Development of a Life Skill and Sport Curriculum for Girls

Abstract

Getting a move on girls' sports: Empowering girls through sport and physical activity program is an initiative to get young women physically active while learning, understanding, and demonstrating life skills during and outside participation in the program. This project serves to enable young women to feel confident in their ability to participate in sports without the bias of societal views telling them what they should or should not be doing. Our current research is focusing on curriculum design, focusing on how to teach life skills, confidence, and body positivity to girls in our community as well as providing young women with outlets and resources related to healthy lifestyles that they would not have otherwise. Beyond designing the camp curriculum, we have also designed a counselor training program, helping college students understand how to teach life skills in sport. By participating in our training program, counselors will have an opportunity to learn the importance of incorporating sport and life skills into the lives of young women as well as developing strategies to use sport to promote healthy lifestyles. This is a pilot test for a recurring summer program, where we will be evaluating the effectiveness of the program. The program will be adapted based on findings from the data analysis as needed. Results will be published and presented at regional or national conferences providing additional resources for other sports practitioners. The curriculum design is based on the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility Model, helping young participants recognize how their behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes impact not only their own development, but the people around them. The curriculum will teach key concepts such as accountability, respect, communication, teamwork, confidence, self-esteem, persistence, and positive body image. By learning what these concepts mean, as well as how they can impact sport, physical activity, and daily life, we hope to instill into our participants' strategies to help them be positive members of society. Teaching these skills through a sports lens should give the participants confidence and joy in living a healthy lifestyle. The camp counselor curriculum will focus on how to implement these skills, including positive modeling, how to give feedback, and learning how to utilize teachable moments in sport settings. We will collect data from the counselors before and after their curriculum implementation, in order to see what their current views on life skills are, and how their views change or grow based on what they learned through our curriculum.