Conference Agenda

It has been established that young people and adults with disabilities, and particularly those with chronic conditions, receive very little support for sexual health issues, despite there being a strong link between sexual health and well-being (Moller et al 2024). Young people with the chronic muscle-wasting condition Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), who are predominantly male, are living longer due to new treatments and advances in multi-disciplinary care (Birnkrant et al 2018) , and they have reported that sexual health is important to them. According to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3, by 2030 there must be ‘universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes’ (SDG3, UN 2015). Despite this, there is a prevalent misconception that people with disabilities are asexual and therefore do not need to be taught about sexual health (Bonder et al 2021). These ‘false ideologies’ around the lack of sexual needs of people with disabilities reinforce the stigma that people face and increase the likelihood of poor self-esteem and mental health problems (Bonder et al 2021). Furthermore, newly introduced Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) Guidance for Schools in the UK (2025) does not discuss issues affecting disabled pupils nor does it offer them any specific guidance. Young people with DMD have reported that RSE lessons are often not relevant to them (Hoskin et al 2024).

Young people with DMD therefore have nobody to discuss their sexual health questions with and are often left to find out information on their own. There is very little published on DMD and sexual health, but a review of literature about people with chronic conditions that encompassed 114 studies found many professionals lack confidence and avoid discussing sexual health with people with chronic conditions and rarely initiate conversastions about it (McGrath et al 2021). A recent Danish study of young adults with neuromuscular conditions reported that both professionals and parents were often reluctant to raise what they believe to be false hopes of relationships or parenthood in the aim of protecting them (Moller et al 2024). These barriers can decrease the self-esteem of young adults with DMD and lead them to internalise the attitudes around them, as well as increasing the risk of STDs where individuals engage in sexual activity without access to sexual health services (Hoskin et al 2024). Despite all of these challenges, young men with DMD have reported both an interest and success in finding a partner and having sexual intercourse (Hoskin et al 2024).

This is the first part of a two-part project that will co-create support and information for young people with DMD. In the first part, we will develop a co-created consensus on what good sexual health looks like for people with DMD and identify the key enablers and disablers of this vision. Using this information, Part 2 of the project will co-create a peer-led training programme to be run in schools and the community.

The research questions for Part 1 of this project are:

1. What does good sexual health look like for young people and adults with DMD?
2. What enables and disables good sexual health for young people and adults with DMD?

And for Part 2:

1. What does a co-produced relationships and sexual health programme of peer training look like for young people with the chronic condition Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy?

We are currently conducting Part 1 of this study and my presentation will talk about emerging findings from Part 1 of the project. I will also share ideas and proposals for Part 2.

The objective of this paper is to explore the configurations of teacher subjects and subjectivities within a national initiative to improve the implementation of “Health, sexuality and family education” in Danish primary and lower secondary schools.

In scholarly literature on school-based sexual health education (SE), the teacher’s role and responsibilities are central points of interest. The teacher takes a position of a ‘critical variable’ (Mulcahy, 2011) in terms of implementing successful sexuality education, which is why many initiatives aimed at improving sexual health and wellbeing involve teachers as main facilitators of change (Janssens et al., 2020). The ‘controversial’ nature of curricular topics specific to sexuality education often entails particular attention paid to teachers’ inner experiences or personality traits which are understood to support or impede the implementation. These include factors such as teachers’ personal beliefs (Lockhart et al., 2025), comfortability (Cumper et al., 2024; Walker et al., 2021) and attitudes and willingness to teach (Bruno et al., 2025; Cohen et al., 2012).

Thus, the significance of the teacher, including their subjectivities, is well established. However, so far, little attention has been paid to how sexuality education policies and practices are not only facilitated by, but may also be generative of, particular teacher subjectivities.

With this paper, I aim to explore this issue by attending analytically to the generative effects of a national initiative to improve the compulsory topic “Health, sexuality and family education” in Danish primary and lower secondary school. My research question is:

How are particular teacher subjectivities configured in the initiative, and which implications (and possible tensions) emerge with their embedded logics of ‘teacher responsibility’ and ‘teacher choice’?

The paper contributes new knowledge that nuance European scholarly debates on the implementation of health, sexuality and wellbeing curricula, particularly by addressing the challenges of teaching sensitive topics such as gender, sexuality and diversity.

Theoretically, the study draws on a material-semiotic framework, inspired by scholars such as Mol (2008), Law (2008) and Mulcahy (2012), allowing for an analysis of the national initiative as “a performative knowledge practice constituted and enacted by people and tools in complex collectives or assemblages” (Mulcahy, 2012, p. 132).

Furthermore, it draws on recent material-semiotic and posthumanist analyses of sexuality education which have encouraged a movement away from humanist, individualist and essentialist ideas of the teacher as a detached agent of change (Cardell & Lindgren, 2024). In this line of thought, sexuality education is conceptualised as a situated and contingent practice, produced by heterogenous assemblages involving a multitude of human and non-human actors (Planting-Bergloo et al., 2022). This implies that difficulties with implementation of sexuality education cannot be understood as individual, nor immaterial, but rather as related to fragility or instability of the capacity of the working assemblages. This approach facilitates bottom-up explorations of how practices do not only produce local versions of sexuality education, but also continuously generate the objects, spaces, and subjects involved in them (Alldred & Fox, 2019). In line with Fenwick (2015), Kiær et al. (2024), and Mol (2008) ideas of teacher ‘responsibility’ and ‘choice’ are not understood as inherent individual qualities or capabilities, but rather as situated capacities entangled in practice.

This study investigates how temperament-sensitive seating of students in the classroom influences learning effectiveness and engagement during classroom activities in the middle school.

According to psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches to education, learning could be effective only by taking into consideration unconscious dynamics, anxiety regulation, and rational position or their sitting in the classroom (Britzman, 2011; Youell, 2006). Students' seating positions also influence perceived safety and patterns of interactions (McCorskey and McVetta, 1978; Wannarka and Ruhl, 2008). Temperament is known as a biologically grounded and relatively stable disposition that is connected with emotional reactivity, effortful control, and classroom engagement (Rothbart, 2007; Zentner and Bates, 2008). This educational research also takes into consideration associations between temperament and academic behavior (Keogh, 2003; Thomas and Chess, 1977).

The research question of this study:

How do temperament-sensitive classroom seating arrangements function as mechanisms of effective containment, influencing middle school students' learning effectiveness and engagement during classroom work?

General objective of this research was to examine how temperament-sensitive classroom seating arrangements function as mechanisms of effective containment and contribute to middle school students' learning effectiveness, engagement and emotional comfort during classroom work.

Specific objectives:

- to identify differences in learning effectiveness and on-task behaviour across homogeneous, heterogeneous and random seating arrangements for students with different temperament types.

- to explore students' affective and subjective experience of classroom seating in terms of emotional safety, anxiety regulation and comfort with participation.

- to analyze psychoanalytical processes (e.g., containment, acting-out and peer co-regulation) emerging in classroom with different seating configurations).

- to examine teachers' perception of the role of seating arrangements in managing classroom affect, behavioral dynamics and learning engagement.