This is a study of teaching about the human body. It is based on transcribed material from interviews with 15-year-old students and teachers about their experiences of sex education and from recordings of classroom interactions during a dissection. The analysis is focused on the relationship between what students are supposed to learn about the biological body and their expressed experiences and meaning making of bodies in the schoolwork. The results indicate that the negotiations associated with the encounters between the bodies of the classroom (student, teacher, and animal bodies) are important for what directions meaning making takes and what students are afforded to learn about bodies, biologically as well as in terms of values. We suggest that these negotiations should be taken into account at schools, be regarded as an important part of the learning processes in science education and in that way open up for new possibilities for students' meaning making.

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In this study we examine upper secondary students’ notions of contraceptive methods, as human reproduction and contraception are common content in sexuality education in Sweden and worldwide. Our data were constructed during an extensive educational sequence in natural science sexuality education and include audio recordings of 17–18-year-old students’ stories. Since the main body of the stories was about hormonal and digital contraception and contraceptive responsibility, these stories are the focal point of our analysis. Our study further aims to problematize, challenge, and develop education on contraceptive methods, and Donna Haraway’s theoretical perspectives have been particularly useful. We have in the analytical process linked Haraway’s cyborg image with her later work on tentacular thinking. Our result shows that scientific facts about human reproduction are important for the students’ ability to navigate between the advantages and disadvantages of various contraceptive methods. However, sexuality education turns out to not only be a matter of scientific facts. This study accentuates how natural science, historical, political, cultural, and market-oriented intertwinings affect students’ notions of contraception—and thereby also the construction of natural science sexuality education.

How mathematics and science curricula connect to democracy and justice is understood through the examination of different perspectives of mathematics and science education as political. Although frequently conceived of as neutral, these school subjects have been central in recent modern education for governing the making of rational, science-minded citizens who are necessary for social, political, and economic progress. Three main perspectives are identified in the existing research literature. A perspective of empowerment highlights the power that people can acquire by learning and using mathematics and science. A perspective of disadvantage focuses on how the pedagogies of mathematics and science intersect with categories such as ability, gender, class, ethnicity, and race to generate and reproduce marginalization. A perspective of subjectivation examines the effects of mathematics and science curricula within the context of historical and cultural processes for the making of desired modern, rational, and techno-scientific types of citizens, thus creating categories of inclusion and exclusion. All together, these perspectives point to the ways in which mathematics and science, as privileged forms of knowing in contemporary school curricula, simultaneously operate to include or exclude different types of students.