Healthy, happy and ready to teach, or why kids can’t learn from fat teachers: the discursive politics of school reform and teacher health

Abstract

The idea of using schools for public health ends has a long and complex history. If anything, interest in the public health role of schools may actually be intensifying, perhaps driven by the attention given to a range of health matters affecting young people, notably mental illness, drugs and alcohol, and obesity. This paper deals predominantly with obesity but emerges out of our ongoing research into both the nature and consequences of policies and interventions that seek to use American public schools to prosecute public health goals. In particular, our focus is on the kinds of school-based interventions that widespread panic about childhood obesity has generated and their consequences for teachers. We take up this matter by examining how American teachers’ health – and the associated responsibilities and obligations to inspire health among young people – are discursively constructed in legislation, policy documents, and academic articles. Our review and analysis of these texts reveal the presence of three distinct discursive formations: teachers as health role models, teachers as fiscal liabilities, and teachers as instruments of policy compliance. These formations, we argue, suggest a novel and, in some cases, alarming trajectory in school-based obesity policies and interventions.

Keywords:

• teachers
• school
• public policy

Notes

1. It is important to stress that we do not deny that material health problems exist for individuals and collectives and that structural inequalities inform access to and distribution of programs and resources that influence individual health trajectories. Following Kelly and Colquhoun (2003), what interests us here though is the manner in which these health states are articulated, discursively legitimated and regulated. Our ultimate aim is to stimulate thought and discussion about the multiple ways in which teacher subjectivities are implicated in contemporary health injunctions.