Katie Fitzpatrick

Health education’s fascist tendencies: a cautionary exposition

Along with other scholars in the field, we are increasingly concerned with the propensity for schools to promote particular messages about health, especially those that encourage body surveillance and control. Indeed, we suggest in this article that certain forms of health education can be seen as a form of health fascism. We begin with a discussion of what we mean by health fascism before considering the historical positioning of health education and its alignment with public health agendas. We also consider how health fascism links with established notions of healthism, the cult of the body and aesthetics.

“That’s How the Light Gets In” Poetry, Self, and Representation in Ethnographic Research

Although still marginal in academic writing generally, poetry has for some time been recognized as a valid form of representation in qualitative research. Poetry can provide a rich, evocative, and aesthetic means of communication, which ultimately enhances ethnographic work. Like narrative, however, the use of poetry to represent research data also raises questions. Drawing on a school-based critical ethnography of marginalized youth in New Zealand, the author describes how poetry became a part of the research. As poetry is deeply personal, she begins with her own doubts about being a poet and an academic. The author then discusses how poetry can be used in research as a method of bringing the personal and political together in ethnographic writing.

On being critical in health and physical education

Background: This paper is a reflection on being a critical teacher of health and physical education. It is a conversation of sorts between the two authors: a critical educator and researcher, and a critical teacher. It is based on the shared experiences of one of the authors (Dan) high-school PE and health classes over the course of a year during a critical ethnography of health and PE undertaken by the other author (Katie). The study was conducted at a multiethnic and low-socioeconomic high school in New Zealand. Purpose: The purpose of this article is to reflect on what it means to undertake and embody a critical pedagogical approach to health and PE teaching. We explore the key tenets of Dans approach and engage in a dialogue about the challenges and possibilities of such work. Design and analyses: The argument here is informed by the aforementioned critical ethnographic study but the authors take a step back from that study in this paper to reflect on critical pedagogy in the field of health and PE and what drives one practitioner to forward his approach despite the difficulties he encounters. We draw on a range of analytical tools including critical approaches to gender, embodiment and pedagogy. Conclusions: We argue that, despite the difficulties of being critical in health and PE, such work is greatly needed in health and physical education. We suggest that, perhaps, a more embodied form of critical pedagogy is required.

Disrupting racialization: considering critical leadership in the field of physical education

Background: The field of physical education (PE), overlapping as it does with the field of sport, has been critiqued for marginalizing those positioned as ‘different’. This difference is typically conceptualized in regard to a white, masculine, heterosexual, and able-bodied norm. Students who do not identify as white are not represented in any significant way in physical education discourses, culture, or the demographics of PE teachers in many international contexts. Purpose: This article explores links between the literature in critical leadership and physical education. Drawing on the theoretical foundations of transformational leadership, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory, we draw links between the field of PE and applied critical leadership. Design and analyses: Drawing on the theoretical tools of Bourdieu, we argue that physical education can be conceptualized as a field of practice. As such, the field values contain certain practices and norms. We argue that disrupting these norms relies on leadership in the field and may require insights from other fields, in this case applied critical leadership. Conclusion: We conclude that leaders (both teachers and teacher educators) in the field of PE have a responsibility to take up practices which work against racialization and challenge current norms. This is both a theoretical and pedagogical challenge but can begin in classrooms.

Trapped in the physical: Maori and Pasifika achievement in HPE

Health and physical education (PE) are low status, marginalised subjects in many schools internationally. However in New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere, they are concurrently credentialed and recognised senior high school options in which students can gain national qualifications. In New Zealand these subjects also tend to attract students who are statistically low achievers in the educational system. For example, health and PE are chosen in senior high school by disproportionate numbers of Maori (indigenous) and migrant Pasifika youth. Results suggest that these same youth achieve more in these disciplines than in other subjects. Considering why large numbers of Maori and Pasifika students choose health and PE is, of course, important. More prescient perhaps is consideration of how their engagement with health and PE intersects with their general positioning in education in relation to social class, ethnicity, physicality and other social hierarchies. Of interest is whether achievement in health and PE reinforces or contests the underachievement of Maori and Pasifika students? In this article, I discuss the implications for marginalised youth in taking health and PE as senior high school options. I draw on Bourdieus notion of capital to explore the intersection of ethnicity, health and PE with national qualifications.

Disturbing the Divide Poetry as Improvisation to Disorder Power Relationships in Research Supervision

In this article, we share our use of poetry as a research supervision tool. We are not only colleagues but are also in a student–supervisor relationship. Early on in the PhD process, we began writing poems to each other on email as a way of communicating aspects of our research ideas that we felt were not able to be expressed in prose. We found that this use of poetry enabled a direct emotional engagement with the work and ideas we were forming. At the same time, we shaped our writing activities as a form of resistance, indulging in a form of anti-neoliberal critique. Crucially, however, we found that poetry also allowed us to form a closer relationship because it required both of us to be open and vulnerable. We didn’t allow time to write and edit the poems but emailed them as soon as they were written.

Critical health education in Aotearoa New Zealand

Health education in Aotearoa New Zealand is an enigma. Premised on ostensibly open and holistic philosophical premises, the school curriculum not only permits, but in some ways prescribes, pedagogies and teacher dispositions that engage with the diversity of young people at its centre. A capacity, to not only understand contemporary health missives, but also critique them in light of lived experience and broader sociocultural conditions, is desired from students and formal assessments reward this. The New Zealand Curriculum is considered a treasure, a document that is the envy of many educators around the world, however, there is not necessarily a direct link between official curriculum and practice. In this paper, we interrogate the extent to which the aspirations of a document so laden with promise can be realised in a political climate that leans heavily on a representation of youth as troubled, fat and risky subjects. We explore the tensions, the paradoxes and the fissures that arise when an avowedly socially critical syllabus rubs up against public health imperatives and a context where the capacity to ameliorate youth health problems is ‘capital’ for vying political interests. Drawing on contexts of obesity and sexuality, we use the work of Bourdieu to explore how health education exists at the intersection of different fields of practice.

Sexuality education in New Zealand: a policy for social justice?

Abstract In 2015, the New Zealand Ministry of Education released a new curriculum policy document for sexuality education in all schools – Sexuality Education: A Guide for Boards of Trustees, Principals and Teachers. This policy is a rare international example of a curriculum document that explicitly values diversity, promotes inclusive school environments, and approaches sexuality education as an area of study (rather than a health promotion intervention). Since its release, the document has, however, gained little attention either of a scholarly nature or in terms of dedicated implementation in schools. One exception is a recent article in this journal by Sarah Garland-Levett, which raises some interesting and important concerns about the possibilities of such policy documents. I follow her lead here and continue the discussion about the place and potential of progressive sexuality education policy, and offer some thoughts about the content and intentions of this text.

Streams of Writing From a Fluid City

What is the relationship between qualitative research and environmental activism? At a time when the effects of environmental damage are becoming increasingly more visible and flooding our daily lives in unpredictable and sometimes devastating ways, how do qualitative methods of research and writing respond to current environmental challenges? This article discusses an arts-science-education collaboration titled fluid city, which disseminates critical research on water ecology to the wider public of Auckland City, New Zealand, through creative and performative means. An experimental approach to narrative washes through the style of this article in an attempt to have the encounter of reading flow with the logic of ecological thinking and liquid perception.

Poetry in motion: in search of the poetic in health and physical education

ABSTRACT This article uses poetry to show how we might reimagine the body and movement in ways that speak back to and subvert dominant and neoliberal conceptions of health and physical education (HPE). Drawing on the notion of poiesis and Arnolds conceptualisation of physical education as ‘in through and about movement’, I explore possibilities for poetic responses to the body and movement. These responses aim to unearth the emotional and political elements of movement experiences and highlight how much we lose in positioning movement as transactional, and HPE as only justifiable through extrinsic outcomes.