The Sexuality Education Soundscape

Abstract

This chapter invites readers to re-conceptualise sexuality education research in ways that highlight the sensory. Attention is turned to the work of Ceraso (Sounding composition: Multimodal pedagogies for embodied listening, 2018) within sound studies to open the landscape of sexuality education research beyond its existing methodological borders. In her teaching of sound composition Ceraso (Sounding composition: Multimodal pedagogies for embodied listening, 2018) employs an innovative pedagogy called ‘multimodal listening’ designed to cultivate student’s listening and composition practices. Although intended for students of sonic composition, multimodal listening is explored for what it might offer sexuality education researchers wishing to listen to participants in more expansive ways. To contribute to Ceraso’s (Sounding composition: Multimodal pedagogies for embodied listening, 2018) thinking and in accordance with new materialist thought, I theorise sound as an agential intra-active materiality which emerges from human-non-human entanglements. Asking what sound does in sexuality education, positions it as an agential force which constitutes the nature and pedagogy of the classroom. Mobilising these ideas, the chapter examines how attuning oneself as a researcher ‘to sound as a locus of inquiry’ might change classroom observation, where sound is conflated with human voices that are ‘mined for meaning’. It is proposed that multimodal listening might enable sexuality education researchers to experience and acknowledge the classroom as sensuous event, and inaugurate new empirical insights.