Ways to Promote Body Literacy at School

• Interrogate ideas about health and fitness

• Teach into size diversity and normalize all body types, shapes, sizes and abilities

• End lunch shame and lunch debt

• Develop professionally around body image, weight, size and tigma

• Let students eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full

Lesson Sparks by Grade Level Band

K-5

Various studies have found that weight based stigma and bias starts in children as early as three years old. One study done in 1998 found that children between ages 3 and 5 were found to think that higher weight characters in stories were the villain "mean" between 70 and 80 percent of the time (Cramer & Steinwert, 1998).

Teachers must consider the ways that higher weight characters are presented and described in the literature they read aloud and offer to students in these grades. See the virtual library for suggested reads at these grade levels! It is critical to address weight stigma and bias early in children, because it is also less malleable and codifies over time. Sending the message that fat bodies are bad bodies impacts students and learners for life. 

Lesson Spark: Reading BIG by Vashti Harrison (K-2)

Lesson Spark: Reading Starfish by Lisa Fipps (5-6)

Lesson Spark: Food Rainbow

6-8 

Middle grade students are especially vulnerable to diet culture, as they are growing in awareness of themselves, media, the world. In addition to external influences, the body changes and grows rapidly. Books like Lisa Fipps' Starfish take on the reality of fatphobia, weight-based bullying and overcoming diet culture and body image. Lisa Fipps' brave and beautiful work normalizes therapy, offers realistic and meaningful insight into the relationship between mothers and daughters that are often rife with anti-fatness and diet culture. It's a perfect whole class text for 5th and 6th graders.

In Christina Soontornvat's All Thirteen (a text that I teach), there's lots of mention of food, calories, starvation and energy conservation. In my own considerations, I've had to ask myself how to make this accessible to students without triggering them, especially for students with disordered eating habits. Middle school is a time where all students are vulnerable to body image issues, and teachers need to be mindful that the books they read and the ways they address weight/food/etc. don't become 'instruction manuals' for students with eating disorders.

These parts of the text can serve as really critical conversation points for understanding the body and how it works. Emphasizing for students that the circumstances that the Wild Boars found themselves in were not typical (being trapped in a cave for two weeks), and that their bodies were doing what they could to keep them alive without the nourishment necessary to sustain their survival for a significant period of time, is a way to cultivate body literacy and nuance in the conversation. Teachers must be mindful that books are not instruction manuals for eating disorders among their already-vulnerable students and readers. 

We are seeking out interdisciplinary educators who can help create study guides that meet this balance and aim to teach books at the middle grade level through a critical lens involving and incorporating body literacy, positivity or fat studies. 

Lesson Spark: Social Media Detective (several pathways) 

Lesson Spark: Reading Starfish by Lisa Fipps 

Lesson Spark: Nutrient Density Glossary

9-12

In 2012, a survey of 377 high school and college students ages 13-18 nationwide found that 44 percent of those surveyed skipped meals to influence or manipulate their weight. As students engage in high-stakes competitive sports, these numbers get more worrisome and significant. Among female high school athletes in aesthetic sports, 41.5% reported disordered eating. They were eight times more likely to incur an injury than athletes in aesthetic sports who did not report disordered eating (NEDA; Jankowski, 2012).

Literature that speaks neutrally about bodies is wonderful, but applying a critical lens of body literacy and fat studies can be a great way to get students thinking about the ways they see body shape and size, unpack weight stigma, and analyze literature. The canon has many stereotypes and tropes to work with and discuss in the classroom (Falstaff in Shakespeare; Piggy in Lord of the Flies); and contemporary texts such as Fat Chance, Charlie Vega by Crystal Maldonado and The New David Espinoza by Fred Aceves can be analyzed through these lenses and offer representation to students across curriculum (health, science, physical education, English).

In the same way that we must be mindful of the content of body/weight/eating disorder topic-focused texts in the middle school level, we must also do so for high school students. As students mature into reading young adult (YA) literature, topics can become more mature and heavy, especially for kids dealing with the content of said books and novels in their real lives. When book-talking or offering texts that deal with eating disorders, it's important to look at them critically and investigate: does the author have experience with this subject? How much of this is representative of actual experiences of people with disordered eating, and how much of it is media-fueled stereotypes/tropes/narrative? How can I use this text to learn more about how to support friends with this lived experience or ask for help if I'm going through it myself? 

Lesson Spark: Fat Visibility in Poetry

Lesson Spark: Argument / Claim

Lesson Spark: 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating: Compare and Contrast 

Lesson Spark: Implicit Body Bias 

Postsecondary

Still working on this part! Check back soon :)