Wearing Consent: The belief that there is no greater way to embody or express one’s personal message about consent than to wear it on our bodies for others to see and respond to.
The Wearing Consent Curriculum: Between 2014-2015, SexEd (Norene Leddy & Liz Slagus) completed an Artists Residency at the 422 Health Center, a school-based health center (SBHC) operated by the Institute for Family Health at the Washington Irving Campus (WISC) in NYC. As Artists-in-Residence, SexEd produced Wearing Consent, a 3-pronged art + sex ed campaign that reached the community of WISC via a classroom curriculum adjusted for both native and non-native English speakers, a robust after-school program, and the SexEd Salon, a school-wide event at the SBHC’s annual Health Fair that showcased our wearable art engagements (including temporary tattoos, manicures, live remixes of students’ recorded definitions of consent, and a runway). SexEd worked in partnership with the health center’s Adolescent Health Educator, Bryana Williams, and together they developed and ran several versions of the Wearing Consent curriculum.
The free Wearing Consent curriculum is designed for mature middle school or high school students, though many of the activities are fun for people of all ages. It includes 4 class sessions that cover consent as a complex topic, as well as specific instructions for creating consent-themed wearable art projects, including temporary tattoos and t-shirts. The curriculum is modular, so each section can work individually. Each section is then broken down into activities, which can also be done independently.
SESSION 1: Wearing Consent: Intro to Consent, and Art as Activism
In this session you will:
● Establish a core understanding of consent.
● Have in-depth discussions about the complexities of consent.
● Create personal lists of why it is hard for students to say yes or no.
● Develop a collective list of why it is hard for students to say yes or no.
● Introduce guerilla art and media campaigns and what makes them successful.
● Introduce graphic design (fonts, composition, combining images and text).
SESSION 2: Wearing Consent: Creating Your Own Wearables Campaign
In this session you will:
● Create working definitions for and understanding of the tenets of consent through exercises and discussion.
● Establish a familiarity with artists’ projects that relate to the work being produced in the class, as well as terms such as collage, composition, mixed media, wearable art and messaging campaigns.
● Develop an understanding of message development. How do you translate your idea into a messages for a specific audience?
● Review the design process: going from an idea (or many) to a fully realized project (how do we get from here to there?).
● Introduce how campaigns and messaging work and what is needed to distribute ideas.
SESSION 3: Wearing Consent: Finalize Your Designs
In this session you will:
● Help students design a personal image of consent that can be used for a wearables campaign.
● Review how campaigns and messaging work and what is needed to distribute ideas.
● Aid students in giving and receiving critical feedback about ideas and making adjustments to their individual designs.
● Work with students to apply basic art & design terms to their own work: color, contrast, and composition.
● Facilitate writing and conversations that articulate the context in which a student would be ready to have sex.
SESSION 4: Getting the Message Out!
In this session you will:
● Facilitate an art critique, including basic art and design vocabulary.
● Review what it means to critically look at/comment on someone else’s work respectfully, have peers provide critical feedback about their work and have constructive conversations about things that work and might need further exploration.
● Review the power of making critical decisions about our sex lives and readiness for certain situations.
● Discuss the relevance and potential of the students wearing their tshirts in public and how they will respond to inquiries about them.
It will really help us to know how and why you are using the Wearing Consent curriculum. SexEd exists to foster a dialogue about sexual health education and culture, and we thank you for participating in this exchange and hope that you will provide us with the context for your use, so that we can better understand and improve upon our productions.
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For more info on Wearing Consent at Washington Irving Campus, check out our Wearing Consent page.