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The purpose of this paper is to explore ways in which children and young people are being positioned as change agents for families through school health promotion initiatives in New Zealand.

The paper maps and describes the kinds of policies and initiatives that directly or indirectly regard children as conduits of healthy eating and exercise messages/practices for families. Drawing on post-structural theoretical frameworks, it explores what these resources suggest in terms of how healthy families should live.

Families are positioned as central to school health promotion initiatives in New Zealand, especially in relation to obesity prevention policies and strategies. Children are further positioned as agents of change for families in many of the resources/policies/initiatives reviewed. They are represented as key transmitters and translators of school-based health knowledge and as capable of, and responsible for, helping their families eat well and exercise more.

While recognising children’s agency and capacity to translate health messages is a powerful and welcome message at one level, the author need to consider the implications of requiring children to convey health information, to judge their family practices and, at times, to be expected to change these. This may create anxiety, family division and expect too much of children.

The paper takes a novel post-structural perspective on a familiar health promotion issue. Given the proliferation of family-focussed health initiatives in New Zealand and elsewhere, this perspective may help us to explore, critique and understand more fully how children are expected to be engaged in these initiatives, and the potentially harmful implications of these expectations.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, Health Education is socio-critical in orientation and is offered as a subject that can offer credits towards the national secondary school qualification. The purpose of this paper is to explore the learning experiences of people who studied Health Education to the final level of secondary schooling in Aotearoa New Zealand. The authors focus specifically on how the subject is taught; or the pedagogical practices that are “put to work” in the Health Education learning environment.

Using in-depth interviews as the authors’ method of data production, they experiment with a post-qualitative approach to analysis while traversing the theoretical terrain of new materialism. In doing so, they explicate the non-human and human elements that are arranged in a pedagogical assemblage – and explore what these elements can do.

The authors found that an array of pedagogical practices were put to work in the senior secondary school Health Education classroom: Student-centred approaches, a non-judgemental and energetic tone to teaching, deployment of human and non-human resources, and students connecting with the community. The authors argue that these practices open up possibilities for a critical Health Education.

This research addresses an empirical gap in the literature by focusing on Health Education in the senior secondary levels of schooling. The findings in this paper may provide readers who are Health Education teachers with ideas that could be of material use to them in their teaching practice. In terms of implications for researchers, the authors demonstrate how putting “new” theory and methodological approaches to work in the area of school-based Health Education can produce novel ways of thinking about the subject and what it can do.

The shifting nature of the pedagogical assemblage can ignite new ways of thinking about teaching practice in the Health Education classroom and the capacities that result for learners. In combination with a post-qualitative approach to analysis, the paper provides a novel approach to exploring Health Education.

This chapter adopts a reflective approach exploring and setting out the contrasting factors that led to the establishment of the subdiscipline in both countries. The factors included the role of key individuals and their respective academic backgrounds and specialisations within each country’s higher education system. Furthermore, attention is given to the particular circumstances in a case analysis comparison of the oldest programs in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia. This sheds light upon the factors linked to the disproportionate success profile for the sociology of sport in Aotearoa/New Zealand. An analysis of scholars and programs within each country reveals important differences aligned with the politics of funding and the variety and extent of systematic structures. Additionally, scholars’ specialisations and preferences reveal a broad offering but are primarily linked to globalisation, gender relations, indigeneity and race relations, social policy, and media studies. This work has been undertaken variously via the critical tradition including Birmingham School cultural studies, ethnographic and qualitative approaches and, more recently by some, a postmodern poststructuralist trend. Lastly, along with a brief discussion of current issues, future challenges are set out.