The body in group exercise for older persons: implications of the explicit, implicit and null curricula
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bodywork describes the work people perform on their own and other people's bodies. Often, this work is performed in an effort to meet cultural, symbolic body norms. The aims of bodywork in fitness for older exercisers are said to serve as a means of controlling and resisting the aging process. Given the popularity of group exercise for older exercisers, this paper focused on three forms of bodywork undertaken by/performed on older exercisers in group classes: assessing, monitoring and directing clients’ bodies. Using an Institutional Ethnography approach, I explicate how instructor training is connected to the bodywork practices that take place in group exercise classes. Methods consisted of a textual analysis of 8 Canadian and American instructor training curricula; observations and interviews with 22 group fitness instructors; and go-alongs and interviews with 14 older exercisers. Findings revealed that some topics included in the explicit curricula taught to fitness instructors lie outside their scope of practice. The hidden curricula uphold ageist sociocultural norms, as well as conflate (older) age, (greater) weight/(larger) size and bodily (dis)function, which are then materially codified in what is considered (age) appropriate fitness apparel. Finally, the null curriculum, or what is left out of the training, has the potential to cause harm, marginalize and stigmatize older exercisers. To conclude, I argue that group exercise instructors and the organizations that develop fitness curricula, could benefit from engaging in a reflective practice that investigates: (1) how some of the sociocultural and discursive representations of older bodies in training curricula might be problematic and stigmatize older people; and (2) how the null curricula might cause harm to exercisers, especially exercisers like older persons who are already marginalized.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".