Discourses about health, obesity crisis and well-being, at a time where the Covid-19 pandemic and the global health emergency traumatized social life and ignited unprecedented, conceivably irrevocable educational transformations, become more prevalent than ever. Notwithstanding the indubitable grounds for concern regarding the expansion of obesity crisis and the need for enhancement of well-being, the lack of a wider consensus about the conceptualisation of either term (McLeod & Wright, 2015), along with their normalizing and regulatory agendas, cannot be disregarded.

In Greece during 2012-2016 a well-being programme was initiated in all schools. The programme, called “EuZein” (Well-being in ancient Greek), comprised the assessment of students' somatic status, the estimation of obesity and overweight percentages amongst them and the promotion of Physical Activity (PA) and healthy dietary conducts. It was a joint project of the Greek Ministry of Education and a University, co-funded by major multinational companies, requiring the involvement of Physical Education (PE) teachers in body measurements and the promotion of PA and healthy diets.

The implementation of EuZein, coinciding with the upheaval of the Greek debt crisis, continued uninterrupted for five years transcending the politico-ideological differences of the governments that emerged in the three successive elections of that period; indicating, thus, the influence of supranational networks and international organisations that shape national educational policies nowadays, through the dissemination of ideas, principles, practices and wider discourses (Ball, 2012).

This paper uses the concepts of Pedagogic Device (PD) (Bernstein, 2000) and Corporeal Device (CD) (Evans and Davies, 2004), which -by the addition of the biological factor- extends the potential of PD, in revealingl the grammatic and syntactic rules of pedagogic communication and its regulative nature, in order to explore the interweaving of the discourses of obesity crisis, well-being and sanitized bodies (Foucault, 1976, 2004) with the globally predominant neo-liberal policies and practices for performativity, assessment and learning outcomes and their impact on Greek PE field. It ventures to reveal how these discourses -expressed in official, scientific and popular texts, like the European Union (EU) or the World Health Organization reports, articles in Journals and uninterpreted statistical data or pseudo-scientific claims, in press and social media- affect the field of PE and to identify the general ordering & disordering principles through which they are translated into systems of pedagogic communication (Bernstein, 2000) and shape PE professionals’ subjectivities.

Focusing on EuZein's implementation, we investigate how global discourses and national policies about obesity, well-being and PA translate into technologies of power and practices of the self (Foucault, 1988), (re)shaping the discipline of PE and PE teachers’ subjectivities. We claim that in the PE context, constructed by discourses of healthy-ism, where health is interpreted as an issue of individual responsibility and care (Tinning, 2014) and well-being is reduced to body's shape and weight (Leow et al, 2014), certain notions of the body are privileged; specific characteristics, orientations and emphases of the discipline of PE are promoted and specific technologies of the self are made available not, simply, to endow subjects with aptitudes but to modify their mode of being (Gordon,2009).

Through a productive dialogue of Bernstein’s and Foucault’s theories, we link the micro-level of school implementation of well-being and anti-obesity initiatives to the meso-level of educational programmes aiming to enhance well-being, eliminate obesity and promote individual health, and the macro-level of (trans)national policies on and discourses of obesity crisis, well-being and helthy-ism.

We highlight EuZein as a case study of reform initiatives, which, although, theoretically aim at institutions, by inscribing their values into indivuduals’ bodies, in reality, render them into subjects of change (Ball, 2008), inducing a specific form of subjectivity that we describe as agile.

Our methodology draws from Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse the fundamental notion of PD (Bernstein, 2000) and Evans’ (2009) deriving notion of CD. The latter elucidates the embodied nature of educational communication by drawing attention to the bio-genetic dimensions of corporeality and to the lived, organic body, which is more than a simple discoursive construction for the transmission of educational messages (Evans et al, 2009). We, also, use Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self to explore external inflictions or self-imposition of practices, modes of life and self-regulation of behaviours, aiming at constituting the subject (Foucault, 1988). We apply discourse analysis to study the official texts (Ministerial decrees, official texts, educational materials etc.), which we consider as spacess establishing and articulating discourses (Peters, 2009), and process the data collected by a series of semi-structured interviews with agents of the whole spectrum of this programme. We seek to identify the organizational principles, priorities and truth claims able to create concrete, tangible effects on the constitution of subjectivities (Peters, 2009) and to track the inter-temporal physical portraying of discourses via a terminology referring directly to the body (docile, flexible, agile etc.) that emanates from policies, which aim simultaneously to mentalities and bodily acceptance that create a somatic habit (Foucault, 1975). By identifying the shifts in pedagogic and corporeal discourses (Bernstein, 2000, Kirk, 2009), we highlight the transformations of pedagogic discourse and practices of PE. These transformations entail a shift from docile bodies, disciplined by bureaucratised educational systems (Foucault, 1993, Kirk, 2004) and strongly classified Curricula, to agile bodies (Gillies, 2010), bolstered by open and performative Curricula. By identifying the technologies of power, the practices of the self and the tactics, which individuals activate in order to make sense of the messages transmitted -becoming, thus, subjects with specific orientations in the field of P.E-, we illuminate the re-positioning both of the discipline and the field’s agents. We investigate the ways in which the discourses of obesity crisis, well-being and healthy-ism and their deriving body policies invade schools, as complementary to the PE curriculum initiatives and external interventions with predesigned, imposed activities and assessment packages. We research how these initiatives intensify the demands for self-governing and control of bodily potentials in the construction of subjectivities in a context of agility (Shibata, 2018), which transcends the need for differentiated boundaries, limits and demarcation characterizing the construction of identities in the context of flexibility (Diaz, 2009).

The paper contributes to the debate about global health and well-being discourses and education policies, which promote educational and social outcomes such as healthy populations and “active” individuals (Foucault, 2004, Evans & Davies, 2004) and the subjects they construct. Our studying of EuZein’s initiative, which follows the pattern of projects like “Eat Well Be Active" -implemented in Queensland during 2005-2008 (Leow et al, 2014)- or the “Let’s Move” -an initiative of Obama’s administration during 2010-2016 (Jette et al, 2016)-, highlights the strenuous demands placed on schools to embrace privatized educational services and predesigned specialized solutions for issues like well-being igniting, thus, the transformation of PE -and consequently school- to a commodity (Sperka et al, 2018). It unveils the interweaving of neo-liberal discourses of performativity, perfection modes (Evans et al, 2009), new power technologies and practices of the self and traces the shifts creating new subjectivity spaces for PE teachers, by identifying the new individualistic emphases that shape new knowledges and educational policies nationally and globally (Ozga, 2012). Examination of EuZein’s policy texts reveals a bio-pedagogy trying to enforce a normalized body, to regulate populations’ lives through the regulation of the individual body (Donzelot, 2005). It evidences that activities complementary to curricula result in new conceptualisations of PE, render necessary the professional development of PE teachers and contribute to the decentering of their professional identities and subjectivities (Leow et al, 2014). Additionally, the analysis of data collected through our interviews furthers our exploration of the notion of agility showing how it transcends the tensions and conflicts about the technologies of power and the forms of control, inherent in the notion of flexibility, by transforming them to technologies of the self (Shibata, 2018) that the individuals adopt as a response to the new demands and rudiments imposed on the PE field.

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