Exercising curriculum

Fort Worth, TX

5/10/2010

By: Jessie Milligan

Anyone who thinks that physical education classes just steal time from the classroom hasn’t met Deborah J. Rhea, associate dean of health science and research for Harris College of Nursing & Health Science.

Rhea has turned school gyms into laboratories for learning and teaching. First, she developed PE classes that got more kids moving, in part by adding activities beyond competitive sports. Then she integrated health science lessons that kids can use the rest of their lives. That curriculum, which meets the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, is now in use in 10 Texas school districts.

“I want to create environments where kids want to move and where they understand why it is important to keep moving,” says Rhea, who is a sports psychologist, an assistant professor of kinesiology and a former high school teacher and coach. “I want to make sure that teachers pay attention to each child, even the ones who don’t seem to be ‘getting it.’ ”

Now she is fine-tuning that curriculum by expanding her research into the affects of ethnicity and culture as they pertain to suiting up for gym and for life.

Rhea is studying fitness and body image among groups of young people. Her research is just beginning but it already is collecting data on important questions. Why has most research on eating disorders been conducted with young, white, affluent females? Why do first-generation immigrant children not have the same motor skills as even second-generation children? Why does ethnicity make a difference in fitness?

Rhea is searching for answers by studying the students in the PE classes she designed, which focus on a variety of activities — not just traditional competitive sports. Kids may play games to enhance rhythm, balance and team building, for instance, as well as play soccer or softball.

Perhaps more important, Rhea’s class plans include time spent teaching kids about media images of idealized body shapes, about peer pressure to use alcohol or tobacco, about the importance of aerobic exercise and about the significance of nutrition. The coursework also includes having kids use pedometers or heart-rate monitors and such to teach them the significance of movement.

“We have to tell them the ‘why’ for everything. We have to tell them how it fits into their lives,” Rhea says. “There is one camp of fitness educators who say the goal is just to get kids moving. There is another camp that says yes, we have to get them moving and we also have to tell them why it is important. Then they start to change.”

Data collected so far shows her curriculum is getting more students to participate in PE, and students in the classes are showing big gains in muscle strength, particularly the girls, and some gains in endurance for both boys and girls. So far she has seen no changes in body fat measurements as a result of the curriculum.

“Out of a 50 minute class, after suiting up and all, there are about 25 minutes of actual movement,” Rhea says.

The goal, she says, is not to specifically and immediately reduce obesity rates, but to educate young people on the importance of life-long fitness, self-esteem and discipline.

Now Rhea wants to make sure all students in the PE class are understood well enough to develop inclusive curriculum. Rhea has begun collecting data on ethnic and cultural differences as they relate to fitness and body image.

“If we learn enough about individual differences, we can better help kids achieve life-time fitness goals, as well as a sense of well being,” she says.

Rhea’s research already has shown that first-generation Hispanic children — the children of immigrant parents — tend to test lower on motor skills assessments than children who have lived longer in the United States.

She suspects the cause may be parents who are working so hard to get established that they spend less time on physical activities with their children. Others say the cause may be a language barrier. But data has yet to be collected to show the cause.

Such data on race and ethnicity is important if we are to learn how to assess, treat and prevent body image problems and eating disorders, says Rhea, whose research on ethnicity and body images centers not just on school children but the larger population as well.

Existing research on eating disorders, for instance, focuses on young, white, affluent females who have sought treatment and thus made themselves available for data collection. That group became the stereotype, or the model for our understanding of eating disorders, she wrote in a chapter she contributed to The Hidden Faces of Eating Disorders and Body Image, published in 2009 by the National Association for Girls and Women in Sport.

Yet even Rhea’s literature review of scant racial and ethnic data shows that Hispanic women are not as likely to develop bulimia, anorexia or other eating disorders when they live with traditional cultural values, such as strongly interdependent families. Black (a term she prefers to African-American because it is more inclusive of all blacks) women appear more prone to binge eating disorders than binge-purge eating disorders, Rhea’s literature review showed.

Those are bare bones research results that Rhea suspects represent just a small part of what can be learned about how a diverse population reacts to body image dissatisfaction, believed to be the underlying cause of eating disorders.

“We need to have better data for diagnostic criteria and treatment,” says Rhea, who would like to eventually develop a PE or health curriculum on eating disorders once more data is collected.

Rhea’s research interests don’t stop with school children or ethnically and racially diverse populations. She’s also been delving into the world of body builders.

Heavily muscled weight lifters often suffer from muscle dysmorphia. The term describes a psychological state of body image dissatisfaction that, along with anabolic steroid use and other factors, can keep men addicted to exercise. That addiction can foster negative consequences, including social alienation and suffering from the negative effects of drug use.

“Women with body image problems often see themselves as too large, even when they are not. Men with muscle dysmorphia see themselves as too small,” Rhea says.

Her research has helped establish dysmorphi as a condition. She collaborated with researchers in the United Kingdom, Pennsylvania and Michigan to write the chapter “Big, Buff and Dependent” in the book Men and Addictions, which was released in 2009 from Nova Publishers.

Rhea will be doing more research into the cause.

“We want to know what drives this. Do they go to the gym because they have muscle dysmorphia? Or do they go to the gym and get into a subculture that feeds the problem and prevents them from recovering? What we need to learn is if it is the culture or the person.”

Her research drives her curriculum, which is expanding into practical use in schools.

Contact Rhea at d.rhea@tcu.edu.