For nearly two decades now New Zealand has been promoting socially critical perspectives and in particular a critical pedagogy as part of their school HPE curriculum. Socially critical perspectives that embrace the principles of social justice and diversity have been evident in New Zealand HPE school curriculum documents since the late 1990s (Ministry of Education, 2007). The HPE curriculum in New Zealand has a clear emphasis on health promotion (McCuaig, Quennerstedt & Macdonald, 2013) and is unique in the world in that it aims to embrace the indigenous ‘Māori’ people’s perspectives about total wellbeing in school HPE. The Māori notion of health is expressed using the concept of ’hauora’, which is the adoption of a Māori concept encompassing physical, mental, social and spiritual health, as well as the well-being of one’s family and community (Durie, 2004). Advocacy for critical pedagogy in New Zealand physical education teacher education and HPE has since enjoyed a strong following (Culpan & Bruce, 2007). A wealth of research has been published examining the opportunities and constraints of this teaching approach (e.g. Fitzpatrick, 2014; Philpot 2015), although most of this research has been placed in PETE rather than seeking to understand how critical pedagogy is enacted in schools. At the time when critical HPE school curriculums were introduced in both New Zealand and Australia, MacDonald and Kirk (1999) claimed that physical education teacher educators had a duty to prepare HPE teachers for the challenge of teaching HPE from a socially-critical perspective. How HPE school teachers’ have adopted these initiatives has since become a regular topic of concern among professionals working in this field. Our own research of students who have graduated from the UOA Bachelor of Physical Education programme suggests that while graduates claim that socially-critical pedagogies that privilege equity and social justice have impacted on their practice, they struggle to articulate how they themselves teach for social justice (Gerdin, Philpot, Smith, 2016). In addition, for some teachers critical pedagogy is viewed as an approach to teaching health education more so than activity based physical education (McIntyre, Philpot, & Smith, 2016). In this paper, key members from New Zealand involved in the EDUHEALTH project will elaborate on the New Zealand context and discuss and problematise practices in PETE which endeavor to instill a critical perspective in PETE graduates.

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