Sacred ties and fresh eyes: voicing critical public health perspectives in curriculum-making

Putting assemblage to work to explore pedagogical practices in health education in Aotearoa New Zealand

Purpose

In Aotearoa New Zealand, Health Education is socio-critical in orientation and is offered as a subject that can offer credits towards the national secondary school qualification. The purpose of this paper is to explore the learning experiences of people who studied Health Education to the final level of secondary schooling in Aotearoa New Zealand. The authors focus specifically on how the subject is taught; or the pedagogical practices that are “put to work” in the Health Education learning environment.

Design/methodology/approach

Using in-depth interviews as the authors’ method of data production, they experiment with a post-qualitative approach to analysis while traversing the theoretical terrain of new materialism. In doing so, they explicate the non-human and human elements that are arranged in a pedagogical assemblage – and explore what these elements can do.

Findings

The authors found that an array of pedagogical practices were put to work in the senior secondary school Health Education classroom: Student-centred approaches, a non-judgemental and energetic tone to teaching, deployment of human and non-human resources, and students connecting with the community. The authors argue that these practices open up possibilities for a critical Health Education.

Practical implications

This research addresses an empirical gap in the literature by focusing on Health Education in the senior secondary levels of schooling. The findings in this paper may provide readers who are Health Education teachers with ideas that could be of material use to them in their teaching practice. In terms of implications for researchers, the authors demonstrate how putting “new” theory and methodological approaches to work in the area of school-based Health Education can produce novel ways of thinking about the subject and what it can do.

Originality/value

The shifting nature of the pedagogical assemblage can ignite new ways of thinking about teaching practice in the Health Education classroom and the capacities that result for learners. In combination with a post-qualitative approach to analysis, the paper provides a novel approach to exploring Health Education.

Working against “pedagogic work”

Purpose

Equipping pre-service teachers with the skills and knowledge needed to teach health in socially critical ways requires pre-service teachers to examine and critique individualistic understandings of health. The purpose of this paper is to use Bourdieu’s concepts of the bodily hexis (the body as both separate from society (autonomous individuals) and the body as socially mediated (the influence of social forces upon individuals)) and pedagogic work to investigate the challenges of redressing the reproduction of individualistic conceptualizations of health in teacher education.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper focusses on an analysis of 31 pre-service teachers’ reflective writing in a foundational health education course, which sought to engage students in thinking about health in socially critical ways. A systematic and procedural form of document analysis was employed to examine and interpret data to investigate the ways in which students were engaging with the socially critical health discourses and course content.

Findings

The findings evidence that while students attempted to engage with and demonstrate their knowledge of a socially critical view of health, contradictions, or places where students unknowingly slipped into individualistic ways of thinking appeared frequently across the data. Findings are presented to elucidate challenges facing pre-service teachers in teaching the AC:HPE curriculum.

Practical implications

Findings suggest the need for teacher educators to employ pedagogic practices that can disrupt previous pedagogic work, serving to challenge and interrogate current constructions of health, and delve deeply into critical discourses through interchange and reflection.

Originality/value

This paper extends the current scholarship of Bourdieusian theoretical concepts in relation to critical health discourses and pedagogies.