Beyond the BEEPs: affect, FitnessGram®, and diverse youth

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on two separate research projects, one with Black and Latinx youth in the United States and another with LGBTQ+ youth in New Zealand, to explore the affective experiences of young people with the FitnessGram® assessment. We specifically use affect theory through poetic inquiry to entangle interview data from young participants about their experiences with FitnessGram®. We then (re)present the data through poetic forms. We argue the turn to affect and poetic inquiry allows us, as researchers, to respond to dominant discourses around FitnessGram® (and young bodies) in critical and creative ways. And, we embrace the experimental, open-ended potential of poetic (re)presentation to bring awareness to the youths’ experiences and to encourage others (researchers, educators, practitioners, policymakers) to engage differently as well. We hope, through such aesthetic forms, we can start to value the affects of FitnessGram® on youth and think divergently about this popular practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Poetic inquiry
• affect
• youth
• fitness testing
• PE

Back and forth

Back and forth

  One side to the other side

      A cone on one end

      A cone on the other end

          IT gets faster and f a s t e r

             The BEEPS

                IT’S in the speakers

Back and forth

  Run from point A to point B

      IT goes

          BOOP

  Run from point B to point A

      clicks get faster

          You have to go faster and f a s t e r

Back and forth

  The speakers

  The BEEPS

     IT tells you how fast it’s going to be

        level one

            level two

     Run as f a s t as you can

     Get to the next line before

          IT

          BEEPS

             But   keep a steady pace

Back and forth

  I go really s l o w

      Then IT will go

         BEEP

  You have to go f a s t e r

      tempo changes

         You get tired

         You stop

         That’s your score

Back and forth

  One side to the other side

  One cone to the other

  Point A to Point B

         Again and again

              Again and again

                 Again and again

Introduction

We (Carrie and Dillon) begin with a poetic (re)presentation to bring the affects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) of FitnessGram® on Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ youth in our research to the fore. This poetic (re)presentation was produced through an entanglement of words from young participants in our respective research projects. As we situate our research, the theory and methods of this paper later, we felt it was important to start with words from the people who matter most – the youth. We felt it necessary to focus on their responses to fitness testing and, specifically, FitnessGram® in their physical education settings. We opened the paper with a poetic (re)presentation, based on the idea that poetry acts as an experimental form of writing that engages ‘all of our “senses”’ (Fitzpatrick & Fitzpatrick, 2020, p. 2), generates emotional vulnerability (Fitzpatrick & Fitzpatrick, 2015) and creates pause to interrogate dominant understandings of the body and research (Fitzpatrick, 2018; Glesne, 1997). The above poetic (re)presentation reminds us (and the reader) that ‘a poem should not (only) be about a thing but rather the thing itself’ (Fitzpatrick & Fitzpatrick, 2015, p. 51). With this ‘thing’ – the poem – it becomes possible to examine the affective experiences of youth in relation to FitnessGram®. Thus, in this paper, we purposefully use affect and poetic (re)presentation to entangle our two research projects, with Black and Latinx youth in New York City (NYC) and LGBTQ+ youth in New Zealand, to explore the ways that the FitnessGram® assessment affected them. We start with a brief background on FitnessGram® and Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ bodies in physical education.

The FitnessGram® phenomenon and Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ bodies in PE

There is a history of fitness testing and, simultaneously the use of FitnessGram®, in the United States (U.S.) and across the world (Alfrey & Gard, 2019; Harris & Cale, 2006; Morrow et al., 2009). The rationale for such testing has been positioned in numerous ways, ranging from identifying the health-related needs of youth, to promoting physical activity, to being used as a formative assessment to further physical education goals (Harris & Cale, 2006; Silverman et al., 2008). Over the past 38 years, FitnessGram® has come to corner the market on fitness testing as ‘the most trusted and widely-used fitness assessment, education and reporting tool in the world’ (Cooper Institute, n.d.). In other words, since its designation as a physical fitness report card in 1977, to the creation of its own health-related fitness test in 1987, to its mandated use across different states and countries (Corbin et al., 2013; Plowman et al., 2006), FitnessGram® has become a powerful entity. The FitnessGram® assessment was used by schools and teachers to test an estimated 22 million students in 2012. It is used in all fifty states in the U.S. and across (at least) 14 different countries (Corbin et al., 2013). According to the FitnessGram® reference guide (Plowman & Meredith, 2013), its goal is ostensibly simple: to educate kindergartners through 12th graders on the health-related components of physical activity, tying physical activity behaviors to concepts such as self-monitoring and self-regulation. With this approach, FitnessGram® maintains that children and young people learn to adopt healthy behaviors for a lifetime.

We – as scholars and former practitioners (a personal trainer and a school-based HPE teacher) – assert a need to bring such linear thought into question. We are fortunate to be able to build on critical scholarship that has begun to raise skepticism of the FitnessGram® system (Butler-Wall, 2015; Gard & Pluim, 2017; Jette et al., 2020; Pluim & Gard, 2018). These scholars have discussed the problematic ties FitnessGram® has in relation to academic publications, research careers, professional organizations and corporations (Butler-Wall, 2015; Gard & Pluim, 2017). Indeed, a simple review of FitnessGram® literature (e.g. Plowman et al., 2006), the Cooper Institute/FitnessGram® website (Cooper Institute, n.d.), and critical scholarship (e.g. Butler-Wall, 2015; Gard & Pluim, 2017; Jette et al., 2020; Pluim & Gard, 2018) illustrates various multi-sectoral partnerships (Jette et al., 2016) littered throughout its history. This includes corporate and social entanglements with organizations such as Campbell's Soup, the National Football League, SHAPE America, and the National Dairy Council, to name a few. With extensive corporate and non-profit partnerships, the above critical scholars have maintained the influence of FitnessGram® (as an interconnected system) is so broad that it has far reaching implications for physical education, including in areas such as policy, teaching, and research.

Pluim and Gard (2018) argued that FitnessGram®, through historical and political ties, may be perceived in the U.S as ‘the silver bullet that solves many of physical education's long standing dilemmas and challenges’ (p. 265). Building on this idea, Jette and colleagues (2020) explored how FitnessGram® uses its interconnected web of influence to position itself as ‘the dominant fitness testing protocol in the United States’ (p. 132). They argued multiple actors, both human (youth, families, advisory board members) and non-human (corporations, funding, report cards), work to produce a highly persuasive system that has stymied opposition and critical questioning into its practices. In making this argument, Jette and colleagues (2020) refer to FitnessGram® as a ‘black box’ (p. 137). By ‘black box’, they mean FitnessGram® operates as a system where focus is only placed on inputs into the system (e.g. student data) and outputs the system produces (e.g. report cards), without ever considering the ‘inner workings’ or actual processes. When the system – in this case, FitnessGram® – appears to run efficiently, no one questions the complex internal workings of the machine, its accuracy, or practices. Rather, these internal workings become part of a ‘black box’ (hidden from sight) and assumed to be a ‘matter of fact’ (Latour, 1987). When we consider the political and historical influence organized around the FitnessGram® ‘black box’ (e.g. corporate and non-profit endorsements, policies), then the ability to criticize this system is overpowered by its ostensible link to the medicalization of the (young) body (Jette et al., 2020; Pluim & Gard, 2018). As a result, the FitnessGram® ‘black box’ remains shut with young people's bodies rendered through pathological processes and terms (abnormal/normal, healthy/unhealthy), based on pre-determined set points that quantify their current well-being and future risk.

With the FitnessGram® ‘black box’ sealed, young people's engagement with fitness testing, and even health-related fitness, becomes limited. Such standardization of the physical education curriculum has been shown to narrow subjective experiences of young bodies to reproduce normative (gendered, racialized, sexualized, classist, ableist) ideals (Fernández-Balboa, 1997; Fitzpatrick, 2013). For LGBTQ+ youth, this has meant that physical education as a subject works to repress non-binary identities, regulating gender and sexuality through heteronormative practices (Berg & Kokkonen, 2021). One example of this practice with FitnessGram® is how its assessments are structured by ‘male’ and ‘female’ scoring categories (Landi, 2019). This approach stabilizes gender as a distinct binary (boys or girls) and nullifies non-binary, intersex, and transgender bodies. Such a differentiation of gender embodies a ‘straight’ pedagogy (Fitzpatrick & McGlashan, 2016) that reproduces heterosexuality as the normal and expected performance. For Black and Brown youth, physical education has historically reinforced societal stereotypes of physical superiority (Fitzpatrick, 2013) while simultaneously labeling their bodies ‘at-risk’ in terms of public health agendas (Azzarito, 2016). As a system rooted in Westernized biomedical measures, FitnessGram® can exacerbate such ‘at-risk’ and deficit perspectives. Its health-related practices (e.g. Progressive Aerobic Cardiovascular Endurance Run (PACER), body composition) continue to be centered around white (often masculine) physiological markers of the body. Additionally, the ways in which FitnessGram® has been adopted in schools and represented in the media recodes race as a ‘risk factor’ to profile particular bodies (Butler-Wall, 2015). Such approaches reinforce a narrative that Black and Latinx families are in need of intervention regarding their lifestyles, erasing broader cultural, social, economic, and political considerations. In turn, with FitnessGram® mandated in multiple countries, states and large school districts (including NYC), Black and Latinx youth may come to find their bodies at odds with a standardized practice that disregards their own race and culture (Azzarito, 2016).

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that physical education is an unfriendly place for many bodies. One problem here is that, with the ‘black box’ sealed shut (Jette et al., 2020), FitnessGram® easily maintains its status as scientifically accurate and, therefore, becomes a neutral entity that is innocently working ‘towards the promise of health through individual empowerment’ (Butler-Wall, 2015, p. 239). Yet, as we turn to situate ourselves, our research, and the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this paper, we contend there is nothing neutral about any of this. In fact, it is all quite affective.

Ourselves, our research and affective ‘methods’

Carrie

  Personal trainer 

      familiar with health-related fitness assessments⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

         (for adults)

            in clinical and commercial gym settings

  Doctoral student

      formal education 

         Nutrition (a long time ago)

         Exercise Physiology (more recently)

  Never satisfied

      With how…

         we talk about health, fitness

             we measure the body

                we obsess over the obesity epidemic

                  we eliminate pleasure and joy from activity and eating

  S e a r c h i n g   

      f o r  

         ways to change that 

Dillon

  Educated and taught HPE in the U.S.

         My JOB is (was) to

            make f a t kids skinny

  Adventured to New Zealand

      Socio-critical affects push(ed) and pull(ed)

         my bodythinking

            my becoming

  Pushing and pulling – pulling and pushing

         being push(ed) … . well, really … . pull(ed)

             “OUT of the closet”

                As a critical scholar in HPE

  I now do the pushing

      to transform HPE

         (in a field)

             that works to transform (straighten) me   

These poetic (re)presentations aim to share who we are, or seek to become, within this paper and in our research. I (Carrie) have been a personal trainer for over 12 years, with a formal education in exercise physiology. I have no day-to-day experience as a physical education teacher, although I sometimes joke that I live vicariously through my partner of 12 years, a Black male who teaches high school physical education in NYC. I am white, able-bodied, and fairly active (depending on the situation) but, if you asked me to complete any part of the FitnessGram® assessment (except the sit-and-reach because I have long arms), I would happily reject the offer. I (Dillon) began my career as a health and physical educator teacher. I used FitnessGram® to assess students, believing in its value. It was my job to make sure students were ‘fit’ and knew the consequences (e.g. obesity) if they were not. Yet, I began to question this path and view FitnessGram® as highly problematic. This continued as I moved to Aotearoa New Zealand to complete my PhD, focusing on socio-critical issues in health and physical education. I am a white, cisgender, queer male who grew up playing several sports. If you asked me to complete the FitnessGram® assessment, I would laugh (or cry) in your face and feign injury. We bring up our positionality because it matters in relation to the background of our research, the purpose of this paper, and the theoretical-methodological approaches that we adopt. As researchers, we are implicated in the act of research itself, from its conceptualization to (re)presentation – who we are or become as we entangle ourselves with data is always subjective, partial, and contextualized (Pringle, 2020; Ringrose et al., 2019). So, we next set the scene(s) and provide the context that led to this paper next to situate its theoretical and methodological underpinnings.

Setting the scene(s): New York City to New Zealand

From 2016 to 2017, we were each working on our doctoral research. I (Carrie) was in the Northeast region of the U.S., engaged in a visual ethnography (Pink, 2013) with Black and Latinx youth at a community-based urban after-school program. My aim was to explore the ways in which Black and Latinx youth interacted with health and fitness in this setting (Safron, 2020). Sometimes, due to my fascination with FitnessGram® and also to discover more about the young participants’ engagement in physical activity throughout their everyday lives, I would ask about their experiences in physical education. When five of the young participants (four males, one woman) spoke about FitnessGram®, I let them expand on it. The data from these five young people (aged 15–18) were generated from excerpts of two individual interviews and two group interviews, each lasting approximately 35–45 minutes.

I (Dillon) was in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, completing a materialist ethnography at a charitable LGBTQ+ youth organization (Landi, 2019). The purpose of the ethnography was to understand the ways in which LGBTQ+ young people are affected by – and generate affect in – health, physical activity, and educational settings. In asking broad questions about physical education, many participants brought up fitness testing (and particularly the BEEP test, a version of the PACER)¹ and their feelings about the practice. There were six LGBTQ+ women² (aged 15–23) who shared strong, vivid reactions to their interactions with the PACER test that began to stick with me – and still do four years later. This data, in which the women reflected on their experiences with the PACER test, came from one individual interview and three group interviews, also lasting between 35 and 45 minutes.

While we came to this paper from different backgrounds and through research projects on geographically distant parts of the world, the young participants’ experiences of FitnessGram®, that they expressed in these interviews, pulled at us – and lingered. These were separate groups of young people, sharing details that were eerily similar but also nuanced with tensions and contradictions regarding their engagement with FitnessGram® in their physical education settings. Due to our fascination, a dearth of critical scholarship (Gard & Pluim, 2017), and the possibility that words from these young people could pry the FitnessGram® ‘black box’ open (Jette et al., 2020) ever so slightly, we felt there was potential to entangle data from our research to see what could be generated. In this entangling, we turned to poetic inquiry (Butler-Kisber, 2020; Ellingson, 2009; Richardson, 2000), drawing on theoretical and methodological approaches that were emergent and experimental (St. Pierre et al., 2016).

Affective ‘methods’: generating data, poetic inquiry and (re)presentation

Affect is a starting place from which we can develop methods that have an awareness of the politics of the aesthetics: methods that respond with sensitivity to aesthetic influences on human emotions and understand how they change bodily capacities. (Hickey-Moody, 2013, p. 79)

Affect is described in numerous ways. For Hickey-Moody (2013), ‘affect is what moves us. It's a hunch. A visceral prompt’ (p. 79). Dernikos et al. (2020) depict affect as ‘scratchings’ – the ‘flickers and ruptures’ (p. 4) that push bodily sensations in different (new) directions. Affects, for Seigworth and Gregg (2010), are the forces that arise ‘in the midst of in-between-ness’ (p. 1) while, for Stewart (2007), affects are simply ordinary – ‘things that happen’ but, these ‘things that happen’ can be ‘funny, perturbing or traumatic’ (p. 2). For us (Carrie and Dillon), affect is all of these things and more. In this paper, affects generated the sensations we felt as we listened to young participants hash out their experiences with FitnessGram®. Affects became intensities that incited us to dig into the data related to FitnessGram® from our separate projects. And, affects acted as aesthetic forces, touching upon our senses, feelings and emotions, leading us to imagine how we could attend and respond to our young participants’ experiences in different ways. Affect, in other words, produced intensities that encompassed our thinking, doing and creation process from data generation to inquiry, often with little discernable distinction.

As we draw on affect as method (Hickey-Moody, 2013), it is with acknowledgment that these methods are driven by and connected to theory, along with particular onto-epistemological concepts (Ringrose et al., 2019). From such a perspective, identity is no longer a stable entity as the human subject becomes decentered. Rather, affect – in its ‘in-between-ness’ (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 1) – focuses on the relations continually produced within and through multiple bodies (e.g. LGBTQ+, Black, Latinx youth, FitnessGram® assessment). Instead of focusing on a single individual (or stable identities), affect as method and theory pulls (and pushes) us to imagine what these relations (in-between bodies) do as they collide in different ways (e.g. poetic (re)presentation). As such, we encourage you (the reader) to take note of two things in this process. First, we decenter any explicit reference to identity in order to think ‘in-between’ different forms of subjectivities. Second, we do not describe specific meanings of the poems. As others (e.g. Faulkner, 2017; Glesne, 1997) have suggested, we leave the poetic (re)presentations open for interpretation, ‘to induce questions rather than answers’ (Butler-Kisber, 2020, p. 37), and to generate affects within and/or ‘in-between’ each reading.

Moreover, in writing about rethinking method in new materialisms, St. Pierre and colleagues (2016) explained, ‘we give up a container model of inquiry in which all elements (e.g., data, analysis, representation) are isolated, distinct, and appear in a pre-determined sequence’ (p. 105). We found this helpful because it allowed us to relinquish a linearity that can define the traditional research process. Affect as method became an active (Niccolini, 2016) and responsive (Hickey-Moody, 2013) endeavor. Hickey-Moody (2013) wrote, ‘Affect is a starting place’ (p. 80). In this starting place, we were able to remain open to the affects of human (young participants, ourselves) and non-human (interview data, the FitnessGram® assessment) bodies as these entities were assembled and re-assembled throughout the data generation, poetic inquiry and (re)presentation process that we explain next.

Generating data

We began with the interview data related to FitnessGram® from our two research projects. This included transcripts from two individual and two group interviews with five Black and Latinx youth in NYC and one individual and three group interviews with six LGBTQ+ women in Aotearoa New Zealand. While we started with the young participants’ words from these transcripts, it is important to recognize that data are not static objects. Using affect as method, data are generative with the potential to create multiplicities instead of a single truth (St. Pierre, 2013). As such, we made the data with the young people (Tinning & Fitzpatrick, 2012). This ‘data-making’, or data generation, started during the initial interviews with youth and continued after our projects had ended, specifically once we (Carrie and Dillon) began to collaborate.

With the young participants’ experiences of FitnessGram® front and center, we started to read and re-read excerpts from our interview transcripts, separately and together. We underlined, highlighted and wrote notes on printed and electronic copies of the transcripts. We engaged in conversations regarding what we were seeing, hearing, and feeling from the youth. We spoke about the ways in which this related to, pushed back at, and expanded upon FitnessGram® sponsored research (Martin et al., 2010; Plowman & Meredith, 2013) as well as critical scholarship connected to FitnessGram® (Butler-Wall, 2015; Gard & Pluim, 2017; Jette et al., 2020). At times, we paused to provide each other with further background on the young people we worked with in our respective projects. We wanted to make sure that we ‘knew’ the youth, even if we did not meet them in person. At other times, we hesitated. We asked ourselves – what was this process doing as we began to assemble and re-assemble young people's words, feelings, and experiences from two different projects? By assuming a position in which we interwove data from our research as well as our subjectivities, we inserted ourselves into the data generation, inquiry and (re)presentation process. In this, we acknowledge the power we hold in shaping the young people's stories, from interviews to (re)presentation. It influences our research and the writing of this paper. Yet, we maintain such subjectivity is a part of any research and can even enhance the work we do and represent (Ellingson, 2009). So, in this paper, using affect as method (Hickey-Moody, 2013), we embraced ‘the emotional and embodied edges of scholarship unapologetically’ (Fitzpatrick & Fitzpatrick, 2020, p. 6). Again, we started with the separate interview transcripts from the youth in our two projects. We continued with the ‘data-making’ as we interwove participants’ words, our subjectivities, literature, theory, and methods. Finally, we enhanced this entanglement by purposefully choosing poetic inquiry to (re)present the youth's FitnessGram® related data.

Poetic inquiry and (re)presentation

Thus far, we have (re)presented two examples of poetic inquiry. In the first, which opened the paper, we extracted young participants’ words from interview transcripts and re-assembled them into poetic form. The second, a brief autobiography of our positionalities, used personal words and experiences to convey our identities and connections to this research. Such practices have been referred to in numerous ways including poetic transcription (Glesne, 1997), poetic representation (Richardson, 2000), and found or generated poetry (Butler-Kisber, 2020). We do not find the need to demarcate distinctions between these practices here. We agree with Butler-Kisber (2020) that such divisions ‘are false dichotomies’ (p. 23). For this paper, we adopted poetic inquiry in the broadest sense ‘to encompass the diversity of poetic forms’ (Faulkner, 2017, p. 209). Poetry, for us, became a creative form of inquiry and (re)presentation. Through its evocative style, poetry can draw attention to marginalized voices and identities (Faulkner, 2017), destabilize traditional research/practice hierarchies (Fitzpatrick & Fitzpatrick, 2020), reach diverse audiences (Sparkes et al., 2003), and open a multitude of sensory and cognitive responses to shift the researcher and reader to think and act differently (Glesne, 1997). Here, we turned to poetic inquiry and (re)presentation, with the hope and an understanding that poetic forms produce affective capacities that, in turn, can lead to (social) change.

So, as we (Carrie and Dillon) continued to discuss FitnessGram® related data, we did so with the participants’ words, affect theory, and the idea of poetry at the center of our inquiry. In doing this, we started to build upon the highlighted and underlined words, notes and conversations that we engaged with during our ‘data making’ process. We loosely followed examples of poetic transcription and inquiry from Glesne (1997) and Butler-Kisber (2020), closely re-reading the participants’ interview transcripts while leaving space for our inquiry to move in non-linear directions. In carefully re-reading the transcripts, we began to take out smaller excerpts. These were words and phrases that were similar and contradictory or ideas that seemed salient in our ongoing discovery. For instance, we found it significant that young people, from distant parts of the world, in separate physical education contexts, referred to the monotony (back and forth) and sounds (BOOP, BEEP), felt ‘proud’ and ‘self-conscious’, and formed partnerships (make allies) but remained ‘competitive’ – all within the FitnessGram® assessment. These young people's affective experiences affected us (as scholars, a former HPE teacher and personal trainer) to further embrace poetic inquiry and (re)presentation.

Thus, in using affect theory through poetic inquiry, we drew on the young participants’ experiences that overlapped and differed. We pulled out critical moments the youth brought up, in which they pushed back at the normativity that shaped the fitness assessment practice. We paused at the sadness and anger the young participants expressed, as they depicted the ways in which that same fitness testing practice narrowed their engagement in physical education. Then, after pulling out exact words and using these fragments and phrases, we started to create and play with poetic (re)presentations. Our intent was to uplift the young people's expressions in order to (re)present their experiences through an affective medium. To do so, we engaged with recurring tensions, including the sense of competition juxtaposed with allyship, that were both normative and transformative (Dernikos et al., 2020; Faulkner, 2017). We played with fonts, spacing and text placement, remembering that formatting is key to this arts-based, experimental practice (Faulkner, 2017; Fitzpatrick, 2018; Glesne, 1997; Richardson, 2000). And, we strove to capture their subjective feelings. Like Glesne (1997), we wanted to bring forth ‘the essence conveyed, the hues, the textures’ (p. 206) that resulted from the data generation and poetic inquiry process. From this, we landed on two poetic (re)presentations, driven by the young participants’ words and affective experiences with the FitnessGram® assessment. The first opened our paper. The second, we share next.

I hate the BEEP test

I hate the BEEP test

  I mean

      I don’t really like it

         but

           I know it helps me

             I jogged around the gym for 14 minutes

                I was so PROUD of myself

                    I was also on the volleyball team then

  I did bad on the PACER test

      THEY said

         YOU have to go to the weight room

  BELOW average

     You failed

        I never passed

            I never passed   

                    the BEEP test

I hate the BEEP test

  By the end of the test

     I’m r a c i n g

        Don’t even care when the click is coming

           Going as f a s t as I can

     But

        it’s all about p-a-c-i-n-g yourself

  Every

     Single

        Beep

           Haunts

               Me

I hate the BEEP test

  In the top

      In the bottom

  The lowest

      The highest

  Getting teased

      Feeling self-conscious

         Feeling worse

             Disappointed teacher

                JUDGING

                   Survival of the FITTEST

I hate the BEEP test

  I hate it (all)

      The report cards

         Showing what percentile you are in

             It felt kind of bad

             Comparing yourself to others

                I really did not like that

  We do NOT learn anything

      It makes you competitive

         To get higher than everybody else

             I don’t know

I hate the BEEP test

  We are really unfit

      I look at the other people

         I just want to do more than them

      I look at the other people

         Don’t want to be the first out

         Don’t want to be ridiculed

             We make allies

                Drop out together

      I look at the other people

         I just want to keep going longer

             There are two guys who always win

  It’s horrible

      dropped out of PE

         I was like

             NO BEEP TEST ANYMORE

I hate the BEEP test⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Moving towards something new?

Poetry is an overtly creative mode of representation; it doesn't pretend to be objective.

(Fitzpatrick, 2012, p. 12)

The purpose of this paper was to use affect and poetic (re)presentation to explore the ways in which FitnessGram® affected young participants in our two research projects. We drew on and entangled data from interviews with five Black and Latinx youth in NYC and six LGBTQ+ youth in New Zealand. In doing this, we moved backwards, forwards and sideways between poetry, literature, theory, and methods – with the hope that, by interweaving ourselves and (re)presenting data through an evocative form, others (researchers, educators, practitioners, policymakers) might pause alongside us and the affective experiences of the young participants that we (re)present here.

We are not saying this is easy. Multiple countries have physical education curricula steeped in discourses of healthism (Kirk & Colquhoun, 1989) and biomedicalization (Johns & Tinning, 2006) that conceptualize young bodies ‘at-risk’ (Azzarito, 2016). Despite having a critically oriented curriculum (Culpan & Bruce, 2007), scholars within Aotearoa New Zealand have consistently documented the biomedical residues of past curricula (Burrows, 1999) that still shape pedagogical practices (Alfrey & Gard, 2019; Powell & Fitzpatrick, 2015). Even with progressive policies, fitness testing (Dawson et al., 2001) persists in Aotearoa New Zealand, including the use of FitnessGram® (Howe et al., 2016). Unlike Aotearoa New Zealand, the policies and standards that shape physical education in the U.S. do not reflect a critical orientation nor are they inclusive of diversity (Blackshear & Culp, 2021; Landi et al., 2021). The FitnessGram® assessment – in many places across the U.S. (e.g. NYC, Texas) – is one of those policies, outwardly grounded in ‘science’ (Welk, 2017) and supported by strong ties to corporate, non-profit and government sectors (Gard & Pluim, 2017; Pluim & Gard, 2018).

Pluim and Gard (2018) call the lack of critical scholarship and academic silence around FitnessGram® ‘puzzling’ (p. 275). Personally, as scholars born and raised in the U.S., we are not so surprised. In the U.S., FitnessGram® is a ‘sociocultural ubiquity’ (Jette et al., 2020, p. 132) that has shaped the careers of numerous researchers and served as a safety net for physical education teachers and departments needing to defend their value in a neoliberal educational climate that demands objective measures. But, in this reliance on science and objectivity, the subjective experiences of young bodies (in physical education) are rarely recognized, or not considered at all. So, we use this paper to purposefully embrace the necessity of subjectivity through affect as method (Hickey-Moody, 2013), poetic inquiry and (re)presentation (Butler-Kisber, 2020; Faulkner, 2017). This process rejects a separation between art and science and disrupts usual ways of thinking to create something new.

Importantly, in embracing subjectivity, we are not ignorant to the inherent biases in our process. Each step, from the focus on specific interview data related to FitnessGram® to our continued ‘data-making’ and use of poetic inquiry and affect, was mediated by our own perspectives and understandings. Thus, we realize, as we extracted young people's words and experiences from separate projects and entangled them into poetic (re)presentations, aspects of the youths’ identities were re-assembled and even lost. We acknowledge that we do not individually feature any of the youth who generated initial interview data from their experiences with FitnessGram®. And, we heed concern that such re-assembling of the young people's words never fully captures or does justice to the youths’ affective experiences. This is a risk that requires great care, reflexivity, and negotiation along the way (Faulkner, 2017). Yet, it was also a risk that we felt was worth taking. For us, the collectivity of the young participants’ words and experiences, while never complete, is powerful. We consider the poetic (re)presentations as filled with potential, to augment often marginalized bodies (youth) in relation to the FitnessGram® assessment and elicit a variety of responses from those who read this paper.

As we look to the future, we have to realize the ‘historical debris’ (Alfrey & Gard, 2019, p. 196) that remains in regard to fitness testing. Most simply, FitnessGram® continues to act as a static entity that has seldom been questioned or changed since its development and commitment to health-related fitness in 1987. The affective experiences of young people, and specifically Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ youth, with the FitnessGram® assessment have rarely, if ever, been explored. We (Carrie and Dillon) feel such experiences not only need to be examined but also valued and celebrated, especially if we (the broader physical education community) desire change. We begin to do that in this paper. By attending and responding to our young participants’ experiences through affect, poetic inquiry, and (re)presentation, we hope we can start to pry the FitnessGram® ‘black box’ open (Jette et al., 2020). We want to show, as poetry does, the potential of aesthetics to make ‘us feel differently about things’ and construct ‘new imaginings’ (Hickey-Moody, 2013, p. 85). In that sense, we end with one more poetic (re)presentation. It is an assemblage of words and ideas from FitnessGram® related literature, recurring themes within the youths’ poetic (re)presentations and thoughts generated by the two of us. We created this final poetic (re)presentation to illustrate the current status of FitnessGram® and push boundaries – to imagine how we (researchers, educators, practitioners, policymakers) can move forward and create space to respond to such problematic practices.

According to FitnessGram®?

healthy student bodies

according to FitnessGram®

  need to meet a certain standard

knowledges

practices

  become standardized

      to what student bodies

         should do

             sufficient number of

                push-ups

                   laps around the gym

                       curl-ups

      to what student bodies

         should be

             appropriate body mass index

                NOT at-risk

                   racialized body as a metric of risk (Butler-Wall, 2015)

                       male OR female

To fall OUTSIDE

  these categories

      is a WARNING

         for student bodies to

             self-monitor

                set goals

                   emphasize HEALTHY behaviors

         for schools and parents to

             Take note

                Accept blame

                   Increase surveillance

BECAUSE

according to FitnessGram®

  ‘health-related fitness is for Everyone for a Lifetime’ (Plowman et al., 2013, pp. 1–12)

BUT

according to us

  a reliance on ‘epidemiological models of risk profiling’ (Butler-Wall, 2015, p. 233)

      exacerbates deficits

         perpetuates racial, gender, cultural, classist stereotypes

FitnessGram®

  narrows

      health

         narrows

             movement

                 narrows

                     possibilities

  leading to AND reinforcing

      exclusionary

         normative

             ideals

                 in/through physical education

So … 

    we wonder

according to us

    does FitnessGram® really produce

        student bodies who desire to be physically active

           for a lifetime?­

OR

   does IT

      perpetuate a

           monotony of bodies (back and forth)

               competition (for the fittest to survive)

                   sense of disappointment

                      self-conscious feelings

   does IT

      lead student bodies to

           hate the BEEP test

               have nightmares

                   and

      drop out of PE?

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Tilapia and Greta for inspiring us throughout this process, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their generous, detailed notes.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Participants in the research referred to the aerobic test colloquially as the BEEP test. This form of the test is a variation of the PACER from FitnessGram®.

2 The women referred to in this paper identified as cisgender women or Takatāpui (a culturally specific Māori term that describes someone who does not identify with Western gender or sexual terms). All of them identified with the LGBTQIA+ community.