Academic Impressions: Cultivating an Inclusive Classroom Environment

Topic: Holistic Wellness as Body Liberation: An Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Zine Project

Course: SOC 144 (Sociology of Health and Illness) and RPTA 33-03 (Race, Class, Gender)

Reflection on Instructional Change:

Over the course of the semester, in our respective courses we taught co-created material related to body liberation, health, and wellness. We created a Zine assignment together and distributed the assignment to our students. The final product of a collaborative zine is a tangible result of the project. Our goals with this project, as related to what we learned from the Academic Impressions Modules is to: 1. Integrate a diverse and unique assignment to target diverse learning styles, 2. Integrate more collaborative activities/assignments to enhance student belonging, 3. Engage in an interdisciplinary assignment collaboration between Sociology and Recreation, Parks, and Administration to promote involvement across campus.

We chose this project because, as both friends and colleagues, we have a shared interest in body liberation. This is due to personal and professional experiences throughout our lives. These experiences have shaped us as individuals and as instructors. We believe, as the feminist statement of the 1960s says, “the personal is political.” Therefore, it is crucial for us to demonstrate to students how their lives are linked to sociological and socio-political phenomenon. We wanted to create an interdisciplinary lecture and assignment that incorporates insights from our respective disciplines to provide multiple perspectives on the same issue. Assigning a creative piece of work in relation to the lecture is a vital part of the project in creating alternate pathways for students to demonstrate their knowledge outside of traditional measurements such as exams and essays.

Reflection on Impact of Instructional Change:

We will use indirect assessments to understand how students are integrating knowledge of body liberation into their daily lives and zine projects. We plan on looking closely at the zine pages our students submit and organizing them by theme or topic. This will give us insight into how our lecture figured in to their creation and how much of what we taught showed up in their zine pages. Also, it will allow us to see if there are other themes that are represented in the zines that we should consider incorporating into future learning.

Learn more about the impact of my project:

Click Here for Slide Deck

Preliminary Assessment Findings:

After collecting the assignments from students in SOC 144 and RPTA 33, Dr. Gonzales and myself found several themes: mental health, reproductive justice and bodies of women of color, healthism, body liberation, traditional food knowledge, & leisure as hope.

Many students focused on the mental health aspects of relationships to the body. For example, one student in SOC 144 created a page based on men's mental health discussing in her paragraph how this is on overlooked area especially when related to men's body image. This is a theme Dr. Gonzales has noticed in SOC 144 - many students express a desire to learn more about mental health and will in inform future pedagogical approaches to further incorporate mental health into coursework. Dr. Gonzales anticipates facing some challenges in finding a way to do so from a sociological and not just psychological perspective. Another prevalent theme in SOC 144 was reproductive justice and its connection to bodies - specifically woman identified bodies and bodies of color. And many students directly discussed healthism and body liberation (see examples below). Other students wrote about traditional food knowledge - another topic covered in this course that is related to ideas about health and food perpetuated by our society.

In RPTA 33, students focused on the connections between body positivity/liberation and recreation and leisure activities such as expressive movement like dance, hiking, enjoying meals with friends and family, yoga, and popular media. For example, some students included quotes from personal heroes who they feel embody the principles of liberation. A few students discussed how this activity helped them think about how impactful body dysmorphia can be, with one student writing “There is beauty & hope in remembering that my life is so much more than my anxieties and worries about my body and what I eat.”

In the future, both Dr. Gonzales and Dr. Joyner plan to continue co-constructing these modules on body liberation and holistic health and wellness, and may use the themes from these initial zine submissions (see below for example student work) to inform further development of this collaborative project.

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**Faculty Bio**
	Dr. Leah Joyner (she/they) is an Assistant Professor in the Recreation, Parks, & Tourism Administration program. Her work centers on community-based research regarding issues in environmental justice, food apartheid, and food sovereignty. She has worked on several community engaged initiatives to promote food justice and educational equity through experiential education and recreational experiences in urban agriculture. She enjoys spending time outdoors cycling, hiking with her rescue pup, and enjoying ocean or river views with her family and friends.

This work was supported by:
	Grant funding from Academic Affairs & the Office of Inclusive Excellence *Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sacramento State.