Publishing Guidelines: Incorporating Health Criteria in the School Curriculum

As education publishers, we recognize that the professionals in our field make content and design choices every day in the normal course of practicing our profession. Thirty years ago our profession answered the societal mandate to represent greater diversity in the illustrations of our books. This impetus was driven by the changing demographics of our country and the need for all students to see themselves represented as members of the American family. No one would deny that the impact of our commitment to diversity has been a driver in the celebration of our multicultural society. Publishers now believe we have another opportunity to be change-makers in an attempt to help fight the epidemic of childhood obesity and the subsequent health crisis that this engenders in individuals and society. Our goal here is to raise publishers’ consciousness to make healthy choices in all educational texts wherein math books have students multiplying apples and not cupcakes, writing instruction has students drafting public service announcements that support healthy eating, and the students of a science class calculate body mass index.

he AAP/AEP/NASBE working groups covering kindergarten through twelfth grade developed voluntary publisher guidelines to incorporate the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, which are promoted through the Let’s Move! campaign. Let’s Move! (LM) was launched in February 2010 by First Lady Michelle Obama, in collaboration with the US Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Agriculture, and other Federal partners. These guidelines are not intended as a curriculum for developing health and physical education textbooks. These guidelines suggest methods to incorporate appropriate information and examples
in the three areas of nutrition, physical education/activity, and healthy behaviors in a wide range of subject categories in which publishers produce supplemental material, textbooks, databases, interactive eBooks, etc. The working groups have attempted to meld recommendations from LM and national health education standards with core curricula standards developed nationally and by states throughout the country. In addition to supporting the LM initiative, these recommendations also align with the Whole Child approach to education, which is designed to ensure that each student is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.