54 - Instructors’ Practices and Perceptions of Teaching Sexual Function and Pleasure

Poster Board Number: 54
There are separate poster presentation times for odd and even posters.
Odd poster #s – first hour
Even poster #s – second hour

Abstract Body : It is well established that sexual pleasure has a positive impact on sexual health and therefore, overall individual health. Despite the known importance of sexual pleasure, health promotion efforts still neglect sexual health, and thus pleasure. There is therefore a need to train healthcare professionals to competently and comfortably address sexual pleasure when providing health services. Anatomy and physiology (A&P) courses often serve as a pre-requisite for students who intend to enter a healthcare profession. Therefore, A&P courses could serve as an important context to teach about sexual pleasure. However, to our knowledge, no study addresses how sexual pleasure is taught in A&P courses. Therefore, we sought to explore if and how instructors teach about sexual function and barriers in implementing this topic in A&P. We recruited six A&P instructors via snowball sampling in the United States who have experience teaching A&P courses. We used the Teacher-Centered Systemic Reform (TCSR) model to explore instructors’ perceptions of teaching sexual function and pleasure and how they affect their teaching practices. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed qualitatively using constant comparison method of thematic analysis. To ensure trustworthiness, two researchers coded to consensus and we applied member-checking, where participants corroborated the themes emerging from the interview transcripts. While all instructors report teaching about sexual function, only two out of the six instructors include sexual pleasure when teaching about sexual function in their A&P course. Themes emerged from categories within the TCSR model, namely: teaching practices, instructor thinking, contextual factors, and personal factors. Instructors adopted the following teaching practices on sexual function and pleasure: in units about genitals and the reproductive system, briefly in small amounts, and limitedly in androcentric ways and as a function of reproduction. Under instructor thinking, instructors reported the benefits of teaching sexual function and pleasure both for students’ personal sexual lives and their future healthcare careers but perceived a lack of time and fear of negative consequences as obstacles to their teaching practices. Contextual factors strongly influenced instructors’ thinking and practices in the A&P classroom and included the absence of sexual pleasure in teaching resources and community beliefs that discourage teaching about sexual pleasure. Instructors did not report personal factors as a barrier to teaching sexual function and pleasure, as these factors did not influence an instructor’s choice to teach or not to teach sexual function and pleasure. This study shows that A&P instructors encounter several personal and structural obstacles in implementing content on sexual function and pleasure resulting in it being scarce and unstructured in their curriculum. This study is important because it helps us understand A&P instructors’ current teaching practices on the topic of sexual function and pleasure. Understanding instructors’ teaching practices and the unique perceptions and contexts of implementing this topic in A&P can help us develop supports to help interested instructors teach about this vital topic. Sexual function and pleasure is an important yet understudied topic within anatomy education, both for students’ personal sexual health and to train competent and inclusive health care professionals.