Sex and Nature: Lessons on Diversity from Animal Sexual Behavior

by Brian Flaherty, Partners in Sex Education

One of the truly enjoyable things about the CFLE conference is that theprograms tend to be created and presented by professional educators – by peoplewho spend a good amount of time thinking about the best way to presentinformation so that they reach a variety of learning styles all at once.  Most of the presentations I went to were doneusing engaging activities that had participants moving around, learning fromeach other as well as from the presenter. 

For example, “Sex and Nature: Lessons on Diversity from Animal Sexual Behavior,” oneof the many highlights of the conference, began with pairs of participantsbeing given slips of paper.  Some of theslips described sexual traits and peculiarities of particular animals, &other named the animals themselves.  Wethe participants had to get up – in pairs – and find the pair who had the slipthat matched ours.   Ours – my neighborand I – described a soft animal with a penis as long as it’s body, whose matechewed off the penis after sex; we hunted around for the pair with a slip ofpaper that read “banana slug.”  Once wefound the slip of paper that matched ours, we had to describe it to thegroup.  The genius of this activity: itgot us moving around, talking to and learning from one another.   Another activity in this workshop was acreative visualization of the production of a “swollen ovary” of a tree –culminating with our eating a piece of that ovary: an apple slice.  The presenter , Marlene Pray, was fantastic –varying the ways in which she brought us great and useful information.  Sure: we all learned about the greatdiversity of nature,  that “no specieshas been found in which homosexual behavior has not been shown to exist”(providing a great retort to too many quick-to-judge students).  But we also had a great time while learningthese things, reinforcing what we took away.