Jan Wright

In recent years, interest in the therapeutic potential of yoga for people recovering from trauma has flourished. To date, much of this research on yoga for trauma adopts a quantitative methodology that positions yoga as a medicalised intervention to understand if yoga is ‘effective’ for trauma recovery for adults. This paper seeks to contribute to an emerging body of qualitative literature by drawing on the voices of eight Iyengar yoga teachers with experience teaching adult students with trauma. It reveals that the teachers do not hold themselves out to be specialists in trauma, nor do they rely on formulistic principles or knowing a person’s trauma narrative. Rather, they draw on the pedagogic skills they have developed more generally through their considerable experience of teaching yoga as an embodied practice to tailor their approach for their students. Of central interest is the way the teachers use their own bodies, particularly their sensory perceptions, to ‘read’ the bodies and emotional capacities of their students within each teaching session. The teachers also reflect on the way they use adjustments as part of their embodied pedagogic skills in nuanced ways that challenge the dominant no-touch discourse on teaching students with trauma. These pedagogic approaches offer important insights for movement teachers more generally, particularly those teaching vulnerable students.

There has been a recent surge in the popularity of school gardening programmes with different models claiming to address learning outcomes within the curriculum. For example, the ‘kitchen garden’ concept has had a rapid uptake across many Australian schools, promoted by both government curriculum support documents, and private organisations. Research points to the ‘use’ of school gardens as an initiative that predominantly draws on discourses of health, wellbeing and sustainability – sometimes together but also often quite separately. Despite the rapid uptake of gardening initiatives in schools, and the explicit mention of ‘gardening’ in State based variations of the Australian National Curriculum, we know very little about how school gardens are being conceptualised by Health and Physical Education (HPE) teachers as part of their teaching – either in primary or secondary contexts. This paper utilises data from a larger study which investigated how 24 generalist primary and secondary specialist HPE teachers talked about ‘environmental health’ within Health and Physical Education. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first it examines the range of discourses, that is, the different meanings and values, the teachers in the study associated with gardening as a practice expected of environmentally healthy citizens. Second, we draw on material and embodied knowledge to demonstrate how the very diverse ways the teachers talked about gardening, provide ‘conditions of possibility’ for thinking critically about gardening, and how school gardens might be positioned within the context of HPE.

This article explores the complicated place of sugar in the display of family connectedness and health in a white, middle class Australian family. In the context of heightened anxiety about childhood obesity, we present the Baker family as a case study to explore the pleasures and tensions that sugar consumption produces in families. On their birthdays, each child has a luxurious "Hammer Cake" coated in chocolate studded with sweets; simultaneously the family members have also been influenced by the documentary That Sugar Film and check the sugar contents on packages as they shop. We analyze how these pleasures and pressures are balanced: how anxieties about sugar are negotiated and managed in food practices and in the making of family through rituals of celebration. We argue that the concept of "contradictory pleasures," where certain foods are seen as "excess," but mobilized for celebration, offers a nuanced and valuable framework to illuminate simultaneously negative and positive attitudes toward certain foods in family food practices and how families navigate multiple influences on these practices, including popular culture and public health discourses.

At a time of increasing diversity in family forms and family practices the evening family meal is promoted as an imperative; a straightforward solution to complex social problems such as childhood obesity, family breakdown and depression. In this paper we discuss the challenges faced by families in achieving this imperative on an everyday basis drawing on visual data generated by children from a qualitative research project with 50 diverse families in Victoria, Australia. We demonstrate the complex and messy realities of everyday family food consumption which is shaped by social structures such as gender, work and care interacting with micro level elements such as food preferences and child agency. We argue the family meals imperative is a biopedagogy that should be decentred. We suggest that recognising and supporting diverse modes of family interaction and belonging beyond the shared table may be a more fruitful strategy for promoting public health.

This paper draws on a multi-method study with 50 families in Victoria, Australia. Primary school children were asked about food knowledge from school and whether they felt motivated to bring knowledge home. Generally, children and parents felt school food messages are unclear, contradictory and not relevant to them and this reduced the likelihood of messages coming home from school. We identify a critical difference in how families thought about healthy eating and food practices at home and the framework of school messages. Families focused on children’s eating in a pragmatic way, infused with nurturance as well as concern. We argue their practices can be viewed as a form of relational consumption (Lindsay and Maher 2013 Lindsay, J. , and J. Maher. 2013. Consuming Families: Buying, Making, Producing Family Life in the 21st Century. New York : Routledge. [Google Scholar] . Consuming Families: Buying, Making, Producing Family Life in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge.) where food is part of the everyday exchange of love and care. A disjunction exists between familial relational approaches and the regulatory framework of school food messages that impacts how messages move between these spaces. Attention to relational aspects of food consumption at school might allow for a more valuable exchange between family and schools that supports family endeavours to feed children well.

Despite the importance of interactions with natural environments for personal and social well-being, there is only limited evidence of the relationship between the environment and health as an idea or area of study in school education in Australia. Logically, the place for such a study, at least in Australia, would be within the Health & Physical Education (HPE) key learning area. However, in HPE, alternative ways of considering health beyond the dominant ‘healthism’ discourses which privilege physical activity, fitness, food and nutrition struggle for any kind of existence. Gruenewald (2004. A Foucauldian analysis of environmental education: Toward the socioecological challenge of the earth charter. Curriculum Inquiry, 34(1), 71–107) suggests looking to the margins of a field to see what knowledge is silenced or subjugated in order to open up new conditions of possibility. This challenged us to look beyond taken for granted ways of thinking about health to identify other resources, perhaps unrecognised as yet, that teachers might draw on to constitute their knowledge of health. To do this, we look to interview data collected when teachers were asked to talk about their personal experiences of the relationship between the environment and health. The analysis of the interviews demonstrated how the teachers conceptualised the relationship between the environment and health by drawing on embodied experiences and affective encounters with more-than-human nature. By theorising these encounters through a post-human, new-materialist lens, we demonstrate how their corporeal knowledge, developed through embodied experiences, has the potential to assist teachers in formulating less institutionalised health understandings. We argue that these encounters with more-than-human nature can serve as alternatives to those dominant healthism discourses that invoke problematic risk, fear and crisis responses.

There is currently considerable sociological research on women’s experiences in sport, the social construction of gender in women’s sport and inequalities between women and men. However, research is yet to examine how inequalities and gender construction occur in and through the hierarchies within women’s sports. Track and Field, with its differentiated events is a sport characterised by hierarchies, with Track events at the top and Field events at the bottom. Inherent in this differential valuing of the events is a hierarchy of bodily expressions of femininity. This article reports on a study which explored how fifteen elite female athletes in Track and Field negotiated the cultural and historical hierarchies between events, how these hierarchies shaped the women’s experiences and the ways they embodied gender. The study drew on Bourdieu's notion of the cultural ‘field’, and his concept of ‘symbolic violence’ [Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature, edited and introduced by Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press] to explore how the women negotiated the hierarchical structuring between events. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the athletes across the disciplines of running, jumping and throwing. Results demonstrate how the hierarchies between women’s events were structurally maintained through practices such as the privileging of bodies conforming to traditional norms of femininity; and how the women themselves were implicated in maintaining these hierarchies through their language, practices and gendered embodiment. Hierarchies within women’s Track and Field are likely to impact aspiring athletes and shape their understandings of themselves as athletes and young women. Making visible such processes presents possibilities for discussions around gender and power in coaching and school contexts.

Purpose: Health education still tends to be dominated by an approach designed to achieve individual behaviour change through the provision of knowledge to avoid risk. In contrast, a critical inquiry approach educates children and young people to develop their capacity to engage critically with knowledge, through reasoning, problem solving and challenging taken for granted assumptions, including the socially critical approach which investigates the impact of social and economic inequalities on, for example, health status and cultural understandings. The purpose of this paper is to explore the conditions of possibility for a socially critical approach to health education in schools. It examines the ways in which preservice health and physical education (HPE) teachers talked about their experiences of health education during their school-based practicum. Design/methodology/approach: In total, 13 preservice HPE teachers who were about to graduate with a Bachelor of Health and Physical Education from a university in New South Wales, Australia were interviewed for the study. Five group interviews and one individual interview were conducted. The interviews were coded for themes and interpreted drawing on a biopedagogical theoretical framework as a way of understanding the salience of particular forms of knowledge in health education, how these are promoted and with what effects for how living healthily is understood. Findings: The HPETE students talked with some certainty about the purpose of health education as a means to improve the health of young people – a certainty afforded by a medico-scientific view of health imbued with individualised, risk discourses. This purpose was seen as being achieved through using pedagogies, particularly those involving technology, that produced learning activities that were “engaging” and “relevant” for young people. Largely absent from their talk was evidence that they valued or practiced a socially critical approach to health education. Practical implications: This paper has practical implications for designing health education teacher programmes that are responsive to expectations that contemporary school health education curricula employ a critical inquiry approach. Originality/value: This paper addresses an empirical gap in the literature on the conditions of possibility for a socially critical approach to health education. It is proposed that rather than challenging HPE preservice teachers’ desires to improve the lives of young people, teacher educators need to work more explicitly within an educative approach that considers social contexts, health inequalities and the limitations of a behaviour change model.