School PE and ‘fat’ kids: maintaining the rage and keeping a sense of perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper is about ‘fat’ kids in HPE classes. The motivation for this paper comes as a personal response to my reading of Roxane Gay’s book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Hunger is thoughtful, passionate, articulate, sad and overall troubling. It also raised questions for me about whether health and physical education (HPE) is a safe space for fat young people and whether or not there is any possibility that HPE might be a transformative space that some scholars suggest. It raises issues regarding curriculum choice and pedagogy, but also about dispositional change such that all HPE teachers become more sensitive to the needs, feelings and capacities of young fat kids.

KEYWORDS:

• HPE
• critical pedagogy
• fat pedagogy
• obesity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Richard Tinning is Emeritus Professor in the School of Human Movement & Nutrition Science at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is also Guest Professor of Educational Science and Sport Pedagogy at Dalarna University, Sweden. Richard was an early advocate of critical pedagogy and has published extensively on school physical education, teacher education and on issues of knowledge and the body in human movement studies. In 2010 he was co-winner of the AIESEP/IOC President’s prize for his significant scholarly contribution to physical education and sport research.

Notes

1 I am intentionally using the term ‘fat’ rather than the medicalised term ‘obesity’. I will, however, use the term obesity at times when it has been used by others, including Roxane Gay herself, to describe their body.