Nicole Taylor

Objective: The objective of this study is to investigate whether self‐disclosed disability and self‐reported program access are associated with measures of empathy and burnout in a national sample of US medical students. Methods: The authors obtained data from students who responded to the Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) Year 2 Questionnaire (Y2Q) in 2019 and 2020. Data included demographic characteristics, personal variables, learning environment indicators, measures of burnout (Oldenburg Burnout Inventory for Medical Students), empathy (Interpersonal Reactivity Index) and disability‐related questions, including self‐reported disability, disability category and program access. Associations between disability status, program access, empathy and burnout were assessed using multivariable logistic regression models accounting for YQ2 demographic, personal‐related and learning environment measures. Results: Overall, 23 898 (54.2%) provided disability data and were included. Of those, 2438 (10.2%) self‐reported a disability. Most medical students with disabilities (SWD) self‐reported having program access through accommodations (1215 [49.8%]) or that accommodations were not required for access (824 [33.8%]). Multivariable models identified that compared with students without disabilities, SWD with and without program access presented higher odds of high exhaustion (1.50 [95% CI, 1.34–1.69] and 2.59 [95% CI, 1.93–3.49], respectively) and lower odds of low empathy (0.75 [95% CI, 0.67–.85] and 0.68 [95% CI, 0.52–0.90], respectively). In contrast, multivariable models for disengagement identified that SWD reporting lack of program access presented higher odds of high disengagement compared to students without disabilities (1.43 [95% CI, 1.09–1.87], whereas SWD with program access did not (1.09 [95% CI, 0.97–1.22]). Conclusions: Despite higher odds of high exhaustion, SWD were less likely to present low empathy regardless of program access, and SWD with program access did not differ from students without disabilities in terms of disengagement. These findings add to our understanding of the characteristics and experiences of SWD including their contributions as empathic future physicians.

Research to date has found discrepancies between performance-based measures and caregiver ratings of executive functioning among children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). These studies are limited by the participant sample, the assessment measures available, and the type of analyses used to examine this relationship. The main objective of the current study was to extend the literature on the association between tests and caregiver ratings of executive functioning by addressing limitations of past research and examining this association among children with prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) with and without a diagnosis of FASD. Participants were 212 children with PAE, including 99 children with and 113 without FASD. Caregiver ratings and most of the scores on tests of executive functioning were above and below the normative mean range, respectively. None of the correlations between tests and caregiver ratings of executive functioning were significant across the groups. The results of this study suggest that tests and caregiver ratings of executive functioning may not measure the same construct or other factors may be impacting the strength and significance of the relationship. Directions for future research and clinical implications are provided.

This Special Issue on environmental attunement introduces seven papers that engage with a range of different insights and practices of nature-culture and embodied connections to place across health, sport and physical education. We have organised the papers into three themes that explore possibilities for: (i) notions of the environment and ‘nature’ in research and practice; (ii) possibilities and challenges of translating environment, sustainability and ‘nature’ from policy and curriculum documents into practice; and (iii) philosophical and theoretical links to emplaced and embodied learning – past-present-future. These are by no means exclusive themes and readers will recognise other patterns of theoretical and empirical possibility as well as important geographical and contextual nuances that need to be explored further. Because of this, we hope that this collection inspires further submissions via an extended call for papers that engage with the challenges and the possibilities of how we might approach the complex environmental, ecological, political and cultural factors that shape health, sport and physical education in current times.

There have been unresolved calls for educators to connect and translate environmental links within health and physical education given the enduring absence, yet overlapping citizen priorities of health. In this Introductory paper to the Special Issue of environmental attunement in the health and/or physical education canon, we question if and how notions of nature and the environment might paradigmatically belong more centrally to the discipline. After some author positioning and situating this work, we draw on theories of attunement to consider what our use of the term ‘environmental attunement’ offers for shaping epistemological habits and ontological work across health studies and physical education. As part of this, we explore the possibilities and challenges for expanding embodied connections to place, space and ‘nature’. We highlight the omnipresence of eco-health, environmentalism, ‘nature’ and Indigenous ways of knowing as central to a pressing socio-cultural context and politics, yet the absence of epistemological habits in health and physical education responding to this need. To conclude we map links and possibilities from the literature to argue for the necessity of ‘environmental attunement’ to more centrally underpin teachers’ ecological identities in learning about health and human movement.

There has been a recent surge in the popularity of school gardening programmes with different models claiming to address learning outcomes within the curriculum. For example, the ‘kitchen garden’ concept has had a rapid uptake across many Australian schools, promoted by both government curriculum support documents, and private organisations. Research points to the ‘use’ of school gardens as an initiative that predominantly draws on discourses of health, wellbeing and sustainability – sometimes together but also often quite separately. Despite the rapid uptake of gardening initiatives in schools, and the explicit mention of ‘gardening’ in State based variations of the Australian National Curriculum, we know very little about how school gardens are being conceptualised by Health and Physical Education (HPE) teachers as part of their teaching – either in primary or secondary contexts. This paper utilises data from a larger study which investigated how 24 generalist primary and secondary specialist HPE teachers talked about ‘environmental health’ within Health and Physical Education. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first it examines the range of discourses, that is, the different meanings and values, the teachers in the study associated with gardening as a practice expected of environmentally healthy citizens. Second, we draw on material and embodied knowledge to demonstrate how the very diverse ways the teachers talked about gardening, provide ‘conditions of possibility’ for thinking critically about gardening, and how school gardens might be positioned within the context of HPE.

In light of the fact that nontraditional students (those age 25 years or older) outnumber traditional students on many US college campuses, it is important to understand their needs and experiences in higher education. A key characteristic distinguishing nontraditional students from traditional-aged college students is the high likelihood that they are juggling multiple competing demands and stressors, including parenthood, work, marriage, and financial responsibility. The findings presented here are part of a larger study that included in-depth interviews with 25 nontraditional undergraduate students at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU or Highlands). This article highlights the narratives of five of these nontraditional students to illustrate the range of experiences that emerged across the sample. The authors reflect on how learning these narratives has influenced their personal approaches to teaching and engaging with nontraditional students and provide strategies for supporting nontraditional students in the anthropology classroom.

Despite the importance of interactions with natural environments for personal and social well-being, there is only limited evidence of the relationship between the environment and health as an idea or area of study in school education in Australia. Logically, the place for such a study, at least in Australia, would be within the Health & Physical Education (HPE) key learning area. However, in HPE, alternative ways of considering health beyond the dominant ‘healthism’ discourses which privilege physical activity, fitness, food and nutrition struggle for any kind of existence. Gruenewald (2004. A Foucauldian analysis of environmental education: Toward the socioecological challenge of the earth charter. Curriculum Inquiry, 34(1), 71–107) suggests looking to the margins of a field to see what knowledge is silenced or subjugated in order to open up new conditions of possibility. This challenged us to look beyond taken for granted ways of thinking about health to identify other resources, perhaps unrecognised as yet, that teachers might draw on to constitute their knowledge of health. To do this, we look to interview data collected when teachers were asked to talk about their personal experiences of the relationship between the environment and health. The analysis of the interviews demonstrated how the teachers conceptualised the relationship between the environment and health by drawing on embodied experiences and affective encounters with more-than-human nature. By theorising these encounters through a post-human, new-materialist lens, we demonstrate how their corporeal knowledge, developed through embodied experiences, has the potential to assist teachers in formulating less institutionalised health understandings. We argue that these encounters with more-than-human nature can serve as alternatives to those dominant healthism discourses that invoke problematic risk, fear and crisis responses.