Chapter 8: Teaching Truth To Power: An Autoethnographic Study about Instagram Content Creation in the College Sex Ed Classroom

Most sex education in the United States promotes abstinence only until marriage. This narrow focus means that students’ knowledge about sex and relationships is strategically limited by the educational system. Since sex often reveals and depends upon power dynamics, this puts all students at a disadvantage, while disproportionately impacting already minoritized students. Based on autoethnographic data collected since August 2020, this chapter will explore how social media content creation can be used as a transformative pedagogical strategy in higher education. For the last six semesters, students taking my undergraduate sex education courses have created Instagram carousels to demonstrate and share their learning. This chapter will highlight the changes I have made to this assignment as my own knowledge of social media content creation and graphic design have grown. Notably, I will discuss how this assignment seeks to rectify the substandard sex education that students in the class, as well as their peers on campus who are not in the class (and the public), have received. Furthermore, I will discuss how I have changed this assignment to provide students with transferrable skills that will increase their marketability in their future careers and their performance in other classes that implicitly rely on untaught graphic design skills for things like presentation slide decks. Located at the intersection of educational studies, public health, and gender and sexuality studies, this course has a focus on praxis, which the Instagram project uniquely achieves. Suggestions for how to apply this to other disciplines will be provided.