: Background: In 2022 the Swedish National Agency for Education revised their sex education curriculum. The revised course, now called ”Sexualitet, samtycke och relationer” (SSR), aims to highlight the importance of consent and further include aspects such as honour-related violence alongside the traditional course content. SSR is mainly taught through subject integration, that is through integrating aspects of the curriculum in subject teaching. The extent of the integration is in part regulated by the National Agency. In the core curriculum of the subject Religious Education, it is for instance explicitly stated that gender and sexuality are to be taught within the understanding of religion. In the revised sex education curriculum, the National Agency also presents that it is appropriate to include education about honour-related violence and sexual consent within the framework of Religious Education. However, little is known about how the revision actually has affected the educational content. Aim: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Swedish religious education teachers in secondary schools have altered their teaching after the National Agency for Education’s revision of the sex education curriculum. Method: Religious education teachers in Swedish high schools aswell as secondary schools were recruited to participate in this interview-based study. The teachers were interviewed in a semi-structured method and the interviews were subsequently transcribed and analysed using sentence concentration. Finally, the findings were sorted into three categories – implemented changes, educational content and external factors. Results: A total of seven teachers were interviewed in this study. As for implemented changes, a majority of the interview subjects had not altered their teaching after the introduction of SSR. The most heavily emphasised external factor was the lack of time to properly adress the content in curriculum alongside the regular subject teaching. Conclusion: The absence of changes in the educational content may partly be explained by a lack of educational tools on the teachers’ part, such as competence development in the issues that SSR tackle. The policies regulating the implementation could also be a contributing factor, seeing as they have the potential to be unclear in their openness.