Despite the importance of interactions with natural environments for personal and social well-being, there is only limited evidence of the relationship between the environment and health as an idea or area of study in school education in Australia. Logically, the place for such a study, at least in Australia, would be within the Health &…

Purpose: Health education still tends to be dominated by an approach designed to achieve individual behaviour change through the provision of knowledge to avoid risk. In contrast, a critical inquiry approach educates children and young people to develop their capacity to engage critically with knowledge, through reasoning, problem solving and…

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…

A National Curriculum in Health and Physical Education (HPE) has recently been developed in Australia. This new curriculum reflects, among other educational priorities, both environmental sensitivities and a commitment to the enhancement of young people's health and wellbeing. HPE is one of the key sites in the curriculum where a focused…

A critical inquiry approach is one of five key characteristics 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…

The health of children in affluent economies has become closely tied to the ideal of a normative body weight achieved by monitoring and balancing diet and physical activity. As a result, the education of young people on how to avoid becoming fat begins at an early age through the language and practices of families, the messages embedded in…

Drawing on research conducted in Australian Health' and Physical Education (HPE) and Swedish Physical Education and Health (PEH), this paper demonstrates the analytic possibilities of Foucault's notion of pastoral power to reveal the moral and ethical work conducted by HPE/PEH teachers in producing healthy active citizens. We use the pastoral…

In this study we interrogate the ways nutrition and health have become increasingly influential to children's everyday life practices and conceptualisations of food. We challenge the orthodoxy of meanings afforded to food that draw a distinct binary between "good"/"bad" or "healthy"/"unhealthy"; ideas widely…

In this article, we want to focus on the impact of the new health imperatives on young children attending primary schools because the evidence from both our own and others work suggests that younger and younger children are talking in very negative and disturbing ways about themselves and their bodies. We see this in a context where in the name of…

Contemporary notions of childhood overweight and obesity have become increasingly influential in curriculum and pedagogy in school-based Health and Physical Education (HPE). Teachers' delivery of HPE subject matter and related school practices are likely to have a considerable impact on the attitudes and beliefs of the children they teach,…

In March 2004, Stephen Ball and others presented a symposium at the conference of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) on the necessity of theory in educational research. Like Ball, I have observed that theory, not just social theory, is a difficult space and one that divides researchers (those comfortable with theory and those less…

In New Zealand, the introduction of a new health and physical education curriculum, coupled with extraordinary levels of lay and professional concern about children's health (as recorded by the Adolescent Health Research Group in 2003) has contributed to a reconceptualisation of health education practices in schools. Policy and professional…

Examines how certainty about children, obesity, exercise, and health is produced in the context of 'expert' knowledge and recontextualized in the academic and professional physical education literature. Argues that the unquestioning acceptance of the obesity discourses in physical education helps to construct anxieties about the body, which are…

In this paper we examine the discursive resources that year 4 and year 8 students draw on to construct meanings for health. Drawing on students' responses to tasks in the New Zealand National Monitoring Project (Crooks & Flockton, "Health & Physical Education", University of Otago Educational Assessment Research Unit, 1999) we…