#Skinny girls: young girls’ learning processes and health-related social media

ABSTRACT

This paper provides in-depth knowledge into young girls’ learning processes in relation to physical activity, diet/nutrition and body image. Data were generated from interviews with 49 girls (age 13–15) in England. The practical epistemological analysis technique was used to explore young people as both producers and consumers, or prosumers, of content and knowledge. The data illustrate that adolescent girls navigate two interrelated health-related paradoxes within publicly private spaces: (i) skinny fat and (ii) naturally fake. Skinny fat refers to how participation in social media represents a continuous struggle of becoming skinny, but at the same time not trying too hard to become too skinny. Naturally fake refers to how having a ‘natural’ look is highly valued, but equally, it is acceptable to be ‘fake’. Overall, adolescent girls are competent users of social media, who are able to navigate the complexity of the medium and its contents. At the same time, the adolescent girls sometimes found themselves, unintentionally, exposed to risks (e.g. bullying or body dysmorphia), particularly when social media was experienced publicly in a temporal order, connected to the past or present, and without control of potential future effects and impacts. Relevant adults should acknowledge young people’s vast competence of life on social media and further empower young people to self-regulate their learning through social media, and in ways that help them to learn from experiences about their health and bodies to shape future actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• body image
• physical activity
• diet
• adolescence
• instagram

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://www.gov.uk/types-of-school.

2. Slim thick is a girl with a slim body shape but a big booty and big thighs. Usually with a small waist and flat stomach. www.urbandictionary.com.

3. For the girls in this paper, fat shaming was a practice of telling people that they shouldn’t be fat.

4. Stories are videos and images that appear outside if the regular social media feed and last for 24 hours before they disappear. They are temporary but can be organised into small collections for later viewing.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [201601/Z/16/Z].

Notes on contributors

Victoria Goodyear

Victoria Goodyear is a Senior Lecturer in Pedagogy in Sport, Physical Activity and Health at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her main research area focuses on social media/digital technologies and young people’s health and wellbeing, and she is interested in the professional learning needs of teachers/coaches.

Joacim Andersson

Joacim Andersson is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Sciences at Malmö University and Örebro University, Sweden. He seeks to clarify philosophical and sociological concepts in order to empirically explore embodied learning and the transactional specificities of learning environments and classroom teaching. He is the lead author along with Jim Garrison and Leif Östman of Empirical Philosophical Investigation in Education and Embodied Experience, Palgrave 2018.

Mikael Quennerstedt

Mikael Quennerstedt is a professor in Physical Education and Health at Örebro University, Sweden. Quennerstedt’s main area of research is within teaching and learning in physical education, and salutogenic perspectives of health education. In his research, questions of health, body, gender, artefacts, subject content, learning processes and governing processes within educational practices have been prominent.

Valeria Varea

Valeria Varea is an associate professor in Physical Education and Health at Örebro University, Sweden. Valeria's main area of research is within embodiment. She uses sociocultural perspectives and qualitative methods to explore and critique people’s engagement in physical activity and perceptions of the body.