Producing, Reinforcing, and Resisting the Health(y) Education Student: A Critical Ethnography of Health Education in South Auckland Schools

Abstract

The health of Māori and Pacific populations in Aotearoa New Zealand dominates a raft of health research and news media reporting. With the prominent focus on health and healthy behaviour, schools have become places charged with the task of influencing and monitoring student behaviours. Health education classes contribute to this process by educating students for and about health across a range of topics from healthy eating, to alcohol and drug use, pregnancy, gender and sexuality, and relationships. This thesis explores the experiences of youth who take health education as an optional senior high school (NCEA) subject in the last 2 years of secondary school. Based on a critical ethnography of two schools in South Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand – both of which have high numbers of Māori and Pacific students – this study focuses on how these students negotiate knowledge from health education lessons at the intersection of cultural knowledge, family expectations, gender, and ethnicity. This thesis draws on postcolonial theory – via Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, ambivalence, liminal third space, and hybridity – to examine the role of schooling, and health education in particular, in reinforcing, challenging, and subverting Western knowledges. The project is underpinned by Pacific epistemologies that privilege the relational space of vā, and which centre youth voices. Employing Pacific epistemologies ensures the project is “with” students rather than “on” students. With this in mind, I adopted Pulotu-Endemann’s pan-Pacific Fonofale model as an analytical framework and structured the thesis around the Tongan creative artifact of ngatu (painted tapa/barkcloth). Employing critical ethnography as my methodology, I engaged observation, research conversations, visual methods, and social media interactions to construct students’ experiences of health and health education over 6 months across the two school sites. The resulting materials were understood via postcolonial theory and also in relation to Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity. As a result, the thesis examines how both technologies of government (Foucault) and the heterosexual matrix (Butler) are enacted in health education classrooms. I argue that these interactions attempt to produce health(y), heterosexual students. My analyses of South Auckland students’ lived experiences highlighted the ongoing tensions and complexity of postcolonial sites, and the implications for schooling and health. I argue that health education is a contentious and ambivalent space for students. It is a space where they are asked to be critical and examine power – by challenging, for example, gender and sexuality norms – however, these same students are also restricted by how schools govern their engagement with health education, cultural norms and expectations, and broader socioeconomic divides. Throughout this thesis, I argue that power relations between the centre of Western colonial knowledge and the margins of the Other are continually made and remade, not only by those at the centre but also by those on the margins. In addition, students are continually negotiating moments and movements of power within multiple spaces, as teachers, parents, and peers attempt to shape them into 21st-century students who are health(y), responsible, contributing members of society.