Search Results

Concerns about college and university student health date back to at least the mid-19th century. These concerns were addressed through the development and implementation of required, service-based physical activity education programs. In the 1920s–1930s, 97% of American colleges and universities offered such programs. Today less than 40% do. However, student health issues persist. This essay asserts that kinesiology departments are best suited to address these needs by delivering physical activity education courses through their institution’s general education curriculum. General education courses are those that every student must take in order to develop the competencies necessary for living a full and complete life and contributing to society. Given the growing costs of higher education, any such requirement must be justifiable. Therefore, implementing and sustaining a physical activity education general education requirement is not for the faint of heart; it requires effort, resources, support, and time. This essay explores these issues.

For children, schools play an important role in providing and promoting physical activity, yet growing school pressure to produce academic achievement gains have limited the priority of physical activity producing programs. The Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association, and others have developed recommendations for school physical activity policy and there is growing interest in examining the relationship between existing school physical activity policies, school practices, and physical activity. Given that research on school physical activity policy is in its infancy, my goal in writing this paper is to introduce readers to key aspects of school physical activity policy while simultaneously outlining existing research efforts and highlighting the many critical research gaps that still exist. I conclude the paper by linking policy to advocacy and outlining considerations for formulating effective advocacy efforts while emphasizing the need for advocacy research.

The online EdD in kinesiology at UNCG evolved from the face-to-face EdD, which was designed as an interdisciplinary doctoral degree tailored to working professionals in kinesiology. The new online EdD, which is the only online doctoral program in kinesiology, retains that broad, interdisciplinary curriculum and focuses on developing practicing scholars in kinesiology teaching, leadership, and advocacy. The fully-online EdD program faces many challenges, including technology issues, faculty buy-in, retention, and dissertation completion. To meet those challenges, the EdD curriculum is structured in a four-year cohort model, emphasizing collaboration and connections from the initial campus orientation session through the dissertation defense.

Young people are increasingly the targets of public health and private-public sector campaigns to promote active lifestyles and longevity of the life span (Arnett, 2012; Faulkner, Kwan, Brownrigg, & MacNeill, 2011). Yet media campaigns alone cannot redress the barriers to physical activity. In this paper I argue that theories of life span and social marketing approaches to health promotion share a grounding in the behavioral sciences that need to be broadened to consider social determinants of active and inactive lifestyles and uncover how youth audiences make sense of health promotions. As such, I suggest how the social marketing of healthy life spans can move upstream to advocate policies and programs for youth activity. In this article I a) critically examine our shifting notions of youth and assumptions about life span, b) highlight trends in media consumption by youth, c) consider how kinesiology can broaden the social marketing lens to active media advocacy for social justice, and d) raise implications for research and intervention.