When health and physical educators strive to teach students about active, healthy living, it becomes troublesome when there are unhealthy alternatives confronting them as they leave the school building. For example, what messages are students receiving if they can leave the gymnasium and at lunch time walk across the road to stores to purchase unhealthy food choices such as soda, chips and candy?

As schools move to become health-promoting environments and develop health literacy in students, it’s important to give students the knowledge of how to live healthy lifestyles. For years, vending machines have been placed in schools, perhaps even placed strategically in schools, so that students are sure to walk by them and be tempted to buy something. Similarly, stores often place snacks close to the checkout counters hoping that customers will be tempted to buy them, and food establishments often ask if customers want to add another food item to their order. These business style tactics to encourage purchasing can lead to unhealthy food choices or overeating.

The issue of vending machines, school concessions, fast food establishments, corner stores, prepackaged food items, etc. have been discussed and debated for some time. In this article, we’ll introduce you to an innovative and practical strategy aimed to help educate students and school communities on healthy food choices and support their health literacy.

Words can inspire a thousand pictures. Words have the potential to incite, divide, unite, create, and effect change. As a teacher educator, I often engage my students in discussions about the classroom environment and issues of safety and social growth. In recent months, I’ve started more than a few conversations regarding how to maintain the integrity of environments for activity and play, particularly as it relates to the topic of verbal pollution.

Verbal pollution refers to the use of words and comments that the majority agrees are offensive and damaging (Fisher, 2008). Today we frequently see these comments and values communicated through music, television, cyberspace and other forms of media and technology. Verbal pollution undermines the promotion of successful outcomes and has implication for our practices.

Through our upbringing many of us in our have been conditioned to ignore verbal pollution. If we don’t it gives the impression of weakness. Unconvinced? Consider one of the most frequently quoted English language idioms: “Sticks and Stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” This rhyme, reported first in 1862, encourages a child victim of name-calling to ignore taunting, refrain from physical retaliation, and to remain calm and good-natured. But in today’s world, this well-intended phrase is both untrue and hypercritical.

“What are we playing in gym today?” is in all likelihood the first question asked every day by every class in every gymnasium across the country and possibly the entire world. It may be an overly simplistic answer to the lack of respect for our content area, but conditioning students to ask, “What are we learning in PE today?” instead of “What are we playing in gym today?” would mark a small step toward educating the next generation about the merits of physical education.

However, it then becomes incumbent upon us to be able to provide an answer to this new and improved question, each and every time a student enters our classroom. Our classroom, the gymnasium, while different in size and equipment, needs to look, feel, and operate like a learning environment. Allowing the educational hierarchy to view us as different, and more often than not as less important, guarantees that we will continue to remain educationally second-class despite the rising need for PE.

So what would it look like if we operated like a typical academic classroom, yet still stayed true to the physicality of our domain?