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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Public health authorities have long regarded schools as important sites for improving children and young people’s health. In Australia, and elsewhere, lessons on health have been an integral component of public health’s strategy mix. Historical accounts of schools’ involvement in public health lack discussion of the role of health education curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to redress this silence and illustrate the ways health education functioned as a key governmental apparatus in Victoria in the 1980s.

The paper draws on governmentality studies to consider the explicit governmental role of official health education curriculum in the 1980s in Victoria, Australia. The authors conduct a discourse analysis of the three official curriculum texts that were released during this period to consider the main governmental rationalities and techniques that were assembled together by curriculum writers.

School health education functions as a key governmental apparatus of governmentality. One of its major functions is to provide opportunities to responsibilise young people with an aim to ensure that that they can perform their duty to be well. The authors demonstrate the central role of policy events in the 1970s and how they contributed to conditions of possibility that shaped versions of health education throughout the 1980s and beyond. Despite challenges posed by the critical turn in health education in the late 1980s, the governmental forces that shape health education are strong and have remained difficult to displace.

Many public health and schooling histories fail to take into account insights from the history of education and curriculum studies. The authors argue that in order to grasp the complexities of school health education, we need to consider insights afforded by curriculum histories. Historical insights can provide us with an understanding of the changing approaches to governing health in schools.

Looked after children (LAC) are criminalised at five times the rate of children in the general population. Children in contact with both child welfare and child justice systems have higher rates of neurodisability and substance use problems, and LAC in general have high rates of school exclusion, homelessness and unemployment. This study aims to understand whether these factors persist in LAC who are in prison as adults.

Administrative data collected by the Do-IT profiler screening tool in a prison in Wales, UK, were analysed to compare sentenced prisoners who were LAC (n = 631) to sentenced prisoners who were not LAC (n = 2,201). The sample comprised all prisoners who were screened on entry to prison in a two-year period.

Prisoners who were LAC scored more poorly on a functional screener for neurodisability (effect size = 0.24), and on four self-report measures capturing traits of dyslexia (0.22), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (0.40), autism spectrum disorders (0.34) and developmental co-ordination disorder (0.33). Prisoners who were LAC were more likely to have been to a pupil referral unit (0.24), have substance use problems (0.16), be homeless or marginally housed (0.18) and be unemployed or unable to work due to disability (0.13).

This study uniquely contributes to our understanding of prisoners who were LAC as a target group for intervention and support with re-integration into the community upon release. LAC in prison as adults may require additional interventions to help with employment, housing and substance use. Education programmes in prison should screen for neurodisability, to develop strategies to support engagement.

The focus of this paper is to centre the lived experiences and perceptions of western education held by Aboriginal people who lived at Moola Bulla Native Cattle Station (Moola Bulla) in Western Australia, between 1910 and 1955. Of interest is an investigation into how government legislations and policies influenced these experiences and perceptions. The purpose of this paper is to promote the powerful narrative that simultaneously acknowledges injustice and honours Aboriginal agency.

The research from which this paper is drawn moves away from colonial, paternalistic and racist interpretations of history; it is designed to decolonise the narrative of Aboriginal education in remote Western Australia. The research uses the wide and deep angle lens of qualitative historical research, filtered by decolonising methodologies and standpoint theory. Simultaneously, the paper valorises the contributions Indigenous academics are making to the decolonisation of historical research.

Preliminary findings suggest the narrative told by the residents who were educated at Moola Bulla support a reframing of previous deficit misrepresentations of indigeneity into strength-based narratives. These narratives, or “counter stories”, articulate resistance to colonial master narratives.

This paper argues that listening to Aboriginal lived experiences and perceptions of western education from the past will better inform our engagement with the delivery of equitable educational opportunities for Aboriginal students in remote contexts in the future.

This paper will contribute to the wider academic community by addressing accountability in Aboriginal education. Most important to the study is the honouring of the participants and families of those who once lived on Moola Bulla, many who are speaking back through the telling of their story.

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.

State and national initiatives place an increased emphasis on both students’ exposure to diverse texts and teachers’ integration of English/language arts and history/social studies. The intent is for students to critically examine diverse accounts and perspectives of the same historical event or era. Critical examination can be accomplished through teachers’ purposeful juxtaposition of age-appropriate, engaging trade books and relevant informational texts, such as primary source materials. To guide interested elementary and middle level teachers, researchers can evaluate trade books for historical representation and suggest divergent or competing narratives that compel students to scrutinize diverse perspectives. Researchers can locate germane primary sources and modify them in ways that maintain their historicity. As students read, they scrutinize, contextualize, and corroborate sources, which enables them to actively construct historical understandings. We examined children’s literature centered on child labor. We juxtaposed trade books targeting elementary students with those intended for middle level students. While our findings revealed various forms of historical misrepresentation, child labor trade books appear far more historically representative than those centered on slavery.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what are necessary conditions for learning the concept ABA form, a concept for analysing and composing music, and to discuss how the use of variation theory can contribute to the field of music education research.

The method used is a form of lesson study, but with only one participating teacher. Three cycles are conducted with three small groups of children, aged eight to nine years old.

The main findings are that the learning of ABA form requires first, awareness of the sequential form of the music, second, that the attitude to differences that appear between sequential parts of the music is consciously being re-direct from seen as “failures” to being interesting musical contrasts and third, that attention is being paid to different features within one musical aspect, that sounds (not only looks) different. It is found that a main contribution of applying variation theory to studies in the domain of music is the consideration of a part-whole relationship. When the teacher helps the children to create contrast and at the same time keeps focus on how it sounds, the children succeed in coming up with a composition in ABA form. To address the simultaneous relationship between acting and seeing, that is musical impressions and expressions, is crucial for learning.

This study is pioneering since music teaching is studied with the point of departure in an intended object of learning.