Competing obesity discourses and critical challenges for health and physical educators

Abstract

Health and physical education teachers have become subject to epistemological and ethical tensions associated with competing obesity and physical activity discourses. The dominating obesity discourse, underpinned by truth claims from science, encourages educators to pathologise fatness, treat exercise as a medicine and survey student activity levels. A reverse obesity discourse, however, argues that obesity concerns are socially constructed in response to a moral panic surrounding youth lifestyles and these concerns are, of themselves, harmful for health. Educators, accordingly, are drawn in different directions with respect to how to manage their governance role of student bodies and the dissemination of health and physical activity knowledge. In this paper, we discuss this dilemma and draw from Foucauldian and Derridian theorising to offer one potential educational strategy. This strategy rests on the idea that knowledge is not fixed but fluid and, therefore, critical education is less about the transmission of knowledge and more about equipping students with skills so that they can critically engage with uncertainty and negotiate the complexities of social life.

Keywords:

• Obesity
• Physical education
• Health education
• Critical pedagogy
• Socio-critical curriculum
• Foucauldian theorising

Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of this paper was first presented to the PENZ national conference 2009 (6–8 July, Tauranga, NZ). We would like to thank Pirkko Markula and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions in writing this paper.