Reconceiving barriers for democratic health education in Danish schools: an analysis of institutional rationales

ABSTRACT

Health promotion and education researchers and practitioners advocate for more democratic approaches to school-based health education, including participatory teaching methods and the promotion of a broad and positive concept of health and health knowledge, including aspects of the German educational concept of bildung. Although Denmark, from where the data of this article are derived, has instituted policies for such approaches, their implementation in practice faces challenges. Adopting a symbolic interactionist analytical framework this paper explores and defines two powerful institutional rationales connected to formal and informal social processes and institutional purposes of schools, namely conservatism and Neoliberalism. It is empirically described and argued how these institutional rationales discourage teachers and students from including a broad and positive concept of health, the element of participation, and the promotion of general knowledge as legitimate elements in health education. This paper thus contains a perspective on health education practice, which, in a new way, contributes to explain the relatively slow progress of democratic approaches to school health education.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutional rationales
• school
• democratic health education
• students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dina Danielsen, Ph.D., is a postdoc at Steno Diabetes Center, Denmark. Her main fields of research are childhood sociology, sociology of the body and health promotion research. Dina has a special interest in young people’s everyday lives, practices and meaning making in institutional contexts.

Maria Bruselius-Jensen, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at Center for Youth Research at Aalborg University, Denmark. Maria is a childhood and youth sociologist primarily doing research in the fields of health education and civic participation. She has a special interest in participatory research.

Daniel Laitsch, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Dan’s research interests include the use and misuse of research in teaching, policy-making, and issue advocacy and comprehensive school health approaches to systemic education reform.