Producing the well and skilled body: a critical discourse analysis of health and physical education curriculum policy in Aotearoa New Zealand

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ABSTRACT Background Aotearoa New Zealand is about to embark on a re-write of the official, national, health and physical education curriculum for all primary and secondary schools. This is a significant moment in policy history as the previous most recent curriculum updates occurred in 1999 [Ministry of Education. 1999. Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum] and 2007 [Ministry of Education. 2007. The New Zealand Curriculum]. In the latter rewrite, health and physical education was combined with all other learning areas into one policy document called The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC). In light of this imminent shift, we have undertaken a discourse analysis of the current 2007 health and physical education curriculum in order to gain insight into what driving concerns, discourses and pedagogical imperatives were privileged in that document, how we might understand those within their related social and political contexts, and what insights such an analysis might offer this moment of curriculum review. Purpose The purpose of this article is to examine how the dominant discourses of health and physical education curriculum policy in Aotearoa New Zealand construct particular ‘problems’ of the body and young people related to health, physical ability and schooling. To date, no one has undertaken such an analysis of current Aotearoa New Zealand policy in health and physical education. Methodology and analyses Based on Foucauldian concepts of discourse, knowledge/power, and problematisation, we combined Norman Fairclough’s textually oriented discourse analysis and Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ approach to analyse the health and physical education sections of The New Zealand Curriculum. Our analyses involved both a focus on lexical choice – in order to analyse the curriculum policy as text – and critical discourse analysis – to analyse the curriculum policy as discourse. While many commentators (including some of the authors of this article) have lauded the curriculum policy for its socio-cultural orientation, the results of this analysis suggest that Aotearoa New Zealand health and physical education curriculum policy is actually dominated by an orientation to enhance young people’s wellbeing, and surprisingly, this is communicated in the text as directly connected to the production of skilled body. We seek to understand this finding in the context of the positioning of the curriculum policy, as outcomes-focused curriculum policy, and neoliberal discourse. Conclusions The health and physical education sections of The New Zealand Curriculum (MOE 2007) problematises the non-skilled bodies of students and position the development of ‘skilled body’ as a key technique to enhance individual wellbeing. In this context, the emphasis on skills reinforces the notions of success and failure, worthiness and unworthiness. We argued that the writers of the next iteration of the health and physical education curriculum will need to be cognisant of how skills and bodies may be positioned through text, what students should understand, know and do, as well as the dominant ideologies and discourses that shape key concepts. Researchers and policymakers will need to critically examine the complex social, cultural and political contexts that work in this particular policyscape.