Michael Gard

Truth, belief and the cultural politics of obesity scholarship and public health policy

A number of debates centring on the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ have sprung up in the last 10 years. Although debate is the normal state of affairs in any scientific endeavour, my focus here is on two broad camps we might call ‘alarmists’ and ‘sceptics’. While alarmists have characterised the ‘obesity epidemic’ as a looming global health catastrophe, sceptics have argued that the consequences of rising obesity levels have either been greatly exaggerated or are unclear. In focusing on obesity, my intention is not to prove the case of one camp or the other but rather to construct a kind of anatomy of the obesity controversy. In this essay, I want to move beyond the idea of there being two camps in debates about obesity and provide a more complex account of the different groups that make up both sides. My interest in this research is to explore the idea that belief matters more than truth. In the context of debates about obesity, nothing could be more irrelevant than the ‘truth’ of fatness. The energising principle will be what people, particularly but not only politicians and journalists, can be made to believe.

When a boy's gotta dance: new masculinities, old pleasures

Why would boys want to dance? Why would anyone want to dance? The argument prosecuted in this paper is that dance educators have tended to see dance as a self-evidently good thing with self-evident benefits for children who learn to dance. In other words, dance educators tend to concern themselves with why students should dance rather than why students want to dance or not dance. Instead, I propose that educators need also to think about how students, but particularly boys, experience, think and feel about dance here and now. But rather than offering an over-arching philosophy, I then discuss some practices from my own teaching research and practice which attempt to engage with young peoples experiences of dance. In short, my argument is that the content of dance education might just as profitably be concerned with the immediacy of pleasure and displeasure rather than dry, hopeful and formal educational objectives.

Producing little decision makers and goal setters in the age of the obesity crisis

It is obviously possible to argue that education is always an arm of social policy. However, there are just as surely degrees of directness between the agendas of noneducational authorities and what happens in school and university classrooms. This article considers what appears to be a direct example of a particular public policy agenda, the so-called “war on obesity,” translated into curriculum. My intention is to rouse the field from its slumber and to ask whether we are content for others to decide what and how we will teach health and physical education in schools and universities. I do this by examining a specific example of health and physical education curriculum. However, this is not a call for resistance to the intrusion of outsiders; we always need to listen to others. My question is whether the voice of physical educators matters at all when it comes to the practice of physical education.

The limits to exercise performance and the future of fatigue research

The study of human fatigue stretches back centuries and remains a significant part of medical and social discourse. In the exercise sciences fatigue is routinely related to the ability to produce muscle force or to the recovery from force decrements. However, the study of fatigue has by virtue of the experimental paradigm excluded the subjective sense a person attributes to an event or experience, thus reducing our overall understanding of the fatigue process. Modern studies report the causes of fatigue as either central or peripheral in origin. Although useful, this dichotomy can also exclude the individual subjective assessment. Furthermore, adhering dogmatically to set parameters is likely limiting the advancement of our understanding. A more realistic paradigm would permit the individual to use the sensory cues to adjust the effort along with the fatigue process rather than rely purely on feedback mechanisms. Therefore, bringing feedforward mechanisms of the brain into fatigue research perhaps represents the next phase in the unravelling of the fatigue process.

Neither flower child nor artiste be: aesthetics, ability and physical education

This paper examines the meaning of ability in the context of dance education, in part, via the lens of aesthetic education, a reasonably well-developed body of ideas, and asks what it means to be ‘aesthetically able’. While aesthetic education tends to focus on aesthetic appreciation, it does also deal with a persons capacity to respond to the world in aesthetic ways. But as well as trying to clarify what ability might mean from an aesthetic point of view, this paper also engages with Evans’ (2004) agenda setting paper in which he challenges the field of physical education to refocus discussion on the ways we conceptualise ability and, by extension, how our educational practices are shaped by our ideas about ability. For aesthetics and dance, I take this as a challenge to think about whether ‘aesthetic ability’ is valued in physical education and what kinds of abilities or (as Evans might say) ‘capital’ are privileged in different approaches to teaching dance and physical education.

Being someone else: using dance in anti-oppressive teaching

In this paper I explore the possibility of using physical movement, particularly dance, to contribute to anti-oppressive pedagogies in the physical education classroom. I argue that, despite the misgivings of some feminist scholars, a focus on the constructedness of masculinities can allude to, rather than prescribe, powerful pedagogical responses. I suggest that the potential of dance movement, as opposed to other movement forms, as a pedagogical tool lies in its capacity to problematise the taken-for-grantedness of bodies and embodiment (and in the case of the research I present in this paper, heterosexual male embodiment). And while it is certainly true that all forms of physical movement are inscribed and circum scribed by the gendered social contexts in which they occur, I argue that dance offers particular potential for disruptive and discomforting experiences, as well as pleasurable ones, for students within school and university physical education.

eHPE: a history of the future

A grand convergence looms. It seems at least plausible that health and physical education may soon be lived by students in ways that are radically different from the past and sharply at odds with the imaginings of its founders and generations of academic aficionados. Perhaps in some respects, the differences will be superficial and less important than the continuities. Nonetheless, I draw connections between some recent futurist literature, developments in social theory and trends in health education, physical education and school-based health intervention—fields that I collectively call ‘HPE’—in order to imagine their digital futures. I contend that there is much for these fields to consider as developments in digital technology, the commercialisation of education, the spread of surveillance culture and medicalisation reshape how people think about HPE and its reason for being. But rather than an apocalyptic warning, this is an invitation to others to engage with some important questions that, although already urgent, have gone largely unnoticed. For example, what kind of thing will eHPE be if/when it exists primarily to generate profits and monitor and measure the minutiae of everyday life? At the very least, my argument here is that if it is not already the case, questions of pedagogical process and effectiveness may soon struggle for relevance in HPEs digital future.

Physiotherapists demonstrate weight stigma: a cross-sectional survey of Australian physiotherapists.

QUESTION Do physiotherapists demonstrate explicit and implicit weight stigma? DESIGN Cross-sectional survey with partial blinding of participants. PARTICIPANTS responded to the Anti-Fat Attitudes questionnaire and physiotherapy case studies with body mass index (BMI) manipulated (normal or overweight/obese). The Anti-Fat Attitudes questionnaire included 13 items scored on a Likert-type scale from 0 to 8. Any score greater than zero indicated explicit weight stigma. Implicit weight stigma was determined by comparing responses to case studies with people of different BMI categories (where responses were quantitative) and by thematic and count analysis for free-text responses. PARTICIPANTS Australian physiotherapists (n=265) recruited via industry networks. RESULTS The mean item score for the Anti-Fat Attitudes questionnaire was 3.2 (SD 1.1), which indicated explicit weight stigma. The Dislike (2.1, SD 1.2) subscale had a lower mean item score than the Fear (3.9, SD 1.8) and Willpower (4.9, SD 1.5) subscales. There was minimal indication from the case studies that people who are overweight receive different treatment from physiotherapists in clinical parameters such as length of treatment time (p=0.73) or amount of hands-on treatment (p=0.88). However, there were indications of implicit weight stigma in the way participants discussed weight in free-text responses about patient management. CONCLUSION Physiotherapists demonstrate weight stigma. This finding is likely to affect the way they communicate with patients about their weight, which may negatively impact their patients. It is recommended that physiotherapists reflect on their own attitudes towards people who are overweight and whether weight stigma influences treatment focus.

Looking beyond what's broken: towards an appreciative research agenda for physical education and sport pedagogy

Despite the volume of research devoted to the many ills that beset the pedagogical field of physical education and sport, we begin by arguing that there has been insufficient attention given to the way scholars conceptualise change and imagine bringing it about. In particular, we point to a tendency within the field to prioritise problems—whats broken—and suggest that this tendency harbours a self-fulfilling logic. Although somewhat oversold by some of its advocates, we then draw on Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as a potential intellectual resource for new agenda setting in physical education and sport pedagogy (PESP) research. AI invites researchers to prioritise the positive in the research contexts they study with a view to discovering and generating stories about success that research participants and scholars alike might build on. We argue that an appreciative agenda calls for more flexible and open communication about the start and imagined end points of our research, and a greater emphasis on collaboration that takes seriously the capacity of research participants to be the authors of change and the source of new directions in PESP inquiry.

Healthy, happy and ready to teach, or why kids can’t learn from fat teachers: the discursive politics of school reform and teacher health

The idea of using schools for public health ends has a long and complex history. If anything, interest in the public health role of schools may actually be intensifying, perhaps driven by the attention given to a range of health matters affecting young people, notably mental illness, drugs and alcohol, and obesity. This paper deals predominantly with obesity but emerges out of our ongoing research into both the nature and consequences of policies and interventions that seek to use American public schools to prosecute public health goals. In particular, our focus is on the kinds of school-based interventions that widespread panic about childhood obesity has generated and their consequences for teachers. We take up this matter by examining how American teachers’ health – and the associated responsibilities and obligations to inspire health among young people – are discursively constructed in legislation, policy documents, and academic articles. Our review and analysis of these texts reveal the presence of three distinct discursive formations: teachers as health role models, teachers as fiscal liabilities, and teachers as instruments of policy compliance. These formations, we argue, suggest a novel and, in some cases, alarming trajectory in school-based obesity policies and interventions.