The health of Indigenous 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 presentation explores the experiences of youth who take health education as an optional senior high school 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 Indigenous Māori and Pacific students – this presentation explores how these students negotiate knowledge from health education lessons at the intersection of cultural knowledge, family expectations, gender, and ethnicity.

Drawing on postcolonial theory – via Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, ambivalence, liminal third space, and hybridity – it examines the role of schooling, and health education in particular, in reinforcing, challenging, and subverting Western knowledges. Employing Pacific epistemologies privilege the relational space of vā, which centre youth voices and ensures the project is “with” students rather than “on” students. 

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 project 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. 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.

Madison (2020) states that, “ethnographers are field researchers who enter and spend time within the groundwork of day-to-day, embodied actions, of a field site. The researcher is a participant observer or a performative witness within a sustained, body to body, environment” (p. 4). However, Thomas (1993) adds that critical ethnographies have a political purpose. I carried out my fieldwork within two secondary school sites in South Auckland area and spent two school terms, a total of 6 months in each school site. I purposefully chose South Auckland as it is an area that is home to Auckland’s largest Indigenous Māori and Pacific communities. It is also the community that I call home. The political purpose underpinning my critical ethnography focused on exploring broader understandings of students’ lived realities of health education. I employed a range of qualitative methods such as observations, research conversations (Fitzpatrick, 2013), visual methods, and social media interactions to engage with students, to go below surface appearances, and to question the status quo (Madison, 2012, 2020). Fitzpatrick (2013) tells us that “critical ethnographies of schooling are relatively rare compared with conventional ethnographic accounts” (p. 25), and critical ethnographies that focus on health and physical education are almost unheard of. Thus, this presentation contributes to the dearth of critical ethnographies within the area of health education.

The key findings of this project cover three areas, family/cultural expectations, the move towards diversity and inclusion; and creating the health(y) student. The expectations that parents hold for their children is a key aspect of these students’ daily realities. While contributing to their family is important, students experiences demonstrate how it is not an equal playing field for those students from lower socioeconomic families. They have more challenges that divide their time and thus can impede their focus on achievement. This is not to blame parents; I do not take a neoliberal stance here, but rather highlight the continued inequities and the possible consequences to students. Over the past 20 years, there has been a call for diversity in the workplace and throughout society. This call for diversity is in part due to the power of re-presentation and the belief that diversity of people will naturally foster a diversity of perspectives. However, my project has demonstrated that the inclusion of cultural and gender-diverse perspectives does not necessarily result in students valuing diversity. Thus, more work is needed in this area. Students at both school sites were invested in health education, could identify health issues that were important to their lives and contexts, and often wanted to participate in work that helped address these issues. However, school boundaries and rules made it difficult for students to address these issues that were important to them. Power relations were inherent in teacher and student interactions and worked to influence and produce particular student subjectivities and shape conduct. Thus, I question how student lead projects can provide students space to explore issues important to them when schools are bound by colonial histories, Westernised norms, and rules that reward particular behaviour and punish others.

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