Abstract
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 consideration of the relationship between the environment and health is possible. However, to date no research has considered the ways that HPE teachers might recognise and negotiate these spaces. The research described in this paper addresses this gap through an analysis of semi-structured interviews with generalist primary and specialist secondary HPE teachers, drawing on a ‘narrative ethnography’ approach derived from cultural geography. This analysis highlights the consequences of the absence of a knowledge tradition that explicitly links the fields of the environment and health in HPE. Participants who were able to conceptualise environmental health almost exclusively drew on dominant neoliberal and risk discourses. At the same time, teachers’ embodied histories and affective encounters with non-human nature helped them to rupture or challenge dominant assumptions about environmental health. We argue that corporeal knowledge developed through embodied experiences has the potential to assist teachers in formulating environmental health in ways that highlight how interactions with the environment might enhance health and wellbeing.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Australian Curriculum Assessment & Reporting Authority. (2015a). Health and Physical Education. The Australian Curriculum v7.3. Retrieved January 26, 2015, from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/health-and-physical-education/cross-curriculum-priorities.
Australian Curriculum Assessment & Reporting Authority. (2015b). Health and Physical Education: Glossary. The Australian Curriculum v7.3. Retrieved January 26, 2015, from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/health-and-physical-education/glossary
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway [electronic resource]: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Baxter, J., & Eyles, J. (1997). Evaluating qualitative research in social geography: Establishing ‘rigour’ in interview analysis. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 22(4), 505–525.
Beck, U. (2000). Risk society revisited: Theory, politics and research programmes. In B. Adam, U. Beck, & J. van Loon (Eds.), The risk society and beyond: Critical issues for social theory. London: SAGE.
Coutts, C., Forkink, A., & Weiner, J. (2014). The portrayal of natural environment in the evolution of the ecological public health paradigm. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 11(1), 1005–1019.
Crawford, R. (1980). Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life. International Journal of Health Services, 10(3), 365–388.
Creswell, J. W. (2013). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Evans, J. (2008). Education, disordered eating and obesity discourse: Fat fabrications. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1989). The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Routledge.
Frumkin, H. (2001). Beyond toxicity: Human health and the natural environment. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 20(3), 234.
Gehle, K. S., Crawford, J. L., & Hatcher, M. T. (2011). Integrating environmental health into medical education. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 41(4, Supplement 3), S296–S301.
Gray, T., & Birrell, C. (2015). Touched by the Earth: A place-based outdoor learning programme incorporating the Arts. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 15, 330.
Green, D., & Minchin, L. (2014). Living on climate-changed country: Indigenous health, well-being and climate change in remote Australian communities. EcoHealth, 11(2), 263–272.
Gregory, R. (1991). Critical thinking for environmental health risk education. Health Education Quarterly, 18(3), 273–284.
Gruenewald, D. A. (2004). A Foucauldian analysis of environmental education: Toward the socioecological challenge of the Earth Charter. Curriculum Inquiry, 34(1), 71–107.
Hilgenkamp, K. (2006). Environmental health: Ecological perspectives. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.
Hultman, K., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525–542.
Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. New York: Routledge.
Johansson, M., Hartig, T., & Staats, H. (2011). Psychological benefits of walking: Moderation by company and outdoor environment. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 3(3), 261–280.
Kingsley, J., Townsend, M., Henderson-Wilson, C., & Bolam, B. (2013). Developing an exploratory framework linking Australian Aboriginal peoples’ connection to country and concepts of wellbeing. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 10, 678–698.
Longhurst, R. (1997). (Dis)embodied geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 21(4), 486–501.
Madden, K. (1995). Householders’ experiences of ‘save the environment’ messages. Australian Journal of Communication, 22(3), 82–102.
Maller, C., Townsend, M., Pryor, A., Brown, P., & St Leger, L. (2006). Healthy nature healthy people: ‘Contact with nature’ as an upstream health promotion intervention for populations. Health Promotion International, 21(1), 45–54.
Petersen, A., & Lupton, D. (2000). The new public health: Health and self in the age of risk. London: SAGE.
Preston, L. (2012). Changing green subjectivities in outdoor and environmental education: A qualitative study. Discourse, 33(2), 235–249.
Rodrigues, C. (2014). The environmentalization of physical education in higher education settings: Environmental dimensions of academic units in federal universities of Brazil. Paper presented at the 6th international conference on environmental education and sustainability: The best of both worlds, Sao Paulo, Brazil. http://www.bestbothworlds2014.sc.usp.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/00_AF_INGLE%CC%82S_DIGITAL_3.0_FINAL.pdf.
Rodrigues, C., & Payne, P. (2015). Environmentalization of the physical education curriculum in Brazilian universities: Culturally comparative lessons from critical outdoor education in Australia. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning. doi:10.1080/14729679.2015.1035294.
Sauvé, L., & Godmaire, H. (2004). Environmental health education: A participatory holistic approach. EcoHealth, 1(2), SU35–SU46.
Simovska, V., & Mannix-McNamara, P. (2015). Schools for health & sustainability: Theory, research and practice. Dordrecht: Springer.
St Leger, L. (2006). Health promotion and health education in schools: Trends, effectiveness and possibilities: Research report. Noble Park North, Victoria: RACV.
Strife, S. (2010). Reflecting on environmental education: Where is our place in the green movement? Journal of Environmental Education, 41(3), 179–191.
Townsend, M. A., Maller, C., St Leger, L., & Brown, P. (2003). Using environmental interventions to create sustainable solutions to problems of health and wellbeing. Environmental Health, 3(1), 58.
Waitt, G. (2010). Doing Foucauldian discourse analysis: Revealing social realities. In I. Hay (Ed.), Qualitative research methods in human geography (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford Press.
Waitt, G., & Frazer, R. (2012). “The vibe” and “the glide”: Surfing through the voices of longboarders. Journal of Australian Studies, 36(3), 327–343.
Welch, R., & Wright, J. (2011). Tracing discourses of health and the body: Exploring pre-service primary teachers’ constructions of ‘healthy’ bodies. Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 39(3), 199–210.
Williams, S. (2006). Medical sociology and the biological body: Where are we now and where do we go from here? Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 10(1), 5–30.
Wright, J. (2003). Poststructural methodologies—The body, schooling and health. In J. Evans, B. Davies, & J. Wright (Eds.), Body knowledge and control: Studies in the sociology of physical education and health (pp. 34–59). London: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Informed consent
Formal ethical consent to conduct this project was gained from the affiliated University.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Taylor, N., Wright, J. & O’Flynn, G. HPE teachers’ negotiation of environmental health spaces: discursive positions, embodiment and materialism. Aust. Educ. Res. 43, 361–376 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-016-0205-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-016-0205-8