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

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, Consent Beyond Binaries’ 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!)

About our tiered pricing:

$395 Full Price - This is the cost and value of the workshop. Select this if the cost will not prevent you from meeting your housing, food, transportation, childcare, and other basic needs, even though it might mean you have to temporarily cut back on some non-essential spending. If a company or non-profit is funding your attendance, you must pay the Full Price.

$295 Equity Price - Select this if paying the Full Price would mean your basic monthly needs, like housing, food, transportation, or childcare, would not be met or that your financial stability would be put at risk. If you choose this option but can genuinely afford the Full Price, you are taking this option away from someone who genuinely needs it. You are not eligible for this price if a company or non-profit is funding your attendance.

$175 Accessibility Price - Select this rate if you are unemployed or underemployed, on disability or government assistance, or struggle to make ends meet, and paying the Community Price would prevent you from meeting your housing, food, transportation, childcare, and other basic needs month to month. This is available only to people experiencing financial hardship who, without it, would not have the means to attend. If you choose this option but can genuinely afford the Full or Community prices, you are taking this option away from someone who genuinely needs it. You are not eligible for this price if a company or non-profit is funding your attendance.

Payment plans are available. Please email hello@everyonedeservessexed.com to set one up.

About your co-facilitators:

Sarah Casper (she/her) is a former PsyD Candidate turned Consent Educator here to give your students the critical thinking, decision-making, and social-emotional skills that they need to have healthy and respectful relationships with others and with themselves. With a decade of experience in schools, yoga classes, and mental health settings helping young people learn how to be good friends to themselves and each other, Sarah developed a skills-based, scaffolded, social-emotional framework for teaching practical consent education to kids, teens, and emerging adults. Her name is pronounced like SAH-rah.

Anne Hodder-Shipp, CSE (she/they) is an award-winning, multi-certified sex and relationship educator with a special skill for conveying complicated (and sometimes sensitive) information in accessible ways. They are the founder and lead educator at EDSE, and she runs a coaching practice that helps individuals, couples, and polycules navigate shame, conflict, and big feelings using a friendly, compassionate, and direct approach. Anne is also the author of Speaking from the Heart: 18 Languages for Modern Love, a groundbreaking and much-needed expansive update to the love language concept, and its accompanying workbook, The Speaking from the Heart Workbook: A Practical Guide to the Modern Love Languages.

This program meets the requirements of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) and is approved for 7 CE credits. These CE credits may be applied toward AASECT certification and renewal of certification. Completion of this program does not ensure or guarantee AASECT certification. For further information please contact info@aasect.org.

This workshop covers the following AASECT Core Knowledge Areas:

A. Ethics and ethical behavior.

E. Intimacy skills (e.g., social, emotional, sexual), intimate relationships, interpersonal relationships and family dynamics.

F. Diversities in sexual expression and lifestyles including, but not limited to, polyamory, swinging, BDSM and tantra.

M. Pleasure enhancement skills.

N. Learning theory and its application.

O. Professional communication and personal reflection skills.

This certification covers the following applicable Sexuality Education training areas:

A. Theory and methods of general education (including curriculum development, delivery, and evaluation)

B. Theory and methods of sexuality education (including curriculum development, delivery, and evaluation)

C. Ethical issues in sexuality education

D. Theory and method of approaches to sexuality education with specific populations (e.g., youth, older adults, couples, ethnic/cultural/faith-based populations, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities)