“Measure Your Belly.” New Zealand Children’s Constructions of Health and Fitness

Abstract

The expansion of health as a concept, repeated expressions of nationwide concerns about young people’s health, and the accompanying information explosion about health and fitness have worked together to support versions of physical education that explicitly address health issues. The conflation of health with physical education, however, is not without problems. This paper explores some consequences of the relationship between health, fitness, and physical activity through an examination of students’ responses to questions relating to health and fitness in the New Zealand National Education Monitoring Project. The children responding to the NEMP tasks were very familiar with the relationship between physical activity, fitness, and health. While this seems to point to the efficacy of physical and health education programs, the ways in which these children seem to have accepted this relationship with a great deal of certainty does not necessarily contribute to their health and well-being but rather suggests an acceptance of discourses that are associated with guilt, the self-monitoring of the body, and which seem to deny the pleasure that can be associated with physical activity.

Greek pre-service physical education teachers' beliefs about curricular orientations: Instrument validation and examination of four important goals

“…This is not scientifically precise and their relationship is far from being unproblematic (Burrows, Wright, & Jungersen-Smith, 2002). According to Tinning (2010), this functions on the "energy intake and energy consumption" approach and fails to take into consideration the dialectical relationship between the individual and the society.…”

Prescribing Practices: Shaping Healthy Children in Schools

“…What is clear from our prior research (Burrows, Wright and Jungersen-Smith, 2002;Burrows & Wright, 2004a, b;Wright & Burrows, 2004) is that children as young as eight years old can and do clearly articulate the health messages adults desire them to have and to hold -they 'know' what they are 'supposed' to think and do in relation to health producing behaviours. In one prior project we analyzed National Education Monitoring Project data derived from year 4 and year 8 New Zealand children's' responses to questions about health and fitness.…”

Reframing quality and impact: The place of theory in education research

“…My own research with young people and that of colleagues such as John Evans, Emma Rich and Lisette Burrows around their understandings of health and their bodies, proposed another way of looking at the 'problem' from that offered by the epidemiological and medical version of the obesity epidemic. This includes data that suggest that children of younger and younger ages are preoccupied with their weight, equate weight as indicated by body shape with health and engage in practices to monitor their weight and maintain a thin body shape ( Jungersen-Smith 2002, Burrows andWright 2007). It includes data that indicate that young women and increasingly young men are preoccupied with eating and sometimes physical activity because of fears of becoming fat and some of those young women and young men are developing eating disorders at least some of which can be attributed to a social preoccupation with the thin/not fat body Evans 2005, Rich, Holroyd, andEvans 2004).…”