This holds significant relevance not only on a larger national basis, but to each college campus: according to the National Eating Disorders Association statistics (NEDA), trends in eating disorder development appear to increase during college years and have risen by 13% from 2013-2021. They are often triggered by sudden changes in environment, lifestyle, and exploration of identity.
At the University of Minnesota Duluth, there is one professor who recognizes this importance and wishes to see it discussed on a wider scale throughout campus: assistant professor Kelsea Schoenbauer teaches a course titled COMM 3395, Communication and Eating Disorders.
This course is unique in its approach to understanding eating disorders and their reasons for development. Rather than the standard medical approach that most people follow, Schoenbauer teaches students to approach the issue through a different interdisciplinary means: the lens of communication, and how the media, culture, speech, and stereotypes surrounding eating disorders has shaped its impact on society.
During a recent class, students were prompted to anonymously share and reflect on their first creative project combining personal experience and another person’s testimony. The development of eating disorders are usually a result of a trauma that one has faced and not as much about food itself.
This discovery and approach inspires certain questions: “What are the stereotypes surrounding people who have eating disorders? What other kinds of projects are students working on? What was the reason behind this course’s creation?”
In an interview with Dr. Schoenbauer prior to class time, she answered these questions and more in elaborating on five fundamental questions about COMM 3395 and everything there is to know about the course. ‘
Can you give a little bit of an overview on what this class is about and what students usually do in each class period?
What we start off by doing is we take a historical context to understanding this phenomenon that we as a culture have labeled as an eating disorder, right, or, more broadly, food and body related challenges. But let's look at this from a different lens. Let's look at this from a communication lens, which applies this additional layer to understanding it.
And then once we have that as our framework, we've been going more in depth to understand okay, let's talk about an interpersonal or family context and how our relationships and how our interactions throughout life and the relationships that we have, how those impact how we perceive our bodies, how we have a relationship with our body, and how we have a relationship with food.
Where did this idea of having a course like this originate from?
So I would say two things: this is definitely my area of research expertise, I have a professional interest in this topic, and then personal experience, as well as personal interest in wanting to change the discourses that are circulating about eating disorders. Having a class that serves undergrads is so important because what we see oftentimes is if individuals don't develop an eating disorder, like in adolescence or early on in life, typically when they develop it is when they come to college.
So I think in a lot of ways, the class, too, is like I'm hoping with it, to help heal a generation of young individuals, to help give them tools and skills that when challenges in life arise, that they have an understanding, a way to communicatively make sense of things, and some additional tools in their tool belt that they can rely on as well.
What do you hope students learn or take away as learning objectives or goals from this course and apply it to their own life?
Definitely that, I would say, being able to communicate more compassionately about it. It's not a requirement that an individual has personal experience with food and body related challenges for the class, but in some way, shape or form, like we're all going to be touched by it, if not individually, it's going to be somebody we know, love, care for that type of a thing, so being able to understand it in its complexity, and then also being able to communicate in a way that is less dehumanizing, less stigmatizing, more empathetic.
And then for the larger community level at the campus level and the university level, [the goal] is changing the discourses around that. So we're going to be doing stuff with the last week of February, which is Eating Disorder Awareness Week. So we’ll be trying to raise awareness and debunk a lot of the myths about eating disorders.
What are some of the upcoming class projects that students are working on? What other projects do you have for the future?
For the first creative project, students have been asked to interview somebody who has experienced an eating disorder. Then they have been instructed to construct a post secret, and the students were instructed to make two postcards. One is based on this person and their experience with an eating disorder, and then they themselves did a personal postcard where they had to think about a hurtful message that they've received about food and/or their body. Then on the back side, there would be the empowering message.
The second creative project in the class is they're going to construct a body map, so it's a life-sized representation of their body. The silhouette should have some kind of significance and meaning behind it. And then they illustrate based off of their own experiences, based off of the interview that they did for the post secret, based off of all the readings that we do in the class and the guest lectures that we have in class.
And so they make the body map itself, and then they will also do an audio recording using the Voice Memo app. And then they'll turn that in, and we'll have a body map exhibit where we'll display everybody's body map around in class.
Is there anything that you hope to see this course grow into, like any future ideas or activities you want to include or expand on? What are your hopes for the direction this class goes in?I
I have a vision for Eating Disorder Awareness Week. I'd really love for that to be a campus and community-engaged project that transcends interdisciplinary bounds or disciplinary boundaries.
I have a colleague who researches social support. I would love for her to do a social support workshop, for us to have different events throughout the entirety of the week that helps raise awareness, that helps provide a supportive community here on campus, bring in different people to talk about their experiences, different experts in the field, to really start making some of these larger shifts that need to happen at the regional level, local level, [and] cultural level as well.
I would love for there to be different events, maybe a spoken word, movie night or some kind of show about eating disorders, but just get a lot of different individuals across campus and in the local community involved.
Additional Note:
It was after this interview in the class where students, in their quiet gathering, reflected on these postcards in what is best described as an intimate and embodying experience. Photographer Hunter Riley helped in capturing photos of this, with the consent of the students.