In our neoliberal and ‘tech-savvy’ society, a growing number of technologies are currently available among young people to learn about their health (eg. websites, online forums, apps, social media, wearable devices, etc.). These digital health technologies are instructive and could be conceived as form ‘public pedagogy’ (Rich & Miah, 2014) in which learning occurs beyond formal schooling. For example, Maturo and Moretti (2018) have shown how several apps in the realm of diets, promote sexualized ideas of the female ‘healthy’ body through avatars and gamification. Fitness content on social media, such as Instagram, also acts as a powerful pedagogy for young women, instructing them that continuous work on the body is associated with performing feminine subjectivities which are confident, happy and powerful (Camacho-Miñano, MacIsaac, & Rich, 2019). The use of other digital health technologies is even supported by schools, for example self-tracking devices, through which young people collect and track data about their health data and behaviours. Rich (2018) explained how these self-tracking technologies promote not only the monitoring but also the surveillance of student’s bodies, producing digital pedagogies through which the new imperative of continuous self-optimisation circulates.

The powerful nature of these technologies raises important questions for those who have a more formal responsibility to help young people form and negotiate knowledge around health and the body, such as physical education (PE) teachers. A key principle that underpins our DigHealthPE Project is the belief that PE teachers could (and should) adopt a more relevant role to help young people to navigate the vast amount of health-related knowledge, practices and power relations that are pervasive in the growing area of digital technologies about healthy lifestyles.

DigiHealthPE is a UNA Europe seed funding research project that aims to address the gap of how to best ‘equip’ PE teachers to support young people as they navigate this complex space. It involves the collaborative research effort of six researchers from five European Universities: Helsinki (Finland), Bolognia (Italy), Bath, (UK) Edinburgh (UK), and Complutense of Madrid (Spain). Specifically, DigiHealthPE project aims to explore and pilot strategies co-created with PE teachers to promote a critical understanding and use of digital health technologies for healthy lifestyles among young people. This video will be focused specifically on the design and development of the training workshops for teachers, and the challenges and opportunities that our theoretical framework presents.

Specifically, our project is informed by new materialism theory, which encourages us to think of technologies for health, not simply as physical things, but as part of a relational network where individual, social and cultural human and non-human entities interact, creating affective forces and embodied experiences. New materialism facilitates a critical perspective, highlighting dominant forces at play, and uncovering opportunities for disruption and alternative relations and affects. Therefore, we propose critical digital health pedagogies as a relevant way to consider the social, ethical and political production of health knowledge through digital technologies, which is complex, multiple and also embedded in issues of power and inequality. Through a new materialism lens, we are also encouraged to move beyond binary categories such as human/non human, mind/body to expand the range of critical possibilities in a way that recognize the agential capacities of the ‘assemblage learner-digital health technology’, the affective forces and the relational dimensions.

The project combines various research methods and phases to develop participatory methodologies for including PE teachers as co-creators of meaningful learning experiences for young people about digital health technologies. A multiple case design approach is being adopted to develop and evaluate the training workshops in two countries (Spain and UK) with different groups of pre-service and in-service PE teachers. In coherence with a new materialism approach, the workshops are following an adaptive, flexible and creative approach to adapt the project to the specific teaching contexts and the continuous changes in our universities and schools due to the pandemic. A set of pedagogical principles were established to guide the design of our training workshops, one that considers teachers and the digital health technologies as ‘assemblages’ in which both are co-implicated in affective process of learning about the body and health; the focus on possibilities instead of results through diffractive thinking; and movement as the keyway to mobilise critical thinking through affects. We will include diverse and innovative data collection methods such as those generated through the workshops (e.g. artifacts analysis, group discussions) combined with digital ethnographic approaches.

Our video will illustrate the workshop design focusing on the specific opportunities and challenges that new materialism theory provides. For example, it will show the story of a young person using a range of digital health technologies for healthy lifestyles to illustrate the broad range of agents, relations and affective forces embedded in the learning processes using digital health technologies. We will then focus on the development of the training workshops and demonstrate how they were designed and how we are developing them coherently with this theory. Our research expects to provide teachers with innovative, creative, and new ways of thinking about digital health technologies, acknowledging the way in which students and the digital are ‘co-implicated’ in affective process of learning about the body and health (Rich, Lewis, & Miah 2020). In the debate we will present the future direction and intended goals of our project as we are moving towards a broader European collaboration.

Camacho-Miñano, M. J., MacIsaac, S., & Rich, E. (2019). Postfeminist biopedagogies of Instagram: young women learning about bodies, health and fitness. Sport, Education and Society, 24(6), 651-664. doi:10.1080/13573322.2019.1613975 Maturo, A., & Moretti, V. (2018). Digital Health and the Gamification of Life: How Apps Can Promote a Positive Medicalization. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Rich, E. (2018). Gender, health and physical activity in the digital age: between postfeminism and pedagogical possibilities. Sport, Education and Society, 23(8), 736-747. doi:10.1080/13573322.2018.1497593 Rich, E., & Miah, A. (2014). Understanding Digital Health as Public Pedagogy: A Critical Framework. Societies, 4(2), 296-315. doi:10.3390/soc4020296