Educating adolescents about sexual health in schools has been a controversial issue for the past 40-plus years. Multiple studies conducted by academic scholars, government agencies, and private organizations have concluded that adolescents receiving sexual education in schools typically make healthier decisions than adolescents not receiving a formal sexual health education, and adolescents participating in comprehensive programs make healthier choices than adolescents participating in abstinence programs. Texas school districts are not required to teach sexual education, but if they choose to do so, adolescents receive abstinence education. Texas adolescents also consistently report making more unhealthy sexual decisions than adolescents in other states. According to the social constructivist epistemology, learning occurs through social interactions with people, symbols, and tools. Interactions with various people, institutions, and information formats construct adolescents’ knowledge about sexual health. High school librarians who teach information literacy skills, who provide sexual health information resources in their collections, and who promote intellectual freedom improve adolescents’ knowledge about sexual health. The more informed adolescents are, the more likely they are to practice healthier sexual behaviors. Myriad factors encourage and discourage high school librarians from playing the role of sexual health information provider. This study explores the role high school librarians play as sexual health information providers within the framework of Role Theory. According to Role Theory, individuals exhibit predictable behaviors within a specific context based on socially constructed expectations. Multiple factors, both internal and external, may inhibit individuals from playing roles. District level library coordinators and high school principals share their perspectives about high school librarians playing this role and the factors influencing librarians’ willingness to do so. Data was collected through three rounds using the Delphi technique. Library coordinators and principals disagree about the role librarians play. Together participants identified fifteen motivators and five barriers to information provision. / text

This paper aims to identify and bring light to librarians different educational practices in their work to fight digital inequality in society. The study uses methods such as observations and interviews to identify which practices the librarians most commonly use when providing digital aid and how these can be understood, how the librarians themselves reflect on these practices, and what differs in their reflections and their actions. After collecting our empirical data we conducted a qualitative content analysis using concepts from Säljös theory of sociocultural perspective on learning, where we identified concepts such as  awareness, tools, and communication as the most central aspects of these educational practices. By doing this we identified three different sub-practices which together make up what we define as an educational practice. These  were approaching practices, conveying practices and outreach practices. These practices were heavily influenced by the concepts of awareness and communication, and as such we could also see how the librarians showed a great deal of awareness concerning the different existing inequalities in society, and thus emphasised the democratic importance of their work. We also found that there were no greater differences in the way they reflected about their practices, and the way in which they actually conducted their work. However, we did find that the main differences instead were in regard to the amount of reflection that they did. Finally we could also see how the librarians mostly had to make do with what they had in terms of their own competencies due to this educational role being relatively new to the librarian. It is therefore our hope that this essay can help inspire future research and endeavours in this field to help develop these practices, and strengthen the role of librarians to better combat digital inequality.