Reading curriculum as cultural practice: interrogating colonialism and whiteness in Ontario’s Health and Physical Education curriculum

Abstract

ABSTRACT Background This paper highlights the cultural construction of health in Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum. Using Kanu’s approach to reading the curriculum as cultural practice, I interrogate how the construction of ‘healthy lifestyle’ in particular is positioned within government policy. In this way, diverse cultural understandings of health are foregrounded to consider how race, ethnicity and culture are central to health and lifestyle, regardless of their visibility in state-sanctioned policy in the area of HPE. Theoretical Framework and Methods Using a postcolonial lens I identify and follow how non-dominant cultural practices are referenced within HPE curriculum to expose how diverse cultural meanings of health remain on the periphery and when included in policy perpetuate stereotypical notions of race and ethnicity. The HPE curriculum from Ontario, Canada, serves as a site to identify and interrogate the textual and discursive representations of culture, ethnicity and race. Text within the secondary school curriculum (grades 9–12) was submitted to a detailed text and discourse analysis. Identifying how, when and where cultural references to health arise within the text is followed by an analysis interrogating the power relations used in constituting Eurocentric views and practices of healthy lifestyles. Findings The paper identifies two key areas within the HPE curriculum where references to culture, ethnicity and race present themselves in the document: first, in relation to English Language Learners and their embodied responses to cultural environments; and second, in pedagogical examples, called Teaching Prompts and Student Reply. In both areas, reading the curriculum as cultural practice brought into view how efforts to recognize difference are recuperated into dominant, normative Eurocentric approaches to wellbeing, sport and physical activity. Conclusion Reading the curriculum as cultural practice illustrates how colonial knowledge systems are the foundation for what becomes recognizable in HPE curriculum. What some might see as seemingly benign ideas, practices, activities, games and sport are indeed educative practices that mark bodies and prioritize knowledge systems, and in some cases, perpetuate ethnic and racial stereotypes.