Educação para a sexualidade

Sexuality education is a topic historically marked by advances and setbacks influenced by social, medical, religious, political, and cultural aspects. Many of these delays are legacies of the military dictatorship, a time of serious human rights violations. In current times, conservative and exclusionary political-party conceptions, similar to those of the period of the 1964 coup, have driven regressions in guiding documents for school curricula. The university, through teacher education, has the responsibility to resist this movement and the erasure of authoritarianism, as well as to contribute to the construction of other, more emancipatory, references. From this perspective, this article consists of a report on a teaching experience lived during the second semester of 2023, with 22 students from the Pedagogy program, in a 36-hour elective course, titled Sexuality Education, at a public university in Minas Gerais. The objective was to reflect on theoretical-practical possibilities to legitimize sexuality education in favor of human rights. Among the findings, it was noted that the topic still causes apprehension in many people and requires the overcoming of reductionist and pejorative conceptions.