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Epidemiological data construct the population of Newfoundland and Labrador as being one of the most obese populations in Canada. The concern for child and youth health is particularly pertinent within school culture and places teachers in precarious positions where they are being asked to share in shaping healthy lifestyle messages while also considering their own health practices. Based on interviews with 13 female elementary school teachers, we explore the ways in which dominant health messages are taken up but also challenged by teachers within school culture. A thematic analysis of teachers' narratives highlights the moral values used in the promotion of eating and exercising in school staff rooms, the gendered and sometimes romanticized view of the past as a method for communicating contemporary health concerns, the struggle to challenge dominant health discourses, and finally, the tensions that arise for people when thinking more complexly about health and healthy living. Teachers' concern for biopedagogical practice demonstrates how they continuously challenge but also participate in the production of the health imperative.

We situate the race-based division of Manitoba's Keystone Junior Hockey League as a case study to reveal the ongoing processes of settler colonialism. We argue that this split is an example of "White settler possessive logics," whereby settler belonging is naturalized through reiterative embodied acts of occupation. That this split happened in hockey, which is colloquially referred to as "Canada's game," is perhaps unsurprising given that hockey is a significant cultural site where Canadian nationhood is produced. However, we also contend that settler entitlement and belonging are never fully secure, but rather always in the process of (un)becoming. Settler belonging is thus threatened by Indigenous embodied sovereignties, which we argue can be found in the game of hockey generally, and in the Keystone Junior Hockey League specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the Canadian context, the physical activity levels of children and youth in the after school time period has become a source of public health concern. We argue that this concern is informed by broader public health crises, in particular the "global obesity epidemic" and the closely related "global pandemic of physical inactivity," and that these so-called "crises" operate as part of a discursive regime that serves to justify after school interventions aimed at increasing the physical activity practices of children and youth. Although the objectives of such interventions are seemingly well intentioned, we suggest that such interventions nonetheless harbor difficult to discern, but potentially pernicious consequences, for the communities in which they are implemented. We focus our attention on the place-specific effects of one Public Health Agency of Canada-funded after school physical activity intervention--After the School Bell Rings (ASBR)--that was implemented in the mostly Indigenous, northern community of Placid, Manitoba. Based on a critical analysis of the ASBR program itself, along with interviews and focus groups with children, parents and recreation providers (n = 10) from the community of Placid, we contend that the ASBR serves to govern Indigenous recreation at a distance. We argue that when implemented in the place-specific context of Placid, the ASBR functions as part of a broader governmental assemblage composed of loosely connected discourses, institutions, socio-structural conditions and individuals that, when assembled, ultimately serve to govern geographically and culturally distinct communities. We conclude by suggesting that the objectives of broad-based health interventions, such as the goal of increasing after school physical activity levels, should not be universally implemented across diverse locales, but need to account for the diverse, place-specific priorities and needs of the communities into which they are implemented.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore issues of race and culture in health education in the secondary school health and physical education (HPE) curriculum in Ontario, Canada. Design/methodology/approach: Using Ontario's secondary school curriculum as a point of analysis, this paper draws from critical race theory and a whiteness lens to identify how cultural and race identities are positioned in contemporary health education documents. The curriculum document and its newest strategies for teaching are the focus of analysis in this conceptual paper. Findings: Within the curriculum new teaching strategies offer entry points for engaging students in learning more about culture and race. In particular, First Nation, Métis and Inuit identities are noted in the curriculum. Specifically, three areas of the curriculum point to topics of race and culture in health: eating; substance use, abuse and additions; and, movement activities. Within these three educational areas, the curriculum offers information about cultural practices to teach about what it means to understand health from a cultural lens. Social implications: The HPE curriculum offers examples of how Ontario, Canada, is expanding its cultural approaches to knowing about and understanding health practices. The acknowledgment of First Nations, Métis and Inuit health and cultural ways of approaching health is significant when compared to other recently revised HPE curriculum from around the globe. The teaching strategies offered in the curriculum document provide one avenue to think about how identity, culture and race are being taught in health education classrooms. Originality/value: First, with limited analysis of health education policy within schools, the use of critical theory provides opportunities for thinking about what comes next when broadening definitions of health to be more inclusive of cultural and race identity. Second, curriculum structures how teachers respond to the topics they are delivering, thus how HPE as a subject area promotes healthy practices is highly relevant to the field of health education. This paper provides an important acknowledgment of the educative work being undertaken in the revision of HPE curriculum.

Given that the health of the nation is often interpreted in and through the health of the nation's youth, the threat of the "childhood obesity epidemic" garners much attention and it is hardly surprising that physical education has been recruited in the "war on [childhood] obesity". This paper explores how students aged 13-15 years, at a secondary school in Toronto, Canada, make sense of, negotiate and embody the health messages embedded within the obesity-informed Health and Physical Education (HPE) curricula. A post-structural analysis of student narratives reveals the ways in which notions of biocitizenry constitute a visibly "healthy", gendered, engaged, normalized body. The "good" HPE student negotiates health discourse in productive and responsive ways, constructing a virtuous subjectivity and alienating the unruly or undisciplined, unhealthy body in HPE.

Background Theoretical Framework and Methods Findings Conclusion This paper highlights the cultural construction of health in Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum. Using Kanu’s approach to reading the curriculum as cultural practice, I interrogate how the construction of ‘healthy lifestyle’ in particular is positioned within government policy. In this way, diverse cultural understandings of health are foregrounded to consider how race, ethnicity and culture are central to health and lifestyle, regardless of their visibility in state-sanctioned policy in the area of HPE.Using a postcolonial lens I identify and follow how non-dominant cultural practices are referenced within HPE curriculum to expose how diverse cultural meanings of health remain on the periphery and when included in policy perpetuate stereotypical notions of race and ethnicity. The HPE curriculum from Ontario, Canada, serves as a site to identify and interrogate the textual and discursive representations of culture, ethnicity and race. Text within the secondary school curriculum (grades 9–12) was submitted to a detailed text and discourse analysis. Identifying how, when and where cultural references to health arise within the text is followed by an analysis interrogating the power relations used in constituting Eurocentric views and practices of healthy lifestyles.The paper identifies two key areas within the HPE curriculum where references to culture, ethnicity and race present themselves in the document: first, in relation to English Language Learners and their embodied responses to cultural environments; and second, in pedagogical examples, called Teaching Prompts and Student Reply. In both areas, reading the curriculum as cultural practice brought into view how efforts to recognize difference are recuperated into dominant, normative Eurocentric approaches to wellbeing, sport and physical activity.Reading the curriculum as cultural practice illustrates how colonial knowledge systems are the foundation for what becomes recognizable in HPE curriculum. What some might see as seemingly benign ideas, practices, activities, games and sport are indeed educative practices that mark bodies and prioritize knowledge systems, and in some cases, perpetuate ethnic and racial stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates Euro-Western sport within a broader settler colonial logic of elimination that frames Indigenous bodies, cultures, and ideas within a politics of containment in the production of the colonized masculine subject. We use three examples to illustrate our argument, including an examination of the use of Euro-Western sport and physical culture in Indian Residential Schools, the definitional confinement of diverse and constantly adapting Indigenous cultures within contemporary Canadian sport policies, and finally the representational fixing of Indigenous masculinities within stereotypes of the hyper-masculine warrior in dominant sport media. However, sport and physical culture are also central to processes of Indigenous resilience, resurgence, and decolonization and, while these themes run throughout the paper, they are explicitly addressed in the final section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociology of Sport Journal is the property of Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

THE GIRL AND THE GAME: A History of Women's Sport in Canada M. Ann Hall Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002; 284 pp. The intent of The Girl and the Game [...]

Copyright of Physical & Health Education Journal is the property of PHE Canada and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on quality school intramural and recreation. The author says that the philosophy and time devoted to creating student-centred intramural programs improves the physical literacy of students. According to the author, an intramural program enlivens collective approach to physical activity.