Curricular Disorder: Disability Studies, Eating Disorders, and Health and Physical Education in Ontario, Canada
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Authors
Dotto, Stephanie
Allain, Kristi A.
Issue Date
2020
Type
Article
Language
en
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
Ontario’s health and physical education curriculum is a major site of sport-health ideology in Canada, shaping young people’s ideas of exercise and bodies at a particularly vulnera- ble time in their lives. Using a disability lens, this paper explores how this health and physical education regime encourages an ethos of bodily control that not only disables certain bodies and obscures the interdependency of human bodies, but also encourages the kind of preoccupation with bodily control typical in those with eating disorders. We suggest that disability studies is a particularly useful lens for considering eating disorders because of its focus on the ways in which society creates disabled bodies by demanding idealization, objectification, and control of the body—a three-pronged attitude that is also very much prevalent amongst eating-disordered individuals. Techniques present in the curriculum in- clude (a) subjecting students’ physical abilities to rigorous scrutiny and evaluation; (b) treating physical activity levels and diet as a matter of choice while minimizing various social factors that affect health; (c) engaging in a healthist discourse that conflates obese bodies with inactive bodies and unhealthy bodies; and (d) making youth engage in quanti- fied self-evaluation of their own bodies and activity practices. In using these tactics, this physical and health education regime exploits societal preoccupations to fuel a disordered fear and contempt of the disabled, "unfit" body in the minds of the young Ontarians.
Description
Citation
Dotto, S. & Allain, K. A. (2020). Curricular disorder. Disability studies, eating disorders, and health and physical education in Ontario, Canada. Thresholds in Education, 43(1), 19–32.
Publisher
Academy for Education Studies
License
Journal
Volume
Issue
PubMed ID
DOI
ISSN
0196-9641