In this paper, we trace the enactment of Home Economics and Health Education (HE/HE) curricula as narrated in the life histories of Greek-Cypriot primary teachers across six cohorts that correspond to different periods of recent history in Cyprus (late 1950s-2010s), to explore it as emerging amidst sociopolitical and historicized contexts, where both constancy and change are possible.  By tracing changes and constants, we highlight how this subject-area has been simultaneously connected to an institutional context as well as broader sociopolitical and economic conditions, which remained constant in envisioning particular types of (elementary) schooling and of teachers as professionals, although of changing modalities.

In its local reiterations and in connection to broader institutional contexts, HE/HE relates to how the spread of mandatory public schooling -- through which curricula were mobilized as a mechanism of modernist governance of populations by nation-states, especially in urban centres -- have been entangled with public health policies (e.g. Ball, 2013) and gendered constructions of the teaching profession (e.g. Llewellyn, 2012). In such contexts of administration and governance, ‘curriculum’ has largely been conceptualized as institutionalized text.  These constitute what Doyle names ‘programmatic curriculum’, locating it between its ‘societal’, and ‘classroom/instructional’ representations of curriculum (1992a; 1992b) or between Deng, Gopinathan and Lee’s (2013) ‘policy’ and ‘classroom curriculum making’ because it ‘translates the ideals and expectations embodied in the policy curriculum into programmes, school subjects, and curricular frameworks’ (p. 7). 

‘Home Economics’ and ‘Life/Health Education’ have long both been part of the programmatic curriculum in Greek-Cypriot education, as labels used in official policy, curriculum texts, and timetables denoting a specific subject-area (Persianis & Polyviou, 1992). However, the shift in terminology from the former to the latter during the most recent educational reform (which included a curriculum review, evaluation and restructuring in 2010/2015), along with the expansion of the timetables from the last two grades to all grades of public elementary schooling, was designed to mark a shift in its content and approach (Ioannou et el., 2015). Life/Health Education became a subject-area where citizenship content was largely relocated and which gradually, in the context of this most recent educational reform, became the primary curricular space for constructing the ideal citizen, embodied in the notion of the ‘democratic socially responsible citizen’. Construing the concepts of ‘citizenship’ and ‘health’ as inextricably linked, the official texts were found to gravitate towards notions of health, safety, and responsibility, marking a shift from national/ethnocentric (as social or political contents of) citizenship. This was a culmination of sedimented health discourses (intersecting with European and Intercultural Education discourses), infusing relevant curriculum documents over the preceding forty years and enabling the formation of a particular type of ideal citizen: an individual responsible over personal health, work, and consumption, hence also contributing to local and/or supranational labour markets (Philippou & Theodorou, 2018; 2019).

It is the enactment of this programmatic curriculum in classrooms that we sought to trace by focusing, in teachers’ life histories, on their narrations of everyday practices in schools and classrooms during their career overall but also in subject-areas, including HE/HE. In this paper, we illustrate how the school curriculum, through and as pertaining to HE/HE, remained distinct, centrally prescribed and recognizable over the last 60 years, although of changing narrated enactments, marking shifting teacher professionalisms and conceptions of elementary schooling.

The paper combines data from two studies that draw on biographical research and life history interviewing to develop a history ‘from below’ of teacher professionalism and of disciplinary knowledge in given subject-areas (Language Arts, History, Geography, and HE/HE) over six decades in the Republic of Cyprus (mid-1950s to mid-2010s). Central in these inquiries are the life histories of 30 Greek-Cypriot elementary teachers who studied in local public institutions and fall into six cohorts roughly corresponding to each of the six decades of interest. Participating teachers had varied characteristics in terms of their gendered identities, academic credentials, place of residence, and types of schools where they served, while each cohort shared experiences in terms of their higher education and credentials (from teacher college and pedagogical academy diplomas in the former cohorts to university degrees and postgraduate education in the latter ones) and the profession’s attractiveness and social status. Following a biographic research approach, we collected data through multiple, semi-structured life history interviews with each of the participants, following a three-step process which, as described by Goodson (2008), involves the conducting, transcription and sharing of in-depth interviews whereby participants are provided opportunities to narrate, amend, and expand their life histories. Interviews were complemented with the collection of personal artifacts and official documents circulated around significant time periods, as those emerged in the participants’ hi/stories. Individual teachers’ life histories were thematically analyzed, followed by the cross-analysis of life hi/stories within and across cohorts. For the purposes of this paper, thematic and cross-analysis of teachers’ life hi/stories was based on axial coding of emic codes that adhered to teachers’ narrations of curriculum enactment at different points of their professional careers and, especially, at times of curriculum change and educational reform but also in relation to key sociopolitical events. We accounted for teachers’ verbatim use of HE/HE when describing its enactment (through materials, policies, ingredients, practices, etc.), but also traced more subtle or broad meanings of this subject-area’s curriculum, as it traversed other subject-area, school, community and social activities. Doing so, we were interested in tracing the ways in which it was materialized within a changing landscape of elementary schooling and the teaching profession over time, while remaining a recognizable and distinct area of the curriculum.

In teachers' narrations, the HE/HE curriculum appeared to have an important place, albeit for changing reasons. The nature of the curriculum made in schools for HE/HE was narrated over time as gradually shifting from a strictly “female” endeavor with its emphases on cleanliness, cooking, clothes-mending or making/embroidery for older female students taught by female teachers, in the first/older cohorts, to include content (also addressed to boys and for all grades) on health, diet, exercise, mental and emotional well-being, conflict resolution, consumption and citizenship in later cohorts. This expanding scope of narrated content troubled caring for the home/family as a gendered mission but also facilitated the traversion of Health Education disciplinary boundaries with other subject-areas (particularly Language Arts), making it preferable to homeroom teachers. Despite shifts, in all teachers’ cohorts, HE was constantly entangled with school/local activities as well as broader sociopolitical agendas (including preparing children for their socially-assigned roles), instantiating both the social embeddedness of schooling and how societies kept being schooled. Another constant was how it was narrated through pedagogical-progressive rhetoric as a subject-area ‘popular’ to children because of being closer to ‘their’ questions, concerns, problems, and everyday life, but also because of its practical/hands-on methodology. For the more recent cohorts, Health Education classrooms were their primary field of action working with children as individuals on mainly health-related concerns (e.g. obesity, diversity, bullying), in ways perplexing the aspirations of ‘empowerment’ envisioned by the current programmatic curriculum. The paper discusses these findings’ implications for debates on the governance of public health (due to the recent pandemic, but also other public health concerns in Europe and around the world) as an instantiation of a sedimented historicity, reminding us how schooling is always-already entangled with public health/hygiene policies, as traced strongly in these teachers’ narrations of HE/HE curriculum enactments during their career.

Ball, S. J. (2013). Foucault, power and education. Routledge. Deng, Z., Gopinathan, S., & Lee, C. K. E. (Eds.) (2013). Globalization and the Singapore curriculum: From policy to classroom. Springer. Doyle, W. (1992a). Curriculum and pedagogy. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 486–516). Macmillan. Doyle, W. (1992b). Constructing curriculum in the classroom. In F. K. Oser, A. Dick, & J. Patry (Eds.), Effective and responsible teaching: The new syntheses (pp. 66–79). Jossey-Bass. Goodson, I. (2008). Investigating the teacher’s life and work. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Ioannou, S., Kouta, C. & Andreou, A. (2015). Cyprus Health Education Curriculum from “victim blaming to empowerment”. Health Education, 115(3/4), 392 – 404. Llewellyn, K. R. (2012). Democracy’s angels; the work of women teachers. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Persianis, P. & Polyviou, P. (1992). Ιστορία της εκπαίδευσης στην Κύπρο, κείμενα και πηγές [History of education in Cyprus, texts and sources]. Pedagogical Institute. Philippou, S. & Theodorou, E. (2019). Collapsing the supranational and the national: from citizenship to health education in the Republic of Cyprus. In A. Rapoport (Ed.), Competing Frameworks: Global and National in Citizenship Education (pp. 95-114). Information Age. Philippou, S. & Theodorou, E. (2018). Re-forming curriculum towards a ‘democratic socially responsible citizen’ in Greek-Cypriot Education: At the nexus of European, Intercultural, and Health Education discourses. In N. Palaiologou & M. Zembylas (Eds.), Human Rights Education and Citizenship Education: Intercultural Perspectives within an international context (pp. 200-223). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.