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Consent Beyond Binaries: Teaching with Nuance, Confidence, and Care

Title of Event: Consent Beyond Binaries: Teaching with Nuance, Confidence, and Care
 
Description of Event:
Sarah Casper of Comprehensive Consent and EDSE Lead Educator Anne Hodder-Shipp have teamed up for the first time to offer a brand-new workshop for clinicians, educators, and anyone who teaches or talks about consent!
 
Teaching consent can be challenging, with traditional approaches often emphasizing legal definitions while inadequately addressing the gray areas that students inevitably ask about. Creating space for these deeper conversations isn’t easy, but educators Anne and Sarah are here to help you learn how.
 
True consent literacy starts internally, with awareness of and familiarity with our body sensations, emotions, and instincts. Rather than centering external behaviors, intellectualization, and yes/no, give/get binaries, [workshop title]’s mind/body approach will help you move beyond insufficient explanations and rigid scripts, and toward consent education that truly connects.
 
Together, we will:
  • Examine the many meanings and associations of consent beyond legal and political
  • Build confidence around teaching consent beyond yes vs. no, give vs. get, and innocent vs. guilty binaries
  • Unpack our personal and professional baggage about consent so that we can more easily talk about it
  • Challenge common understandings and teachings of consent using a thoughtfully critical lens
  • Practice navigating real-life classroom scenarios to build comfort, skill, and consistency
  • Unlearn unhelpful, unrealistic representations of consent and how to recognize them in curricula
  • Identify solutions for challenges, conflicts, and misunderstandings that commonly come up in classrooms
  • Make space for nuance, discomfort, and ambiguity
This workshop will not:
  • Review legal definitions of consent, age of consent laws, “capacity to consent,” and similar models (we’re not lawyers)
  • Provide a pre-made, one-size-fits-all way to teach consent (that doesn’t exist)
  • Show you how to teach consent “the right way” (that’s not a thing)
  • Use reductive clichés like “consent is sexy,” “no means no,” “yes means yes,” or “if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no” (not as helpful as they seem)
  • Assume consent is simple, easy, fun, enthusiastic, or exclusively verbal (inadequate and ableist)
  • Center statistics or use them as teaching tools (unhelpful and unreliable)
  • Uphold the carceral system and punitive models of “justice” (racist, classist, and ineffective)
  • Teach you how to help survivors and advocate for restorative justice (that’s a different workshop!)
Date of Event: Aug. 22-23, 2025
 
Time of Event: 9 a.m.-1 p.m. PT
 
Location: Online Synchronous
 
Sexuality Education (SE) Training:
SE2. Theory and methods of sexuality education (including curriculum development, delivery and evaluation).
SE3. Ethical issues in sexuality education.
SE4. Theory and methods of approaches to sexuality education with specific populations (e.g., youth, older adults, couples, ethnic/ cultural/ faith-based populations, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities).
 
Presenter/Speaker: Anne Hodder-Shipp, Sarah Casper
 
Contact Name: Anne Hodder-Shipp
 
 
 
AASECT Approved CEs: 7

Event Knowledge Areas Covered: