In June 2011, I competed in a figure/bodybuilding competition as a form of embodied research. This photograph shows me standing onstage during the Northern Alberta Bodybuilding Championships, wearing a tiny blue velvet bikini and high heeled plastic shoes while covered in tanning dye.

Figure is a category of physique competition in which women train like bodybuilders to increase their muscle mass, focusing on growing a wide back and strong legs. They then gradually lose fat to reveal those muscles, ideally displaying small waists to create a desired “X” shape.

As a specialist in the early modern body in France (1550-1750), I had written books and articles about the history of childbirth, illness, health and medical portraiture. And I had worked for decades inside libraries, archives and museums.

At age 45, however, I needed a new challenge and decided to use my own body and my own life as sites for learning. I wanted to try what was for me a new approach to producing knowledge.

I decided to undertake an auto-ethnographic project, analyzing my own experiences within broader cultural frameworks to interrogate the gendered dynamics of fitness culture and assumptions about the practice of bodybuilding.

I was exploring popular topics such as body image, fat phobia and feminism, which are misrepresented in much popular culture. I started to write about these topics for broader audiences in a blog.

Figure competitions can help women reject gender norms

At first I thought that becoming a figure girl was at odds with my feminist identity and politics. I was not interested in being objectified and judged in terms of my appearance instead of my intelligence. Yet I discovered that figure competitions can benefit women, helping them to be strong, independent, and to reject gender norms.

The successful figure girl is, after all, larger and more muscular than your typical fashion model. She also eats a lot of chicken and sweet potatoes, without apology.

For me, feminism involves a commitment to expanding opportunities and diminishing restrictions in the lives of girls and women (which in turn improves the lives of boys and men). It does not involve producing or enforcing rules for living, but encourages everyone to think critically about sexism and gender roles, starting with their everyday experiences.

My posing and walking lessons were informative – I was awkward and simply could not convey the proper form of femininity. In this process, I made connections with many amazing women and men, who taught me how to appreciate my physical strengths.

I strove for an impossible ideal

Like many figure girls (and women in general), I strove to embody an impossible ideal. In the end, my failure to conform was a liberating experience.

I learned that bodybuilding is not really about discipline and mastery; it is about pursuing long term and in many ways impossible goals in a consistent, intensive and open-ended manner.

Bodybuilding is a lot like academic work. I begin any research project in order to create new knowledge and not reach predetermined conclusions. The Feminist Figure Girl project allowed me to try out different methods, meet new people, write for different audiences and produce a scholarly book, Feminist Figure Girl: Look Hot While You Fight the Patriarchy.

In it, I offer these and other arguments about bodybuilding, linking it with yoga, while focusing on what it feels like not what it looks like. In Chapter Two, for example, I analyze the sensation of muscle failure – it happens when you lift weights repetitively to the point of muscle exhaustion – arguing that it is an enlightening and potentially transformative experience.

In Chapter Five, I examine the role of photography in physique culture, focusing on the act of being photographed instead of the resulting images. Sometimes bodybuilding is equated with photographs, like the one of me onstage included with this article, but

I must admit that this photograph conceals more than it reveals. For instance, it does not show the years of lifting weights, months of strict dieting (I ate a ton of chicken, bison, egg whites, sweet potatoes and oatmeal) and a final week of contest preparation, which included a period of water loading before days of water restriction in an effort to make my body look tight and vascular during the competition.

This picture alone does not tell the whole story

Nor does the photo portray the sheer misery that I felt while standing onstage, dehydrated, with a spitting headache and throbbing feet. Figure girls – figure boys do not exist – wear crystal encrusted bikinis and four-inch heels while onstage, moving through front, back and side poses for a panel of judges. Afterwards, exhausted figure girls rush backstage to drink water and eat cheesecake.

Also, this picture says little about the practice of bodybuilding.

For serious bodybuilders, their own bodies are the primary sources of knowledge. Real bodybuilders, such as those who compete multiple times, work hard to learn about their own flesh. They discover what foods best fuel their muscle growth, whether their bodies retain water or shed it very quickly, like mine did.

They do not strive for a static ideal, but inhabit a body that continually changes, whether bulking up during a phase of muscle growth, leaning out for a show, recovering from injuries, or performing a flawless posing routine.

It is not possible to maintain a strict diet

Finally, this photo shows a body that is unsustainable. I immediately became softer after the show, gaining weight as I drank water and indulged in carb-laden meals. I have since trained hard to increase my muscle mass, but these muscles are no longer visible because I cannot maintain the strict diet required.

I have also had a baby since then, relishing the fascinating bodily changes that occurred in an entirely new context. The static fiction portrayed in my onstage image has little to do with real flesh, which is always changing as we live and learn.

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The value of a college education has received a great deal of attention lately. There is little doubt that going to college offers a substantial economic payoff. On average, college graduates earn quite a bit more than those without a diploma, and their level of unemployment is only about half as high. US Census studies suggest that a college degree nearly doubles lifetime earnings.

But there are problems with assessing the worth of a college education strictly in terms of employment and earnings. We need to remember that having a job is not the only thing that makes life worth living. Likewise, it cannot be the only parameter by which we evaluate the worth of a college education. Consider the case of a young woman I know who, after graduating from a top business school, went to work for a large Wall Street investment bank, helping to structure multi-billion dollar financial transactions.

By the lights of many economically oriented analyses, this young woman is a resounding educational success. She landed a job straight out of college. It paid her handsomely. Every day, her work presented her with business problems that required her to think critically, solve complex problems, and speak and write effectively. And she excelled in all these things.

She was receiving top-notch evaluations. Her annual salary and bonuses were growing. She was in line for promotions, and her mentors told her that she would rise quickly in the company. Yet she noticed that something important was missing – something that has nothing to do with economics or the economic criteria of success. Her business education had prepared her to succeed, but not to do work that was meaningful and fulfilling.

She noticed that the people she worked with were miserable. They had expensive tastes in clothes and cars, but they hated their jobs. They were making lots of money, but they found no real fulfillment in the work they were doing. In many respects, they were the picture of success, but inside they felt hollow, and they longed to do work that really meant something.

When she challenged her colleagues about this, they would say, “Of course I hate my job. Everyone around here does. But this is what you have to do to get ahead. What do you expect me to do, quit and go to medical school? Sure, I wish my work had more meaning, but the money is simply too good, and I can’t afford to quit.”

But that’s just what she did. She quit her job, went back to school and started taking premedical courses. Then she went to medical school and completed a medical residency. All in all, this career change cost her dearly – more than 10 years of her life and literally millions of dollars in additional educational costs and lost income.

But despite the sacrifices, she gained something. Now she is happy. She has a job that actually means something to her, where she feels that she is truly making a difference in the lives of other people – the patients she cares for every day. Economically, the last decade of her life has been a ruinous loss, but humanly, it has paid off handsomely.

This story illustrates important lessons about the true worth of a college education. Foremost among these is the realization that the purpose of college is not merely to prepare for a job or career. It is not even to develop the requisite skills to compete successfully in an increasingly unforgiving and rapidly changing global market.

And let me be clear – I know that many students graduate with crushing debt. The average 2012 college graduate was nearly $30,000 in debt, and I personally know many medical students whose debts total over $300,000. No student can afford to ignore the costs of education, and no parents send their child off to college hoping that they will emerge unemployed, or worse yet, unemployable. Statistics concerning job and graduate and professional school placement rates really do matter. And so do statistics concerning starting salaries, continuing employment and life-time earnings.

Our jobs represent an important part of our lives, but we do not live strictly to work. We eagerly pursue many activities in life in spite of the fact that no one pays us to do them – getting and staying married, raising children, enjoying the company of friends, reading books, traveling, gardening, cooking, playing sports and so on.

At its best, education does not merely provide career training and job placement. It also helps us to find our path in life, by challenging us to examine ourselves, the world around us, and our vision of the kinds of lives and world we hope to build. At its best, education doesn’t just prepare us for life – it helps us discover what it means to live, and to develop habits that make life truly worth living.

To put the matter as straightforwardly as possible, worth cannot be fully assessed in purely economic terms. While we can calculate the value of a college education in dollars, doing so omits more than it captures. We are not mere wage earners and wealth creators. We are also citizens and human beings, whose educations can “pay off” in far more important and enduringly meaningful ways.

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What if babies could tell us what they want, before they start crying for it? Bring in baby signing, a system of symbolic hand gestures for key works such as “milk”, “hot” and “all gone” that are taught to hearing babies as a way to communicate before they can talk.

The sign for milk, for example, is made by opening and closing the hand, while the sign for “more” by tapping the ends of the fingers together.

Now new research has reported that it’s even possible for babies to learn these signs just from viewing videos at home. The study found that babies learnt to produce baby signs just as well from a video as they did if they were taught by their parents.

Yet only those babies who had been taught the signs from a parent showed evidence of understanding what the signs meant. The bigger question is whether these findings should be taken as encouragement to teach babies to sign and what impact it has on child development.

Believe the spiel?

Should parents be encouraged to sign with their babies? This is a question that I’m often asked and it’s one I’ve tackled in my own research. Baby signing burst onto the booming baby market back in the 1990s and has since gone global, attracting parents to spend money on classes, books and DVDs with claims that Baby Sign can help “improve” their baby in some way. Accelerated speech development, reduced frustration and increased IQ are just some of the claims that have been made. But there is little evidence to support these claims.

In 2012, American researcher Lauri Nelson and colleagues published an analysis of the credibility of the claims made on baby sign websites.

Across the 33 baby sign websites they identified, there was a high level of consistency in the types of claims made. Nelson traced the source of the evidence for each claim and found that more than 90% were based on opinion articles, not science. None of the claims relating to reduced tantrums, better self-esteem, or improved parent–child bonding were supported by any evidence at all, opinion or empirical.

Baby science: fact or fiction?

So what about the evidence for the other 10%? A review paper published in 2005 examined evidence from 17 studies published between 1980 and 2002 that had evaluated the effectiveness of signing with infants who could hear.

It concluded that the existing research was methodologically flawed and, because of this, there was: “no evidence to suggest that Baby Sign had any benefits for child development.” This prompted me to conduct my own experiment, avoiding the pitfalls of previous studies, to test whether baby sign improves language development.

I randomly allocated parents and their babies to either baby sign training or a control condition and routinely measured the babies’ language development over one year, from when babies were eight months up until 20 months.

While the babies learnt and used the signs (often before they could speak), doing so made no significant impact on their language development. The babies who signed did not start to talk any earlier, nor did their language progress any quicker than the babies in the control conditions.

Others have subsequently replicated this finding and another review paper published in December 2014 concluded that: “there is no strong evidence to support the claimed benefits of baby sign.”

No negative effects

While the evidence clearly fails to support the notion that baby signing boosts development, there is no evidence that is actually harms or hinders child development. No studies have reported any negative effect of learning baby sign language on children’s outcomes.

However, other research I have been involved in found that parents who chose to attend a baby signing class had significantly higher stress levels than parents who attended other, non-educational classes with their baby.

Our interpretation of this finding was that parents with higher pre-existing stress may have been attracted to Baby Sign classes because of types of claims made about how baby sign can benefit them and their baby.

This is not to say that baby signing can’t be a fun thing to do: many parents and their children gain great pleasure from learning and using it together. But we need to move away from the fiction and stick to the facts: there is no evidence to support the claim that baby signing will accelerate a child’s development.

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Although re-authorization is still politically complicated, 2015 appears to be the year the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) will be reformed.

Popularly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), ESEA promised to close the achievement gap and herald an era of evidence-based education policy by giving federal teeth to a state-based accountability process launched in the early 1980s. However, NCLB not only failed to accomplish these goals, but also led to some schools resorting to cheating, so as to increase test scores.

Starting in 1984, I taught for 18 years in a South Carolina public school. For the past 13 years I have been a professor of teacher education. Throughout these 30-plus years, I have witnessed how accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing has guided how we view and run schools.

My experience and analysis of education policy during that time have revealed important lessons from NCLB – ones likely to be ignored during the re-authorization process. Education reform under the Obama administration and the initial plans for re-authorization show that politicians continue to support standardized testing as part of accountability policies, despite a long record of failure.

US education policy has been guided by “miracle” claims

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, “miracles” in education reform have significantly influenced US education policy. NCLB, for instance, was built on bi-partisan support for George W. Bush’s self-proclaimed Texas “Miracle.”

The “miracle” under Bush suggested that accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing raised student achievement and solved some long-standing educational challenges, such as drop-out rates and achievement gaps.

However, scholars have raised questions about the “miracle.” Emeritus professor at Boston College, Walt Haney, who analyzed the Texas reform, concluded:

The gains on TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills) and the unbelievable decreases in dropouts during the 1990s are more illusory than real. The Texas “miracle” is more hat than cattle.

Despite ample evidence and expert opinion, such “miracle” reforms continue to drive policy even under Obama. Before becoming secretary of education in the Obama administration, Arne Duncan was credited with improving student pass rates in Chicago, another so-called education “miracle.”

Early in his administration, Barack (and Michelle) Obama endorsed the Harlem “miracle” that claimed enormous gains at Harlem charter schools. Yet, both “miracles” have been called into question.

Testing pressures have led to corrupt practices

In addition, NCLB has created several negative consequences.

For example, the pressure of accountability to meet unattainable goals such as 100% proficiency has resulted in cheating in order to raise test scores. High-profile cases have occurred in Atlanta and Washington DC.

Also as detailed by an academic, Andre Perry, testing pressures under NCLB led to corrupt practices in public and charter schools that were exposed in New Orleans. As Perry stated in his analysis, “the desperation to show growth can lead to nefarious practices like counseling out [identifying students likely to score low on tests and recommending they leave a school]” or even excessive expulsion and suspension.

The focus on raising test scores led to other negative consequences as well – such as a increasing the emphasis on core courses while also eliminating electives such as art and even more teaching for the test. As a result, expectations for students were also narrowed.

A final consequence was a booming education marketplace. UK-based Pearson “has reaped the benefits,” as Stephanie Simon reports: “Half of its $8 billion in annual global sales comes from its North American education division.” A Software & Information Industry Association report reveals that testing and assessment products – which include software, digital content and related digital services – have increased by 57% since 2012-2013. They now make up the largest single category of educational technology sales.

NCLB fails to close the achievement gap

Most important of all, NCLB has failed its most ambitious goals, including closing the achievement gap and ushering in evidence-based policy.

Based at UCLA and founded to deepen understanding of racial and ethnic groups in the United States, the Civil Rights Project and FairTest, a program that works to end the misuses and flaws of standardized testing, after a careful analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, reveal that the achievement gap, which appeared to be closing before these accountability measures, has become stagnant over the last two decades:

Further, we must ask: Have NCLB legislation and funding led to more evidence-based policies? Often not.

Notably, value-added methods (VAM), a complex statistical method to interpret test data, is used as a tool for holding teachers accountable for student test scores. A study for the Educational Testing Service warns that this policy is unreliable for individual teacher evaluations and will discourage teaching high-needs students.

Education policy needs to focus on equity

Also, accountability measures have allowed for policies that let states take over districts or schools labeled “failing.” However, close analysis of schools that were taken over did not show significant student achievement. In fact, such policies often disenfranchise students and communities.

In my view, throughout the NCLB era, evidence has been consistently trumped by partisan politics.

Ultimately, the real lessons of NCLB are that accountability based on testing is not the solution to educational problems that are grounded mostly in rising poverty.

Education policy focusing on equity, community, and support would serve our students and schools well – and not the political and commercial interests that have benefited so far from the ineffective and harmful NCLB.

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Only 14% of young women who enter university for the first time chose science-related fields of study such as engineering, manufacturing and construction. This is one of the headline findings of a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that examines gender equality in education across 64 countries and jurisdictions. In comparison, 39% of young men who entered university chose to pursue one of those fields of study.

Gender has always been important in education. What the report – based on the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests – reveals is the extent of the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Let down in science

The university statistics won’t come as a complete surprise to many – though the magnitude of the gender difference is worryingly large. But the school-age data, drawn from 15-year-olds who take the PISA tests every three years, contains an even more alarming message: the UK’s gender gap visible in school results for science subjects is among the largest.

British 15-year-old girls are reported as doing 13% worse than 15-year-old boys. In Finland, girls do 16% better than boys. Of the 64 countries that took the tests, the UK takes 61st place.

Many will feel that the findings are hard to believe. They certainly don’t agree with the annual GCSE results in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and the equivalent examinations in Scotland. For example, in the 2014 results for the single science GCSE, 56.2% of boys achieved grade C or higher compared to 61.8% of girls – a gender gap of 5.6% in favour of girls.

But if the OECD’s findings are valid – and I suspect PISA is a higher quality science test than is a typical GCSE in science – they are deeply disturbing. We know that students who do less well in science at school are less likely to continue with it, and we also know that students who take STEM degrees end up glad that they did and get well-paid jobs.

Hearing the wrong messages

This has nothing to do with biological difference between the sexes. Across the 67 countries that took the tests, the average gender difference in science was only 1%, so the explanation must be a cultural one. The OECD report has a mass of statistics about gender differences in such things as attitudes, self-regulation, and girls’ lack of self-confidence in their science and mathematics abilities. What it comes down to is the messages that girls hear from others, and then internalise.

Despite television presenters like Alice Roberts and the growing prevalence of senior female scientists in the UK – Dames Athene Donald, Julia Goodfellow, Julia Higgins, Julia King, to mention just four – too often it seems that girls hear that science is not for them. Or rather, subjects such as human health are OK for them to pursue but not the “hard” sciences like physics and chemistry – and certainly not computer science and engineering.

Campaigns like Let Toys Be Toys are doing their bit to tackle gender stereotyping at an early age, but it still persists. Schools should be doing more to protect both girls and boys from society’s gender stereotyping.

Time pressures

When I trained to be a school teacher back in the 1980s, we had lots of sessions from sociologists and others about the importance of gender, social class and ethnicity and the assumptions that society – and we as teachers if we weren’t careful – all too often made about pupils. Today, time pressures and changes to how teachers are trained mean that new teachers are much less likely to receive the depth of training on this topic than we did.

The preoccupation among politicians from all political hues when they are in power with students’ school examination results means that schools now have less time and determination to do what they used to do well – namely to produce self-confident, rounded citizens. We need to get back to realising that how school students see themselves and their subjects is important. If we don’t, too many young people, especially girls, will continue to believe that science is not for them and that they aren’t really good at it – and by thinking that way, they won’t be.

This article was co-published with the IOE London blog.

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By Nathaniel Swain, University of Melbourne

My 11-year-old student sighs. How can the same letters make so many different sounds? We are looking at the letter combination “ough”, which can be read in seven different ways: “through”, “thorough”, “although”, “plough”, “thought”, “cough” and “rough”.

Certain movements around the English-speaking world think our spelling system is just too difficult. In the UK, the English Spelling Society has renewed calls for spelling reform. They want to change words with extraneous letters and make it easier to spell.

The society proposes spellings like “wensday”, “crum”, “cof”, “distres” and “milenium”. For some, including me, these suggestions produce a visceral reaction; others may see this as progress.

This isn’t the first time groups have sought to artificially alter the spelling of English, and it won’t be the last. But these attempts are counter-productive to improving the literacy skills of struggling students.

Is it really that hard?

As a speech-language pathologist, I help many young people who are yet to grasp expected literacy skills for their age. They are usually amazed that English spelling is this complicated.

English does have a complex spelling system (or orthography). In Australia, we have 44 unique sounds that make up words, but only 26 letters to represent them. To solve this imbalance, English spellers use “graphemes”, which include both single letters and letter combinations to represent these sounds. This helps us spell sounds like the “ch” in “choose”, “ng” in “king”, “ee” in “street” and the “ire” in “fire”.

This system is not perfect, however. Graphemes can be pronounced differently in multiple words, as in the “ough” example. One speech sound can also be spelt with multiple graphemes, like the vowel sound in “horse”, “haunt”, “court”, “caught” and “store”. English also has many irregularly spelt words that have to be learnt by sight, like “debt”, “know” and “yacht”.

Old-fashioned spelling rules further complicate things, rather than solve these problems. “I before e except after c” works for only a handful of words. It has so many exceptions (like the words “science”, “sufficient”, “seize”, “weird” or “vein”) it is a rule we could do without.

You can see why some students find it difficult! English’s spelling complexity does make it harder. The rate of dyslexia in countries like Italy is half of what it is in the US. Research suggests that this is because “decoding” English is much harder than in a language with a more consistent spelling system like Italian.

It is understandable why some people see that English’s spelling system is to blame for literacy difficulties. It is less clear how they think creating a whole new system will solve the problem.

Attempts to ‘fix’ the English spelling system

In the early 20th century, the US Simplified Spelling Board built upon the work of Noel Webster (of the Webster dictionaries) to bring about the now American spellings of words such as “jail”, “honor”, “center”, “analog” and “jewelry”.

The equivalent in the UK, the English Spelling Society, admits it has not achieved much since its founding in 1908, with the last spelling reform bill of 1953 failing to take off. Nevertheless, it is planning an international conference for spelling reformers this year, where they hope to get the ball rolling again.

Why ‘fixing’ the spelling system is a lost cause

Language is alive, in that it constantly evolves as humans use it to communicate. Hence it is highly social. Functionality and popularity are what determine acceptable spellings and additions to English.

Even in the last few years, English has changed dramatically. Today, we share something we just googled, by tweeting it to our friends, while our iPod is syncing. The teenagers of today are experiencing FOMO, so they totes save time by txting “lol thnx” and spend more time Facebook-stalking their besties.

New words and spellings creep into our language, and dictionaries just have to keep up. Change comes from how we use language, not how a group of concerned elders think we should be using it.

Language has the dispositions of a teenager; it always follows the crowd. So attempts to cosmetically alter our language through the spelling system are not only misguided, but also futile.

What about people who struggle?

Although more difficult for some, proficiency in English spelling is attainable. If you can read this sentence you have to agree. The challenge of supporting struggling students is not solved through spelling reform, but through educational reform.

Currently, many students, especially in Australia, do not benefit from evidence-based literacy teaching. Low literacy skills then place young people at significantly higher risk of unemployment, social exclusion, poor health and trouble with the law.

To improve literacy attainment, we should put our energy into ensuring that all students receive synthetic phonics (sound-based) instruction, which teaches the sound-letter patterns of English systematically. Trying to artificially change the spelling system to make it “easier” is simply a waste of time.

So when my students grumble about the problems with English spelling I remind them: spelling doesn’t come naturally; it requires hard work to learn. With appropriate support, the vast majority can learn English spelling – and as we use it, we all play a part in its (gradual) evolution.

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