This past summer, I worked with The Body Positive, a non-profit organization dedicated to “helping people develop balanced, joyful self-care and a relationship with their bodies that is guided by love, forgiveness, and humor” (The Body Positive). My primary role was to create a revised version of the ‘Be Body Positive Curriculum’ for high schoolers. This involved reading and critiquing the current version of the curriculum, reviewing feedback from high school students for the current version of the curriculum, editing lessons to be more inclusive, trauma-informed, and social justice-focused, and writing new lessons for topics that were missing in the current version of the curriculum. This new version of the curriculum will be piloted in a Philadelphia high school, for more feedback and revisions to be made. I primarily worked with one other person, Clara, on these tasks, and we both reported to Connie Sobczak, the executive director and co-founder of The Body Positive.

This was a really exciting position for me to be in! I was not only giving feedback on the current curriculum and suggesting edits, I was also in charge of actually making those edits as well as creating brand new lessons. I had a good amount of familiarity with the Be Body Positive High School Curriculum because I became a Be Body Positive Facilitator in senior year of high school, and I’d already been thinking about suggestions for revising it. The curriculum had a great structure and touched on many important topics, and, some important nuances and details were missing. Some of the main changes we were considering included thinking to a broader and more expansive audience – a community that especially includes trans folks, poor folks, folks with trauma, disabled folks in conversations around bodies, intuitive eating and living, intuitive movement, etc. 

Some specific changes included expanding on gender pronouns in the first introductory lessons where the curriculum offers for people to share their names and pronouns. Given more widely spread and accessible conversations about gender identity and pronouns, I made the change of clarifying that people can share how they want to be referred to in the space rather than pressuring people to “come out with their pronouns.” I also added a video resource for the lesson around gender identity and gender nonconformity. 

This section for resources was added to every lesson. For each lesson we created an agenda at the top (to give an overview of the session), and at the end there was a section each for ‘food for thought’ (takeaway question to consider for the week), ‘action’ (action step related to the session topics) and ‘resources’ (articles, videos, TikToks, etc. related to and expanding on the session topics). This was a way to consistently frame each of the sessions, and to offer materials for participants to engage with beyond and after each of the sessions themselves, encouraging learning to happen outside the setting of the weekly Be Body Positive sessions. The action piece in particular was a main focus of our revisions; it was important to communicate a sense of agency and empowerment to the participants, so that they can feel empowered to make ripples of change in their communities. 

Additionally, I incorporated more language and content around fat liberation specifically, and I created lesson materials based on my Laidlaw research of the history of fatphobia in relation to colonialism. My colleague and I also collaborated to create more explicit materials and content around how fatness and fatphobia intersect with other identities and systems of oppression, including ability/ableism, race/racism, class/classism, trans identity/transphobia, and more. The intuitive eating from the current curriculum became an intuitive living lesson, making this concept of following one’s intuition and inner truth more applicable to all aspects of participants’ lives. My colleague and I created a new lesson about the importance of self-care in resisting oppression, as well as one about how to build community through social media.

I feel proud of the work I did with The Body Positive, especially being able to incorporate high schoolers’ feedback and solidifying a social justice, liberationist framework for the curriculum. I learned a lot about the long and detailed process of writing curriculum (it takes so many revisions, and piloting, and feedback, and more revisions!), as well as the different stakeholders involved in curriculum development and implementation in schools. I incorporated my research from my previous Laidlaw summer, I implemented concepts I have learned through taking and experiencing curriculum, and I communicated the meaning and importance of our new curriculum to colleagues, collaborators, and stakeholders. I gained many valuable skills and experiences, and I hope to work with The Body Positive in the near future on revising and expanding the curriculum. 

Source:

The Body Positive. thebodypositive.org