Deana Leahy

Assembling a health[y] subject: risky and shameful pedagogies in health education

As a school subject, health education functions as a contemporary apparatus of governmentality by attempting to shape the health[y] conduct of young people. Currently, health education, along with many other institutions and programmes, is heavily shaped by neoliberal logics of risk. This paper is interested in exploring how these tenets shape versions of curriculum and classroom practices. The article draws on ethnographic data and the analytical device of governmental assemblages to consider how governmentalities are brought to life at their point of application; via teacher interviews and classroom practices. Analysis reveals that health education pedagogical assemblages are made up of the usual ‘neoliberal suspects’: risk discourses and strategies that attempt to individualise and responsibilise. However, accompanying these ‘usual suspects’ are a raft of melodramatic and affective intensities, including disgust and shame. These affective pedagogical assemblages are significant for scholars interested in understanding the governmental machinery of health education, and public health and health promotion more broadly, and its potential effects.

A critical ‘critical inquiry’ proposition in Health and Physical Education

A critical inquiry approach is one of five key charateristics that have shaped the development of the new Australian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education (AC: HPE). However, what this means is open to interpretation. In the various documents leading to the consultation draft AC: HPE and in this document itself, critical inquiry is used in varying ways with differing intentions. In this paper, we examine the conditions of possibility for particular understandings of critical inquiry in the AC: HPE and the shifts in meaning over time in the AC: HPE documentation that has been publicly available for consultation. We examine the potential for particular versions of critical inquiry to be translated from curriculum documents to classroom teaching through an examination of how critical inquiry has been deployed by HPE preservice teachers in their teaching during their final professional experience.

School health education in changing times: Curriculum, pedagogies and partnerships

This book explores the complex nexus of discourses, principles and practices within which educators mobilise school-based health education. Through an interrogation of the ideas informing particular models and approaches to health education, the authors provide critical insights into the principles and practices underpinning approaches to health education policy, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Drawing on extensive literature and research, the book explores and considers what health education can and should do. Chapters examine the extent to which health education, past and present, has attended to the needs and interests of young people in school environments, as well as assess common pedagogical approaches and whether the outcomes tally with expectations. By considering the problems in teaching health education, curriculum making, health education pedagogies and porous classrooms, the book offers a knowledge base from which educators can consider how theories and models can sit together to shape curriculum and influence practice. School Health Education in Changing Times will be of key interest to postgraduate students, researchers and academics in the field of health education. It will also be a valuable resource for teacher educators, current teachers, and those on professional development courses who want to navigate the moral minefield surrounding health education.

Governing Food Choices: A Critical Analysis of School Food Pedagogies and Young People's Responses in Contemporary Times.

Abstract Recently a proliferation and intensification of school programmes that are directed towards teaching children and young people about food has been witnessed. Whilst there is much to learn about food, anxieties concerning the obesity epidemic have dramatically shaped how schools address the topic. This article draws on governmentality to consider ‘the conditions of possibility’ for teaching about food in contemporary times. In particular the form that knowledge about food takes in the midst of an obesity epidemic, the authorities on which it draws for its legitimacy and the learnings made possible are considered. To do this two Australian studies investigating students’ engagement with school-health knowledge are considered. It is suggested that the obesity epidemic has potently shaped the ways schools seek to teach about food and the possibilities for how young people come to understand their own, and others’, food choices.

Biopedagogical Assemblages Exploring School Drug Education in Action

Public health “perspectives” position school-based drug education as a key site whereby public health imperatives can be brought to life through the “empowerment” of young people to take charge of their bodies to ensure their own good health. Foucauldian governmentality scholarship has been extremely useful in the task of critically examining these attempts to govern the population’s health and drug use, drawing attention to the ways in which classrooms function as biopedagogical spaces where particular sorts of knowledge and truth are mobilized to produce subjects who are rational, autonomous, and “empowered” to make the “right” healthy, drug-free choices. Although the work of Foucault has helped in drawing attention to expert knowledges, discourses, and truths that operate in the production of “healthy” subjectivity, it has been less useful for exploring the affective, desiring, and embodied aspects of school drug education or for examining its potential side effects, including its impacts on bodily capacities, social relations, and empathy. In this article, then, we draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to build on and supplement these governmental approaches: to consider what actually happens, affectively, in classrooms when drug education biopedagogies are put into motion, and what implications this has for embodied relations beyond the classroom. We argue that by attending to the affective, desiring, and embodied aspects of school drug education, we get a more nuanced sense of the broader impacts of school drug education: how it functions as a biopolitical site and how it might affect upon health and well-being in ways not considered by discourses of public health nor those of governmentality.

The political is critical: explorations of the contemporary politics of knowledge in health and physical education

This special issue has been conceived to acknowledge the advances in inquiry and understandings that political and critical scholarship has facilitated. Perhaps more importantly, it seeks to reveal the limits of contemporary ‘political’ and/or ‘critical’ research in the field and encourage fresh thinking about a number of issues, including not least, the relationship between political and critical research. In our editorial we highlight a number of key questions that have guided our thinking about the state of critical scholarship and ways of working to continue to engage with critical questions.

Critical perspectives on health and wellbeing education in schools

Purpose This Special Issue aims to place the spotlight on educational research and its contribution to the field of school-based health and wellbeing promotion. The purpose is to bring together scholars from across the world to consider current developments in research on curricula, interventions, policies and practices concerning health and wellbeing promotion and related professional development of teachers. Design/methodology/approach The members of European Educational Research Association (EERA) Network Research on Health Education (Network 8) were invited to submit their conceptual or empirical work addressing processes and outcomes in school health and wellbeing promotion. Additionally, an open call for papers was published on the Health Education website and on EERA website. Following the double blind peer review process and editorial work by the guest editors and the editor in chief, six of the submissions that were accepted for publishing are selected to be published in this issue and the rest w...

Zombies, Monsters and Education: The Creation of the Young Citizen

There is a persistent concern amongst contemporary governments about the nature of the citizens that young people will become, a concern that manifests itself in a growing body of education policy which describes, and prescribes, the young citizen whom schooling is to shape. This policy is dressed in the language of freedom, initiative and self-improvement that have become so much part of the neoliberal zeitgeist. It purports to enable all young people to be healthy, active citizens with the capacity to direct their own lives as well as to improve the fabric of society. Such citizens are in contrast with those young people who are seen not only to be undemocratic and unhealthy but also to be deviant and dangerous, even monstrous. In this chapter, we deploy the metaphors of the zombie and the monster as a means through which to unpack contemporary educational policy within the Australian context. In the first section of the chapter, we introduce what we mean when we talk about zombies and monsters and how these metaphors can be used to discuss contemporary policy and the citizen they aim to (re)produce – the zombie citizen. We then bring this analysis to bear upon the policy itself as zombified. Finally, we argue that contemporary classrooms deploy the monstrous in order to encourage young people to become ideal neo-liberal citizens.

Schooling Lunch: Health, Food, and the Pedagogicalization of the Lunch Box

In this chapter we explore various school lunch policies and practices in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. We make the argument that contemporary lunchtime policies are guided by a desire to regulate and control consumption as well as to transmit particular ideological values around food and notions of what constitutes (un)healthy food choices. We consider the cultural, sociopolitical, and economic forces that render these surveillance and regulatory practices commonsensical. Our findings suggest that there are some common anxieties around consumption, health, and obesity that may be driving these kinds of transnational ‘lunching’ policies and pedagogies. While such campaigns, resources, and pedagogies are intended to be beneficial, they actually produce some troubling effects.

'Someone has to keep shouting': celebrities as food pedagogues

ABSTRACT In a recent interview with the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver stated that ‘Food is the most basic issue […] it’s about health […] someone has to take responsibility for this. Someone has to keep shouting’. Oliver’s statement reflects his position as a chef, a public pedagogue and, importantly for the purposes of this article, a celebrity. Oliver’s is one of many voices that have entered the public realm to educate the public about the dangers of unhealthy eating. In this article we discuss the work of three celebrities: Jamie Oliver. Sesame Street Workshop’s character Cookie Monster and Australian food celebrity Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Foundation for schools. Whilst acknowledging that these three food pedagogues represent only a few of the voices that seek to intervene in the food consumption habits of citizens in contemporary times, they can be understood as a public pedagogical response fuelled by the obesity epidemic. We argue that whilst on the surface it appears that our three food pedagogues offer benevolently inspired propositions, we understand such posturing as deeply political. Specifically we are interested in examining the educative effects of these messages and their troubling implications for how individuals understand and experience food-related imperatives. We ask readers to consider who is metaphorically ‘shouting’ whilst drawing on various pedagogical forms and devices and we ask who is being ‘shouted’ at, and to what effects. We suggest that these celebrities function as powerful pedagogues who seemingly attempt to offer particular visions of health, consumption and citizenship, and, above all, attempt to cultivate a moral duty to eat well.