Jaleh McCormack

Dosing up on food and physical activity: New Zealand children's ideas about 'health'

Objective To investigate New Zealand children’s understandings of ‘health’. Design Secondary analysis of student responses to a task called ‘Being Healthy’ in New Zealand’s National Education Monitoring Project. Setting Year 4 (8—9 year-old) and Year 8 (12—13 year-old) students who took part in New Zealand’s National Education Monitoring for Health and Physical Education in 2002. Method Coding of student responses using NVivo qualitative analysis package. Results Students reiterated messages widely promulgated in popular and professional mediums. Students predominantly conceived of health as a corporeal matter, citing eating, exercise and hygiene practices as the most important health promoting behaviours. Conclusion Students could usefully be encouraged to adopt socially critical understandings of what health might entail and broader, more holistic conceptualizations of health beyond matters of the ‘body’ alone.

School Culture Meets Sport: A Case Study in New Zealand.

This article draws on ethnographic work undertaken with 21 students and several members of staff at an elite girls’ school in New Zealand to investigate the relation between school culture, pedagogical practices and discourses of physical education and school sport. It explores what and who contours the participation of these young women in sport, both within and outside of the school gates. The article interrogates the values young women ascribe to sport and physical education in the context of their shared commitment to achieving academic success, and suggests that government policy agendas and imperatives around Physical Education and sport are not necessarily changing pedagogical practices. Rather, the school’s desire to turn out well-rounded, balanced and successful young women drives the school’s commitment to affording young women multiple opportunities and resources to participate in sport and recreation within the school gates.

‘Doing it for themselves’: a qualitative study of children’s engagement with public health agendas in New Zealand

In this paper, we examine how New Zealand children engage with public health agendas that seek to shape their understandings of health. We shed light on the ways children make sense of what they see, hear and come to know through public health ‘work’, and consider what effects this has for how they come to think of their ‘selves’ and relations with others. We pay attention to the way public health messages assemble, bolstered by dispositions, behaviours and ruminations expressed in schools, families and communities. Children’s talk exemplifies the sheer volume of public health missives saturating their worlds and the range of media used to reach into children’s lives. In many cases, children are ‘doing it for themselves’ in the sense that they are attempting to enact health imperatives about healthy eating, regular exercise and weight management. However, alongside the willingness of many to simply believe and enact health information, we draw attention to the capacity of some children to think through public health messages, negotiate and make sense of them in relation to their own lives. Despite the ubiquity and mantra-like quality of public health messages currently directed at children we contend they are variously interpreted and embedded in children’s lives. We regard the messiness and complexity of children’s engagement as affirmation that a critically informed variety of public health could provide opportunities for children to come to know health as more than simply eating the right foods and running a lot.

The Burden of Brown Bodies: Teachings About Pasifika Within Public Health Obesity Research in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Recent theorizations of biopedagogies, drawing on Foucault’s thinking about biopower and biopolitics, coupled with contemporary understandings of pedagogy as a cultural practice, provide a useful analytic for interrogating the workings of obesity discourses. In this article, we aim to extend thinking about biopedagogies through a reading of public health research texts that produce “evidence” about obesity and Brown bodies. We consider the role public health researchers may play as pedagogues in the art and practices of life. We chart how some public health research utilizes normalizing practices and produces discourses of ignorance that constitute bodies as objects to be worked on and taught. Finally, we flag up our concern that biopedagogical efforts to solve public health issues may occlude potential detrimental effects for individuals and their health.