Health Education: Critical perspectives

✍ Scribed by Katie Fitzpatrick (editor), Richard Tinning (editor)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 281
• Series: Routledge Research in Education Policy and Politics
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Health Education: Critical perspectives provides a socio-cultural and critical approach to health education. The book draws together international experts in the fields of health and education who deconstruct contemporary discourses and practices, and re-imagine a health education that both connects with young people and offers a way forward in addressing issues of health and wellbeing.

Chapters within specifically link academic work on neoliberalism, healthism, risk and the body to wider discourses of health and health education. They challenge current practices and call for a re-thinking of current health programs in education settings. A unique feature of this book is the analyses of health education from both political and applied levels across a range of international contexts.

The book is divided into three sections:

• the social and political contexts informing health education

• how individual health issues (sexuality, alcohol, mental health, the body and obesity, nutrition) articulate in education in complex ways

• alternative ways to think about health and health education pedagogy.

The overall theme of the book offers a perspective that the current approach to health education – promoting a fear of ill health, self-surveillance and individual responsibility – can become a form of health fascism, and we need to be cognisant of this potential and its consequences for young people. The book will be of key interest to academics and researchers exploring the political context of health education.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Preface
1 Considering the politics and practice of health education
PART I The politics of health and education
2 Health education and health promotion: Beyond cells and bells
3 If you are not healthy, then what are you? Healthism, colonial disease and body-logic
4 The reproductive citizen: Motherhood and health education
5 Schools, the state and public health: Some historical and contemporary insights
6 Who has health problems? Class, racialization and health
PART II Inventing youth health issues
7 Tau(gh)t bodies: Student sexual embodiment and schooling
8 Young people, alcohol and a social science of risk: Bauman and the problem of ambivalence
9 Social media: Virtual environments for constructing knowledge on health and bodies?
10 Mediating biopower: Health education, social class and subjectivity
11 The corporatization of health education curricula: “Part of the solution” to childhood obesity?
12 Mental health in corporeal times
PART III Against healthism: Shifting educational practices
13 Critical approaches to health education
14 Salutogenic approaches to health and the body
15 Getting which message across? The (H)PE teacher as health educator
16 Disrupting the field: Teacher education in health education
17 Beyond body fascism: The place for health education
Index