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For a field that generates so many research publications, school health is the focus of remarkably little critical scholarly analysis. This is a curious situation for many reasons, not least because so much of what does happen in schools is the subject of heated disagreement. The purpose of schools and the optimal methods for educating children are regularly the context for both healthy public debate and ideological warfare. With the pos- sible exception of sex education, however, the health-related role of schools tends to slip peacefully under the radar. In fact, something of a becalmed consensus seems to pervade school health, leaving its many advocates and practitioners to go about their business lar- gely untroubled by the kinds of probing questions which might seem worth asking.

In this article we examine the ways discourses of risk manifested and played out within and across two groups of Australian mothers living in two large urban centres in Australia: the first comprised of mothers who had a pre-teen child diagnosed with an eating disorder (n=13); the second of mothers who had a pre-teen child without the symptoms or diagnosis of an eating disorder (n=13). In 2011 and 2012, we conducted in-depth interviews with the mothers in their homes on their ideas about health and their relationships with their children. An analysis of the data collected from these interviews indicated that having a pre-teen child diagnosed with an eating disorder had a decisive impact on how the mothers constituted and responded to risk. For mothers, who had a pre-teen child with an eating disorder, risk was intensified by bio-medical discourses. The particular intensifications of risk limited the ways in which mothers could act and often threatened to undermine their abilities as competent carers. By contrast, the mothers who did not have a pre-teen child with an eating disorder spoke about risk less directly, and with less sense of immediacy. Where these mothers acknowledged risk discourses particularly in regard to health, they were in a stronger position to negotiate them. Our analysis indicates that the ways in which mothers responded to risk is contingent on circumstances and contexts. Mothers' responses to risk were related to the calculability of the risk and their perceived capacity to manage it.

The AIME (Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience) Program was established in 2005 when 25 students from the University of Sydney volunteered to work with 25 Indigenous children from local high schools. Since 2005 more than 3000 mentors have been recruited to work with 3542 Indigenous school students in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. The AIME Program is based on the recruitment of university students as mentors who provide advice and personal support to Indigenous school mentees from years 7 to 12. Its overall goals are to improve retention rates of Indigenous high school students to Year 12 and to encourage the transition of Indigenous students to university.

Across the globe many nations have found engaging young people in the post compulsory years of school to ensure their transition into economic citizens is challenging. Governments are focusing on developing initiatives and programs to connect young people in education and training as preparation for the workplace. In Australia the use of Applied Learning as pedagogy is emerging as a valuable tool in the delivery of curriculum to engage young people in education. Educators who use Applied Learning pedagogy develop curriculum that is relevant to student interests and needs, connected into communities and results in young people acquiring workplace skills. One such program in Australia is the 'Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL), offered in years 11 and 12 of school and firmly grounded in Applied Learning pedagogy. The challenge for many educators is, and has been, that there are marked differences between VCAL pedagogy and curriculum and the pedagogy and curriculum they may have previously used in senior school programs. This paper draws on research that explores the professional learning experiences of Applied Learning educators, in the context of the VCAL. I argue that general professional teaching experience alone is not necessarily adequate preparation for teaching in the VCAL program.

This paper offers a brief review of research on the impact of bullying and racism on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within Australia. The overarching emphasis was on the variety of physical, social, mental, and educational outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and youth, whilst also critiquing the prevailing literature with regard to its inclusion and sensitivity towards the importance of culture and connected values. Within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research setting, although a strong base of research on the impact of racism has emerged, research on the impact of bullying is more recent. In addition, while there may be considerable overlap as to the individual impact of bullying and racism, racism research has identified a wider cultural/identity-threat that bullying research (with a few exceptions) has largely ignored. As a result, there is a need to be sensitive to cultural differences with regard to both the types and effects of racism and bullying, and that efforts to understand and to lessen the prevalence of racism and bullying should be framed within the development of a culturally sensitive and secure framework (Coffin, 2008).

This paper describes and discusses how gender is constituted in a Swedish workplace health promotion intervention which focused on diet and physical activity, through the resources of what we have called a ‘Stone Age’ discourse. The paper draws on material gathered for a larger study that examined how discourses of health are contextualized in educational practice and interaction between educators and participants in four different workplace health promotion interventions. The purpose of the interventions was to help employees change (improve) their lifestyle as concerns dietary and physical activity habits. Data was collected for the original study by ethnographic methods such as participation observation of the interaction between educators and participants. Foucault’s ideas about governmentality were utilized in analyzing the interactions in order to investigate how health discourses were drawn on and the technologies of power and of the self by which the participants were governed and invited to govern themselves in the name of health. From these analyses, various discourses were identified on which the participants and particularly the educators drew to constitute the healthy employee. One of these was a discourse, which in this paper is called a ‘Stone Age’ discourse, because of the ways in which the differences in men and women’s health were explained in its most overt form by reference to women as gatherers and men as hunters, with men as a result positioned as the physically, emotionally and mentally ideal and women as the problematic and lacking ‘Other’. While this discourse, in this form, may be unique to Scandinavian countries, this paper will nevertheless indicate how this notion corresponds to ideas from evolutionary theory and medicine in international research on health and wellness. This paper will also discuss the implications of such ideas about health and gender for interventions aimed at changing behavior and lifestyles. The paper will provide a

Contemporary notions of childhood overweight and obesity have become increasingly influential in curriculum and pedagogy in school-based Health and Physical Education (HPE). Teachers' delivery of HPE subject matter and related school practices are likely to have a considerable impact on the attitudes and beliefs of the children they teach, particularly in the primary school. It thus becomes important to consider the ways of thinking about and doing health (discourse positions on health) that teachers bring to their teaching of HPE. This paper examines pre-service teachers' positions in relation to the health discourses to better understand what teachers, in this case beginning teachers, bring to their teaching of HPE and interactions with children in primary schools. It draws on a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis to analyse pre-service teachers' qualitative survey and interview responses to questions about meanings of health. Three key positions emerged, signifying Agreement, Disagreement and Negotiated positions in relation to the dominant discourses of health and the body.

Background: Physical activity levels decline markedly among girls during adolescence. School-based interventions that are multi-component in nature, simultaneously targeting curricular, school environment and policy, and community links, are a promising approach for promoting physical activity. This report describes the rationale, design and baseline data from the Girls in Sport group randomised trial, which aims to prevent the decline in moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity (MVPA) among adolescent girls. Methods/design: A community-based participatory research approach and action learning framework are used with measurements at baseline and 18-month follow-up. Within each intervention school, a committee develops an action plan aimed at meeting the primary objective (preventing the decline in accelerometer-derived MVPA). Academic partners and the State Department of Education and Training act as critical friends. Control schools continue with their usual school programming. 24 schools were matched then randomized into intervention (n = 12) and control (n = 12) groups. A total of 1518 girls (771 intervention and 747 control) completed baseline assessments (86% response rate). Useable accelerometer data (≥ 10 hrs/day on at least 3 days) were obtained from 79% of this sample (n = 1199). Randomisation resulted in no differences between intervention and control groups on any of the outcomes. The mean age (SE) of the sample was 13.6 (± 0.02) years and they spent less than 5% of their waking hours in MVPA (4.85 ± 0.06). Discussion: Girls in Sport will test the effectiveness of schools working towards the same goal, but developing individual, targeted interventions that bring about changes in curriculum, school environment and policy, and community links. By using community-based participatory research and an action learning framework in a secondary school setting, it aims to add to the body of literature on effective school-based interventions through promotin

This research provides a needed glimpse at the ‘underside’ (Giroux, 1981) of Australian pedagogy.By charting the lives of six teachers and six students from a range of Victorian schools, the research examines our assumptions about how identities are produced and reproduced through schooling. It provides a detailed analysis through a combination of photo elicitation and narrative inquiry methods. The study examines the resistance to sameness and why some students and teachers submit and accept the sameness, while others push back.Building initially from the work of Michael Apple and his positioning of ideology, curriculum and power relations, this study explores what are the values and assumptions that shape pedagogical practice and in what ways do these practices inculcate Victorian students into ideologically ridden‘common sense’ practices that are not articulated but understood through the consumption of cultural capital?This research seeks access to the powerful undercurrents that shape the identities of our teachers and our students as ‘foot soldiers in the long front of modernity’ (Willis, 2003, p. 390). The research is concerned with schooling and the process that happens to an individual within a school. It examines power and education and asks how do both students and teachers internalize and express the pedagogies of contemporary schooling and in what ways do the everyday aspects of teaching and learning reinforce the notion of schools as mechanisms of cultural capital distribution?

The implementation of the first iteration of a curriculum for an applied learning programme for police trainers received a hostile response from participants. It was perceived as irrelevant and supplanting, rather than augmenting, trainers’ fixed and untested training practices. This paper presents the reflections on my journey as a nonpolice person straddling an outsider-insider position while challenging that which is taken-for-granted and introducing an educative intent, as opposed to a doctrinal, technical intent, to police training. On a daily basis I simultaneously work within and against the prevailing D/discourses and dominant subcultures, while establishing and nurturing relationships with police trainers: being teacher, coach and ‘critical friend’. The response to the second and now third iterations of the learning programme has been increasingly positive, revealing shifts in trainers’ thinking and practice.

Teaching 'out-of-field' occurs when teachers teach a subject for which they have no disciplinary or methods qualification. The incidence of out-of-field mathematics, science and technology teaching are particularly high in rural and regional areas. Given that mathematics and science are key areas of policy concern, there is an urgent need to understand teachers‟ position in this increasingly common practice in order to provide appropriate system responses. This paper asks the question, how are mathematics and science teachers‟ professional identities influenced by having to teach out-of-field? Twenty teachers who had taught science or mathematics at some time in their career, two school leaders, and two support staff, took part in semi-structured interviews, which I then transcribed. This paper reports on a thematic analysis of a subset of the data that isolated factors influencing teachers‟ self-assessment of themselves as out-of-field or in-field. Excerpts from the interviews are used to introduce and contextualise these factors within rural and regional settings. These factors are used to generate a theoretical model, the Boundary Between Fields (BBF) Model, that enables analysis of the impact of these factors on identity construction during a boundary crossing event. The Model highlights the influence of support mechanisms, contextual factors and personal resources on the nature of teachers‟ negotiation of subject boundaries and its impact on professional identity. This innovative model provides a platform for re-conceptualising these experiences as opportunities for professional learning occurring within schools as communities of practice, where teachers are supported and enabled to expand their professional identity. These findings provide insight for policy-makers, school leaders and teacher educators, into the complexity of the issue for teachers, as well as the conditions required for such teaching to be considered learning opportunities.

The establishment of communities of practice (CoPs) has emerged nationally as a strategy to promote ‘excellence’ in teaching and learning in Australian universities. CoPs in Australian universities have been reported as fostering the development of identity in practice and collegial academic identity. In these accounts identity development is associated with storytelling around everyday practice, although the relationship between narrative and identity development has not been explored or described in detail. Similarly, although the complex and changeable university contexts in which these CoPs operate is noted and described in the literature, there is currently no detailed account published of the relationship between the broader discourses that shape these contexts and the process of identity development in university CoPs. We argue in this paper that there is a need for a new way of researching identity formation in university CoPs. Drawing on Trinh Minh Ha’s work (1992), we propose that fragmentation be used as a working metaphor for thinking about and researching identity development in university CoPs, with direct reference to the contexts in which they operate.  The proposed new approach takes into account the complexities and variety of discourses that influence identity formation in CoPs and the changeable and sometimes contradictory Enterprise University contexts in which Australian CoPs operate. In this paper fragmentation is described and applied to the process of researching identity formation in university CoPs. This paper also describes how fragmentation guides the combined narrative research and discourse analysis methods used in the proposed approach. This paper argues that fragmentation provides the means for developing practical (or experiential) insights as well as conceptually structuring a useful method for investigating discursive factors, to open up a variety of potential new understandings about identity formation

Despite the notion of educational inclusion of students with disabilities increasing in popularity, the day-to-day reality of its effectiveness remains mostly unknown. This paper reports key findings of a small-scale qualitative study that was conducted with a group of young people with vision impairment who attended an inclusive secondary school. The aim of the research was to ascertain their voiced experiences of their inclusion. Relevant to the study was the researcher’s insider status, which allowed for his unique insight and shared experiences with participants to influence data collection and analysis. The students reported a constant trade off that occurred between their aspirations for access and autonomy and practices of other stakeholders in the school that both facilitated and inhibited their inclusion. In sum, the students’ inclusion was ineffective because of habitual inhibiting actions of others. Recommendations are made based on Slee’s (2001) call for altered teaching and learning realities to promote educational inclusion, and a model of social justice that could bring about increased student agency (Higgins, Macarthur & Kelly, 2009).

The year 5 children erupted into the room with its strange machines and people. Fitness testing! Eyes alighted on scales, lung capacity tester .., exercise bikes, benches, and before teachers organized queues, the boys were blowing, poking, questioning, pushing. The girls tended to huddle apprehensive, eyeing each other … Perhaps one was viewing them through pre-programmed eyes but most of the boys seemed boisterously competitive , while the girls were more hesitant, even anxious, with some reluctance to try hard … In no other test were the differences more noticeable that in the simple weighing of the children. The boys seemed either indifferent, with the odd self-conscious body-hugging from both the skinny and the really chubby, while most easily bounced on and sent the machine’s arm swinging. The girls moved up in tight groups, and while one stepped on the others gathered to read the result even before the tester

Reading through the keys texts on the history of education in Australia one would easily be persuaded to the absence of any form of formal physical education in schools. Drills and even the cadet movement receive scarcely a mention in key texts covering the period such as Barcan’s various histories of education in NSW and Australia (Barcan 1980, 1988), in Smith and Spaull’s (1925) History of Education in NSW and Theobold and Selleck’s (1990) collection Family School and State in Australian History. In one sense these point to what has always been obvious to physical educators, that academic and vocational concerns preoccupy those involved in educational reform and those documenting it. The absence of such references, however, ignores the place that corporeal education had in managing children in schools, the preoccupations with military preparedness and cadet training that were a feature of the period covered in this chapter, and the regular references to drill and health in departmental communications such as the Inspectors’ Reports in the various State Education Gazettes. It also ignores the close relationship between State Departments of Public Instruction and the voluntary teacher led sporting organizations that organised sport for thousands of children in government funded elementary schools and lobbied successfully for compulsory swimming lessons in these schools. On the other hand, the place of sport and games in elite private schools, particularly boys’ schools warrants considerable mention in the histories of these schools, and there is a substantial literature on the place of games in building particular kinds of citizens for the British Empire and the developing nations of the Empire (e.g. Mangan).

Over the last decade intense concern has developed about what has beencharacterised as an obesity epidemic in the West. This concern has been accompanied byequally intense debates over the validity of this characterisation. Many critics see theepidemic designation as part of an intensifying 'moral panic' about fat in which emotionsabout fat shape the public and scientific debate. In this article we explore thecritical literature on the obesity epidemic, noting the way in which it draws attention tothe role of the emotions in discourse on the epidemic. We argue that the action ofemotions in this context invites further theorisation, and that this theorisation needs tobe undertaken via concepts that: (1) explicitly integrate the body and the emotions withthe materialisation of political discourse, (2) avoid individualising and psychologisingaccounts of the emotions and (3) analyse the action of emotion in political debatewithout implying the need to eradicate emotion in generating more just and accurateperspectives. To this end, we turn to the work of Sara Ahmed, who has developed asophisticated account of the role of the emotions in constructing social collectivitiesthrough their engagement with ideas of the body. We argue that this theory can be usedto illuminate both the general relationship between public discourse and subjectivity,and the specific relationship between the self, the body and the oftentimes unmetimperative to slimness.

Currently in developed nations, childhood obesity is generating widespread concern and prompting social and institutional responses. Obesity is constructed as a broad public health crisis, but individuals are constructed as responsible for their own bodies and body sizes within this crisis. We are particularly interested in two aspects that focus on women as central to this phenomenon; the first is the imputation of maternal responsibility for the weight of children and the second is the role that specific fears about flesh and women’s bodies play in how childhood obesity is represented. We analyse media representations of childhood obesity in Australia and draw out the discourses of maternal responsibility and the intertwining of mothers and children’s bodies. We frame the childhood obesity crisis within a broader discussion of women, care and responsibility, suggesting that childhood obesity offers another embodied location to reinforce and extend women’s roles and responsibilities as mothers, in response to changing patterns of work and care.

At a time of increasing hype about the health consequences of obesity, it is unsurprising that ‘going to the gym’ has become increasingly popular amongst most age groups. Tailored children’s gyms for the 8 to 14 year olds are being established in some western countries as the new antidote for childhood obesity. Such developments illustrate Fusco’s (2007: 46) point that urban spaces are increasingly subjected to ‘neoliberal ideologies of healthism, active living and consumerism’ and reflect the overlays and interactions between health and space in neo-liberal cities. At the same Fusco suggests young people’s health geographies are missing from current depictions of life in the city, while van Ingen (2003) also draws attention to the need to better ‘narrate’ notions of identity and the practices that normalize particular health discourses in the physical activity context.

In the literature on young people’s health and its relation to participation in physical activity, there are recurring narratives that lament the decline in participation during the senior years of schooling and beyond (e.g. Sallis, Prochaska and Taylor 2000). This apparent decline has been interpreted as a significant problem and one that must be addressed by strategies to engage young people in more physical activity; most of which target young people with a view to changing their attitudes and behaviours (Gyurcsik, Bray and Brittain 2004; Leslie, Fotheringham, Owen and Bauman 2001). This concern about young people’s participation in physical activity seems to be embedded in, and adds support to, a notion that adolescence is a developmental period of ‘increased risk’, where young people are particularly susceptible to, and held responsible for, making ‘bad’ health choices (Rose 1992), as parents and schools exert a diminished influence over their lives.

In writing The Code of Health and Longevity in 1818, Sir John Sinclair hoped that with the provision: of the facts and observations, which are most essential for the preservation of health, .... that it will now be in the power of every considerable person, to ascertain what rules are suited to his particular situation, and to adopt those which are likely to be most efficacious. (Sinclair 1818: 13) Motivating Sir John’s tome nearly two hundred years ago was his concern that ‘people seldom attend to their health till it be too late’ (p.12) and that ‘the attainment of longevity, if accompanied with good health, is not only an important consideration to the individual, but also to the community to which he belongs’ (p.12).

In this concluding chapter we offer some reflections on the conduct of our research that we believe have relevance across most qualitative studies that involve young people, particularly young people from diverse social and cultural groups. In the case of the Life Activity Project and related studies, we also needed to attend to the added sensitivity associated with researching young people’s meanings of health and, inevitably, their feelings and thoughts about their bodies and body weight. What follows are some stories, dilemmas and reflections ‘from the field’. The contributors to the book share issues around: recruiting participants to the research process and maintaining participants’ involvement; developing respectful relationships; and, the dilemmas of researching Others and representing the their voices. These reflections come from fieldnotes, thesis manuscripts and contributors’ input into our closing discussions on methodological issues. In many cases these have been included as verbatim quotes.

I want to achieve a lot with my career and work wise so I know I have to put in the hours but then I feel like I’m missing out on the rest; like the social life, you know, just going for a bike ride, taking the kayak out, motorbike. And when you do think, alright, I’ve got the time to do it you are just so worn out that you just don’t want to do it. It’s too much effort. So you just feel tired all the time.

Chapter Intention: • To explore the discourse of ‘sociocultural perspective’ and its representations in Health and Physical Education curriculum; • To explore sociocultural perspective alongside the emphasis of critical pedagogies and critical inquiry; • To consider possibilities and limitations to embedding a ‘sociocultural perspective’ in teaching practices.

This article investigates (i) how the structuring practices and meanings associated with dance classes at an inner‐city American high school operated as institutional spaces (re)producing ‘dividing practices’ that supported racial and classed hierarchies; (ii) how these racist structures were created and maintained relative to dominant notions of embodiment, ‘race’, social class, femininity, and dance; and (iii) the way these dominant practices and hierarchies were managed by two ‘black’ young women at the high school in order to construct particular modes of self‐governance. The analysis suggests that educators be attuned to the role that spaces play in creating particular types of ‘docile’ bodies and the strategies enacted by young people to create alternative embodied practices and subjectivities.

One of the most powerful and pervasive discourses currently influencing ways of thinking about health and about bodies is that of the ‘obesity epidemic’. This has, in turn, generated a counter argument from a range of perspectives. While there has been considerable recent theorising of the issue in the context of fat studies, there has been less attention to how the discourses associated with the obesity epidemic have had an impact on populations and specific sections of populations. The contributors to this book came together because of a joint concern as educators with the ways in which the ‘truths’ of the obesity epidemic, as they are recontextualized in government policy, health promotion initiatives, web resources and school practices have consequences for how children and young people come to know themselves. Our purpose then is to further current theoretical understandings of obesity discourse, and the practices it endorses, by interrogating what we are terming biopedagogical practices as they are enacted across a range of social and institutional sites. In bringing together collaborative insights around biopedagogies, the collection will also further theoretical understandings of the construction of the body in contemporary culture.

The focus of this paper is on the community impact of education research, specifically as this is conceived within a changing context of research assessment in Australia, first mooted by the previous Federal Coalition (conservative) Government within a new Research Quality Framework (RQF), and now to be reworked by the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative by the incoming Federal Labor (progressive) Government. Convinced that a penchant for the utility of research will not go away, irrespective of the political orientations of government, our interest is in exploring: the assumption that research, particularly in areas such as education, should have an impact in the community (as this was first defined within the RQF); the difficulties much education research (despite its ‘applied’ characterisation) has in complying with this ideal; and what a community impact requirement means for the kinds of education research that will be privileged in the future. In particular, we are concerned about the potential narrowing of education research directed at/by community impact and what is lost in the process. One potential loss or weakening is in the positional autonomy of higher education to conduct independent education research.

Background: Following the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the NSW Premier, Mr Bob Carr, launched a school-based initiative in NSW government primary schools called the Gold Medal Fitness Program to encourage children to be fitter and more active. The Program was introduced into schools through a model of professional development, Quality Teaching and Learning Materials (QTLM), then widely used by the NSW Department of Education and Training. The implementation of the Program was evaluated by a research team at the University of Wollongong for its effects on the fundamental movement skills, self-esteem and participation in physical activity of participating children and its success as a program of professional development for non-specialist primary school teachers.

The various research assessment exercises in UK, New Zealand and now Australia have motivated discussions around the nature of ‘quality’ and the purpose of educational research. To a certain extent this is also a discussion about theory, although the word is unlikely to be mentioned, in that terms such as ‘value free’, ‘neutral’, ‘critical’, ‘practical’, ‘transformational’, ‘evidence-based’ all invoke particular ontological and/or epistemological positions, that are and can be contested. One of the questions educational researchers face in the context of such exercises, though again implicit, is what value is attributed to robust theoretically informed research and which theoretical positions will have value? This becomes particularly pertinent in questions of the usefulness of research, or, in the Australian Research Quality Framework (RQF) as proposed by the former Liberal Coalition government, the ‘impact’ of research .

Games centred approaches (GCA) such as TGfU, Game Sense, Tactical Games are widely promoted as alternatives to traditional forms of teaching games within physical education. Despite a growing body of empirical research and a considerable theoretical literature, there are no analyses in the GCA literature, of interactions in actual lessons. In this paper we argue that social semiotics provides the tools for such an analysis. We give an example of how such an approach might be used by analysing questioning, as exemplified in the GCA literature and teacher resources, for the ways it constructs knowledge and interpersonal relations. We argue that the claims for a student-centred approach and mutual construction of knowledge are demonstrated in these examples.

Current concerns in New Zealand and abroad about the health and well-being of young people have generated a raft of government-sponsored and educational policies and practices geared towards the production of trim, taut and fit subjects who choose wisely from the range of risky ‘options’ available to them in avowedly new and changing times. These initiatives yield consequences for children and young people who are increasingly being urged, in Foucault’s terms, to conduct “…a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being…”(1997, p. 225) in an effort to ‘become’ the imagined healthful, agentic citizen. Drawing on poststructuralist theoretical resources and perspectives from the sociology of childhood, we explore the ways these practices are implicated in the constitution of children and young people as social actors. Empirical work with children and teachers, media and policy analyses, together with an interrogation of contemporary curriculum imperatives, inform our analysis with Australia and New Zealand providing the primary contexts for our investigation.

School health syllabuses, health and physical education textbooks and most recently website resources targeting young people’s health are one of the main sources of knowledge in schools about how individuals should live their lives and come to know themselves and others, particularly as these relate to their bodies, their relationships and their daily practices of eating, drinking and engaging in physical activity. One of the most powerful and pervasive discourses currently influencing ways of thinking about health and about bodies is that associated with the notion of an ‘obesity epidemic’. In this paper, we use the notion of biopower as it draws on the ‘truths’ and imperatives of the ‘obesity epidemic’ to examine how the practices associated with health education via texts books and web-based resources contribute to the regulation of bodies and the constitution of particular desires around health.

This paper examines the relationship between the discursive and material practices associated with school sport and physical education and the formation of particular classed and gendered subjectivities; and how these, in turn, impact on young women’s potential life chances. In so doing, the paper will attempt to go beyond an understanding of ‘subjectivity’ as formed in relation to cultural and institutional discourses, to engage with the notion of ability or ‘embodied capacity’ as a form of physical capital (Shilling 1993) which has particular salience in a consumerist ‘performance’ motivated market economy and which is differentially made available in schools. This argument will be developed through the examination of the material and discursive contexts of two Australian schools: an elite private girls’ school and a coeducational government school which draws primarily from young people living a low socio-economic suburb.