The end of our trip in space and time

It's time to go. It's time to start new trips and new adventures. This was a nice trip, but, as everyone knows, each project has an adequate time and our time is passed. This will be my last post.

During more or less one year and a half we have been doing this journey. A lot of people were with us in the way. That's why this was a nice adventure and that is the main reason because I will miss this trip. We've been together discovering the way peoples of different parts in Europe and people of different ages think about love and sex and their specific way of behavioring in what concerns to sex.
It was a big challenge to face this delicate subject. From the begining it was clear that this is a subject that some populations face in a shy way or, at least, they don't talk about it in a confortable way. That's why some partners had an enthusiastic involvement in the beginning, but it wasn't necessary a long time until they realise that they were in trouble, because they didn't feel confortable, or because their school leadership (or the students or the parents) didn't feel confortable driving their eyes inside sexuality. This could have been a reason for us to give up this project. Some of us gave up. But the others stood. For the ones who stood, they realised that if some cannot stay in this project, that is a reason to investigate this subject at school work. It can't be a part of us which we ignore, because it is a part of us with a lot of influence in our lives.
We are finishing this project. Everything must be reviewed, of course. In this blog you can find what we've done. A lot of work should follow. We will see if we can come back to develop the project. For now we will make a pause.
In the top of this blog you can find links to the pages in which main activities developed in our project are detailed.
In order to perform the project, we've choosen freedom as a basic value. During this project time, this year and an half, we lived in a deeply transforming world , some of us changed their mission in their school, others saw the groups of students they teach be replaced. So, it was important the adaptability of the project activities to his school reality. We accept this, if the essencial goals were kept. This way, it was possible to drive our work to a deeper level. Each teacher worked with his students. Students debated the subject, talked with teachers, with friends and with relatives. It was the best way to avoid sex tabu. Publishing posts about the developed activities gave us the oportunity to know what partners were doing in the project and allowed us to compare ideas/values and discuss on them.
As a last word, I want to thank everybody who was in our «trip in space and time». It was a pleasure to be with you all. I'm specially grateful to Maria because of her intense and wise work.

Best regards from Portugal!

reflecting on our project

When I joined this project, a year and a half ago, I had my doubts about how such a delicate issue as sexual education at schools could be worked out in an etwinnning project. Jorge’s leadership in this trip proved that when teachers want, they can!

The project was extended in two school years, during which I had different positions at school and thus I worked in different ways.  The first year I worked with a specific group of students, meeting in the school library and talking (the photo shows our group during a meeting). We collaborated very well in the activities and writing the chain story, where students revealed aspects of sexual behavior in our area. That story was a starting point of a lot of discussions.  I won’t refer to the importance of such discussions, as my partners here have already mentioned them and I fully agree with them.

During the second year I worked in collaboration with another teacher in my school. We had the chance then to reach a wider audience and collect finally questionnaires from them.  Students tend to be shy to participate in such projects although they admit the importance of them. The use of English language during the second year was a problem but we decided not to give up but be flexible. We focused on the core aim of this project, that was discussing, thinking, and opening our mind in issues of sexual education. I gave students the chance to talk, even though their points of view were not recorded. Every question of our questionnaire was the starting point of discussions that made them all reflect on sexual behavior. It was also interesting to see the similarities and differences in thinking with students from other countries. Our school year ended early, so we didn’t have the time to discuss the results with my students. We will do it next school year, as the trip into human sexual behavior seems it’s never ending.

Sexual education in schools is a very delicate issue and a taboo for many teachers. With this project I was feeling not alone. I had Jorge and the other partners sharing with me worries and ideas. I’m grateful for that.

Thank you Jorge!

Maria

from the Greek team

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Mabel's Evaluation of the "Trip"

It was a privileged for me to participate in this trip. Unfortunately my contribution was brief due to many school work I had to do, but it was an enriching experience for me and for my students.

They felt challenged to participate in such a project, where older students, from different nationalities, shared their opinions about topics that also concern(ed) them. They felt they were not alone in this piece of paradise that is Portugal, but that there were several links of interest, worries, frustrations, fears and feelings among all these youngsters that could be discussed together.
The use of the English language was a problem to my students. They told me many times they wouldn’t be able to write directly to the blog whatever they wanted because they feared not to be able to write in perfect English. Probably (I hope) I made them realize or led them to reflect about the need to learn and use foreign languages. People need to communicate with each other and whenever we start something new,( that comes out of our routine) it is always hard .

So this trip in space and time allowed my students to give their first steps into a project like this and it really gave them the possibility to understand more about themselves and about the others. Moreover they also felt that it is very important to talk about issues that, many times, are still kept as tabus.

I do think etwinning projects are a wonderful tool to learn and to bring closer Europeans creativity and knowledge. Teachers and students have the chance to develop a collaborative work, working out together a lot of skills in real context and building up projects that are done according to student’s needs, what enhances highly their and our development.
As I love trips I hope to share my knowledge and work experience with this full of potential space and I expect to do it many more times…

To finish, I would like to congratulate Jorge Rocha and the other members of the project for this amazing work.

Classes debating questionnaire data

Click para obter esta informação em Português (click here to get this information in portuguese)
The last activity I developed with my students was an important step of the journey in space and time. This activity consisted of a debate on the survey results.

It was a dynamic debate, as it was supposed to be: sexuality is a matter really complex and, because of that, there are a lot of opinions about the way it must be lived. To judge everyone’s attitude towards sexuality requires to understand in a deep way the reasons and motives of everyone. Thus, before presenting to the students a moralizing and formatter speech, we think we should try to discover the experience of each one, every ethical understanding which is designing the personality of each of our students.

Consequently, sexual education cannot be done through monologues in which teachers assume the role of experts (anyway teachers are not experts in sexuality subjects).

I don’t want to remove teachers' authority. They will keep it, but they must express it in a sensible, sensitive and responsible way. With this teachers' profile, students will trust in their teachers and, at the same time, they will not create the illusion that teachers hold a knowledge out of doubt, something like a divine revelation that allow him to be certain and indisputable. Differently, teachers with this profile will point out that those who say they are illuminated are usurpers and are trying to take off everyone the noble responsibility to find your way.

Sexuality is the territory of the typical argumentative confrontation. There are sensitivities, cultures, values in confrontation, confrontation of everything that define the individuality of each one. It is a confrontation that is a game that to be civilized and sustainable has to be transparent in what concerns to the integrity and specificity of each one.


In the name of transparency and integrity, school sex education should make a decentralized approach, plural, inclusive, but not relativistic. The discussion of sexuality, such as the experience of sexuality, should tolerate and seek to understand all points of view, provided it remains untouched respect for others, untouched their integrity. For this reason the survey data were discussed in open classes, one meeting of the students of the class (in one case, it was possible to join two classes in the same lesson), class directors, other teachers of the classes and a representative of parents.

During an initial consideration, they were told that the data presented were not collected with scientific methodology; in these circumstances, everything we wanted was to stimulate the discussion and the starting point was the presentation of statistical data drawn from information gathered through the questionnaires (data published in previous posts in this blog).

To read more detailed information about debates with different classes click here.

A trip in (inner)space and time

Vincent Van Gogh, Shoes

It seems that there are trips we have to do deep inside (ourselves) to realize how different lives are. The trip I have been doing with my students for 2 years now has been tough but it has also been an enriching experience. They have taught me a lot about the meaning of life! I must confess that it’s been a truly “trip in (inner)space and time”
There are a wide variety of factors that can lead students to specific behaviour. As Jorge so clearly said, the environment and living conditions, the lack of family values and rules make my students face the dark side of life since early ages. They just live with feelings of rejection and anger and these feelings are reflected in their everyday lives: at school, with peers, with boy/ girlfriends, in sex, etc( of course that this is not a blind rule because there are some that don’t follow the path).
When life is so difficult, emotions are expressed in a not so beautiful way…

Mabel's Testimony - the value of sex in Lisbon sorroundings

Well, I work with students that are between 12 and 15 and I must tell you that the data shown in the questionnaire doesn’t surprise me in some fields. First of all, a great percentage of my students start their sexual life very early. In my opinion that happens due to many factors:
-their families don’t have an effective role ( a lot of parents have several jobs and aren´t at home, others have parents with social problems like drug addiction or they are even in jail and others don’t care at all about their children). The example they have at home is sometimes extremely hard to live with. My school has a considerable percentage of cases of abortion. This year I had some students from the 9th grade that had an abortion. The way students and their mothers reacted was amazing for me because it seemed as if they were talking about teeth extraction without psychological consequences;
-physical and psychological violence is also present among my students. They aren’t mature enough to understand the dimension and the importance of sex in their lives. Sometimes they use sex as a reflex of what they are used to live and watch at home and sometimes as a weapon used (without having that conscious) against themselves ;
- the concept of intimacy is changing among youngsters. In the past the first sexual intercourse happened later and it was something special, to share our intimacy with somebody we were in love with or that we loved. Nowadays, as Jorge said, it’s like a game or in my opinion just a way of having quick fun. They just do it and don’t think much about it. What is interesting to analyze is that this behavior is happening also with girls.
Sex and love is falling apart and this fact brings inevitably more problems to teens and future adults.

Sexual attitude - authors of physical violence in sexual relations

The following shape shows the results of our questionnaire concerning physical violence in sexual relations. We can compare differences in answers between people of different ages, different genders and different countries. In this shape people say they were authors of sexual violence.
Click on the shape, to see it more clearly.

Sexual attitude - physical violence in sexual relations

The following shape show the results of our questionnaire concerning physical violence in sexual relations. We can compare differences in answers between people of different ages, different genders and different countries. In this shape people say if they were victims of sexual violence.

Click on the shape, to see it more clearly.

Sexual attitude - psychological violence

The following shapes present the results of our questionnaire in what concerns psychological violence. We can see the differences according to different ages, different genders and different countries.
Click on the shapes, to see it clearly.

Sexual attitude - reasons to be sexually active

The following shape shows the results of our questionnaire in the topic inquiring reasons to be sexually active. Each one could chose from one to all given hypothesis. We can see the differences in answers of genders, of countries and of ages.
Click on the shape, to see it more clearly.

Sexual attitude - who was the partner in the 1st sexual intercourse?

The following shape shows the results of our questionnaire in the topic inquiring the partner of the 1st sexual intercourse and the nature of the relationship. We can compare the answers of people with different ages, different genders and in different countries.

Sexual attitude - to have more than one sexual partner

The shape bellow shows the results to the topics in the 1st column, selected according to the different ages, gender and country of inquired people. To see the shape more clear, please click on it.

First time

First of all I would like to point out that the number of collected questionnaires from my school is not enough to reach a conclusion on the average sexual behavior of adolescents in my area. Nevertheless, my experience gained during the last 7 years I get involved in sexual education gives me clues on how adolescents think and why they act so. 

Here is my explanation on some of the collected data:

Sexual behavior at a very early age (12) has been mentioned to me personally by a girl who was raped and a boy who was led to a prostitutes’ house by his own father. So I can’t see any will in this action from the side of the child. We cannot say that they agreed on what happened to them. I am also not sure if other cases refer to masturbation and not to a normal sexual intercourse at that age. Most students that filled the questionnaire were shy and didn’t ask any questions, even when they didn’t clearly understand what was asked.

Sexual activity at ages below 16 was a result of not clear and conscious decision, as it happened while the persons were drunk, during a party, most of the times. And if there is no real sexual intercourse at this age, for the reasons that Gonçalo Brás Gomes has very accurately mentioned, teenagers are exploring their bodies with sexual  acts, even without having any relation with the other person. That’s what struck me, hearing about the easiness of acting so. And it’s very clear that boys pretend to have emotions towards girls, so that they convince them to be with them.

Another interesting finding through my talking with my students was that most of the times when the first sexual intercourse happens at an age below 16, girls don’t do it again unless they find a boy they are sure to have a long-lasting relation or they keep having this first boyfriend for the next years and even marry him when they finish school. They don’t change easily sexual partners. Boys of course have a completely different attitude.

For me, this questionnaire was the chance to start talking with my students about issues that (as they told me) they had never talked with their parents about. Some girls told me that I did very well to start such a conversation in the classroom because they had the chance to hear how boys think on such issues and they realized the difference of attitude towards sex between boys and girls.  The data collected by the questionnaire are thought provoking but not concluding to general results.

Sex and personal conflict

Ana Nogueira (10ºB, Escola Secundária Henriques Nogueira), commenting on the post "The age of the 1st sexual experience":
«I would like to mention an important fact. In class, our teacher showed us the results about the age of 1st sexual experience. If we cross this information with the other results about the age people think they should have their 1st sexual experience, we see an alarming fact!

In some cultures, people think one thing and do another. There is a conflict in their minds. This can have serious consequences like lack of self-esteem, frustration

. If most people think they should start their sex life late but they start it early, something is wrong.

They can start with understanding what makes them think they should initiate sex late: religion, parents, fear, shame...

Then they must do their own choices and never forget that none of us should do or not do something because other's opinions. We can't regret a choice well thought and that doesn't go against our own values!»

All shapes of our questionnaire about sexual attitude

Now it's time to analyse all the data of our questionnaire. They are available in 2 different documents: one word and one pdf. Later I will publish shapes with crossed data.

The age of the 1st sexual experience

Here we have some data of our questionnaire concerning sexual attitude. In this case, we can compare data in order to understand the sexual attitude in different countries, in different generations. It's part of our tip in space and time.

Teenagers have the experience of sexual intercourse when they are too young! Please, pay attention how many youngsters start sexual intercourse before they are 16 years old. In Greece, more than 53% have already started when they are 15!

 In the 1st shape, 1st column, you can find the age of 1st sexual experience of the people that filled in the questionnaire in each country; «total» refers to the % of people in all the studied countries that had 1st sexual intercourse at that age; «others» refers to the people that have a different nationality.

In the next shape you can find the differences of ages in which people of different generations had their 1st sexual intercourse. The crossing data are the questions «how old are you?» and «which was the age of your 1st sexual experience?»

In the next shape you can find the differences of genders in what concerns the age of 1st sexual experience.

What do you think about this information? Which relevant conclusions do you think we can draw?

I'm really worried with people who start to have sexual intercourse before they are 12 years old! Can you imagine?! How can we expect this children to have responsability in sex?

I can't avoid to think maybe to have sex in that age is not a matter of their will. We can't forget that with that age, they don't have mature will yet!

SEXUAL ATTITUDE QUESTIONNAIRE

Welcome to our etwinning questionnaire about human sexuality. This is an important item in order to develop sexual education with students in our etwinning project.
Questionnaire is a result of several contributes. It is based on Maria Sourgiadaki’s and Jorge Rocha’s work on a questionnaire of Maria João Alves (leader of PPES in Escola Secundária Henriques Nogueira) and on a sexual education guide, approved by the Greek Ministry of Education. Finally, there are some questions suggested by students.
Translations from Greek and Portuguese to English are not professional.
Please, answer questionnaire trying to be completely honest. Your opinion is important so that we get information from your sexual attitude in order to analyse and discuss upon it. The whole process of getting information and its use will be controlled by this etwinning project team, which gives you guarantee of confidentiality and anonymity. Data will be statistically processed in an aggregate way.
Click in Questionnaire so that you can answer. Thanks for your contribution!

Sex, values, culture and human freedom in action

«After reading the post «A trip back in time» we were debated with two different opinions. The grandmother and mother of Mary. The grandmother of Maria despite being a generation older than the mother of Maria agrees with sex before marriage, but the mother of Maria who is less of a generation does not share this ancient custom, which leads us to conclude our thoughts and our tastes are influenced by our culture and our beliefs because even by the same family being a mother and grandmother of Maria have different cultures and consequently different opinions.


Currently, our society is not as conservative, because with the changing times, the customs and way of thinking of most people is changing, and we are having a more open mind to the various matters that were previously more difficult to address. Given the situation of this post, we agree that our society is currently in disagreement with the fact that the woman be forced to have sexual relations with the Turkish leader in her wedding night.

However, there may still be cases of people who agree with this. These people may have historical and cultural conditioning or psychological make them agree with this. Taking the example of a pedophile. This does not give freedom to the person who chooses to satisfy his own sexual desire and is not free because it is conditioned by psychological problems. Now, consider this action good or bad depends on the values of each subject or culture (subjectivity of values) and ethics of each.

That is, people's opinion depends on their culture and their beliefs. As the culture and beliefs, are influenced in our thinking and our decisions. Right and wrong and good and evil are concepts that can have different meanings for different cultures, which leads us to think that at that time, the chances for the Turks was having sex with the woman on her wedding night that she did not agree. This is an ethnocentric culture, because they are only worried about their own pleasure , not valuing the views of women, even to the point that they cut the breasts if they did not take having sex with them.

Currently this is an unacceptable situation for our culture.»

Bruno Camacho

Beatriz Esteves

Cátia Santos

(10ºC, in Henriques Nogueira School)

International day of women - women in our society

            As said in the original post, on the 8^th of March of every year we celebrate worldwide the International Women’s Day. These celebrations are expressed in different ways: some celebrate the respect, appreciation and love towards women, men express their love for women and others celebrate women’s economic, political and social achievements.

            The general assumption states that women are naturally passive, while men are naturally active. In our opinion, full human equality can only be achieved when men and women agree that those attitudes (passive and active) are appropriated for either of them.

            Like this, we can conclude that it is very important to educate ourselves as to the basic gender differences which exist between men and women and acknowledge that the differences exist. This way, we should use our differences to improve our relationship rather than to damage it. These cognitive differences should be recognized as long as we continue to make an effort to conserve and protect feminism and equality between the genders in the process.

            Many people question themselves why is there a global day of the women and not a global day of the men, due to the fact that on the human rights law we find the equality of race, gender, religion, sexual choice. However, in our opinion, we must look at this day by another perspective - there are profound reasons based on cultural issues that backup the existence of this day.

            In the Bible, the book considered blessed by most of the world population, we talk about God - powerful, unique, omnipotent and omnipresent - as being male. Jesus, the only son of God, is also a man, just as the first human created by God was Adam and was also male (Eve was made from one of Adam's rib). Popes, bishops and priests are always men, as well as the disciples were. Physically a man has by nature more physical potential, and it can’t be disproved scientifically, thus unwittingly giving men power in ancient societies in which the intellectual was much less important than today, and was therefore also considered the most capable and strongest to be the boss/leader of a group.

            In the animal life, for example, males of most species tend to be larger and are more able-bodied than females. Therefore when in flocks the leaders are the "strongest" males of the group. With this we mean that the superiority of men over women has always been part of the culture of most societies almost always. However, especially in the West some changes have been noticed in the practice of this ideal. Women have been gaining freedom, and therefore more opportunities to show their capabilities and limitations, that were blocked previously. It is with the incentive to promote opening opportunities to women that we believe that world women's day is important to exist.

            Currently, women have different rights depending on the region of the globe they are located in. In a Western perspective, the modern women have an active professional life, without letting the domestic life become passive. We agree with teacher Jorge when he says that men and women should be partners, both professionally and at home; this way, a woman can devote more time to her profession and rise to new heights in her career. In the Eastern perspective, women aren’t free and don’t have the same rights as men – they are professionally very limited and are "forced" to devote all their time to their domestic life, stressing that men don’t share their time with this activity. In the second perspective, women and men are not equal in terms of rights, duties and employment opportunities.

            In the recent decades, with the admission of young women in universities, women have manifested themselves better than the men at the academic level, which allows us to deduce that they are who will occupy the most important positions in the future society. It’s now that the woman may be expressed at a professional level.

            Today, in our day-to-day as Portuguese citizens, we've had women in senior positions. Our own school is an example of that, where the highest position is the executive director of the county and it is occupied by a woman. Us as students deal almost daily with male and female teachers - and according to our personal experience we could not discern any differences professionally and socially between teachers of different genders.  Hence we can conclude that perhaps sex has nothing to do with professionalism in a profession of intellectual character.

Comment created and posted by:

Inês Vieira

José Freitas

Tiago Rosado

International day of woman

March, 8th. This is the international day of woman. Congratulations to all women!
Anyway, this is time to think why is it necessary to have a day dedicated to the women. Then, we will find that women are discriminated all over the world. They're discriminated in accessing to education, discriminated in accessing to the working market, discriminated at home and primary victims of wars made by men. Equality and justice are great values that we still need to reach fight for, so that this intolerable situation can be changed. And we need to know that we have to be patient doing this fighting, because it is a long term job that must start now, immediately, because each minute passed, there are new injuries against women.

This fight must be taken by men and women and I believe that for me, as a teacher, and for my students, a good way to fight is doing a good job becoming ourselves more and more educated. Improving education is the best way to spread equality and justice in the world of men and women. So, students must know that in every day that they don’t do a good job in their studies, they are losing an opportunity to become our world better for women... and a better world for them is a better world for men also.
I'd like we (people of different schools and different countries) comment about the situation of women in the world of our experience: how is it working with our girls, mothers, teachers, etc.

A trip back in time

Reading Ines’ comment, about talking with her mother, I felt that it was my chance to grab and talk about my own experience, discussing about sexual behavior with both my grand-mother and my mother. Imagine that it happened some….25 years ago.

It was early 80’s, a rather progressive period on terms of sexual behavior. We were talking about my cousins getting engaged (the official step before marriage). For my grandmother it was natural that the new couple would live together from now on and would have sexual life. It was a very common attitude for the couple to get married when the woman was pregnant. And this was not something new! It was happening in Crete quite a long time ago.
But for my mother, who was not Cretan, that was kind of provocative, according to her beliefs. She was a generation younger than my grandmother but having not the Cretan culture, she was opposing to pre-marriage sexual intercourses. Wasn’t it strange?

My grandmother gave me an explanation of why Cretans have had this, let’s say “custom”. Going back in time, in the years where Crete was under the occupation of Turks, when a couple was getting married, the first night after the marriage, when it was supposed to be the first time of the couple to have a sexual intercourse, the Turk Chief of the area demanded that he would have the woman first. If she would refuse she was brutally punished with the cutting of her breast. How could Cretan people then survive this tragic fact they were facing? How would they be sure that the baby born was a Greek and not a Turk? They changed their sexual behavior and getting engaged was like getting married. The marriage was taking place when the woman was already pregnant. The same behavior was kept through the years even when the “danger” did no longer exist.

Without knowing the past, somebody would assume at that time that Cretans had an immoral attitude, since they had sexual intercourses before marriage, compared to others. But before judging, it’s better to try to find why. Every human behavior has its explanation.

Our new Partner - Secondary School of Camarate (Loures)

The Secondary school of Camarate is located in the suburbs of Lisbon and it has almost 550 students. Last year it became a TEIP school. That means it was considered a priority school due to some problems of its community, namely the social and economic conditions of the students and their families and, consequently their lack of studying habits, some disciplinary problems and low school results.


It’s a multicultural school with a considerable community of students that come from Africa, Pakistan, Ukraine, India and Brazil. Our Headmaster is also Bulgarian. Many languages are spoken in Camarate, unfortunately Portuguese and English aren’t very well spoken!

A lot of work is being done, however good results take some time to come up as well as changing students mentalities about the importance of studying.

It’s a nice school, with updated technological devices. It has 44 rooms very well equipped, labs, a library and some clubs (music and dancing, Capoeira, bike and theatre club).

This year we had some interesting activities that brought all the community to our school. We had a well known contest “Camarate School Idols” and a kind of “Oscar awards of Camarate.”

The end of this school year finished with a great party where students could sing and receive an Oscar for their performance during the year. It was a nice experience that motivated all the students to give their best to receive the award.

About me

My name is Mabel, I was born in a beautiful city called Covilhã, near Serra da Estrela, the highest mountain in Portugal. I’ve been teaching English for 16 years near Lisbon and I love the light of this city.

I love reading, painting and going for a walk with friends.

This Trip in Space and Time started long ago and unfortunately I only caught the train last September 2010.

Mabel (English teacher)