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In this paper we report on a teacher education co-design project that explored Australian pre-service primary generalist teachers' ideations of the pedagogical links between health education and nature. As part of their coursework in a Master of Teaching degree at an Australian University, students were invited to design a Victorian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education (VC:HPE) activity that connected primary curriculum (F-6) with nature. We conducted a 3-hour suite of online learning activities and prompts using Zoom, Padlet and Moodle. The data consists of the students' curriculum design artefacts as well as recordings of the group discussions and non-assessment-based presentations of their work. Drawing on theories of child-nature interaction, we present an analysis of the ways in which n = 72 pre-service teachers across 18 groups of 4-5 educators conceptualised links between 'nature' and HPE across their activity designs. Prior to the workshop, the majority of pre-service teachers had not previously considered links between the HPE learning area and nature. Through the activities of the co-design workshop, students were surprised with the variety of pedagogical possibilities that were able to be made. There was much student discussion about the possibilities and limitations of balancing safety and risk in their nature-based activity designs. We present a thematic analysis of the quality of student-nature interactions in the groups' learning designs through: (i) exploration; (ii) embodiment; (iii) cultivation; (iv) appropriation; and (v) representation. The analysis and discussion has implications for the way quality health education is linked to nature-based learning environments, teacher education and contemporary curriculum enactment that incorporates nature and the environment as part of the learning design.

Many young people in Australia leave secondary school with little understanding of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). This study aims to describe Australian teachers' experiences when providing SRH education, map their use of resources, and explore barriers and strategies to increase students' skills and confidence to protect their SRH. Quantitative data were gathered via an online questionnaire (n = 189) before qualitative data were elicited via semi-structured interviews (n = 16). Descriptive statistical analyses were conducted on non-parametric data, with Mann-Whitney U tests being used to explore differences between groups. Deductive thematic analysis identified three themes and five sub-themes. Participants valued SRH education and were confident to provide it. They reported having access to a range of resources but not the time or awareness to use these resources to greatest advantage. Participants believed that barriers to providing SRH education, such as non-specialist teachers and students not choosing Health as a subject in the later years of schooling can be overcome with teacher education and training. Findings paint a somewhat positive picture of SRH education in Australia including life-changing learning experiences for students, a range of useful resources available to teachers, and the potential of SRH education when staff and school leadership recognise it as a priority.

Health and wellness influencers are often criticised as dubious and unqualified sources of health education, presenting highly curated, commercialised lifestyles via social media platforms such as Instagram. While these critiques are important, they also present a narrow reading of complex digital cultures. In this paper, we examine a digital ethnographic case study of Australian entrepreneur and health influencer, Ashy Bines. We argue that Bines' pedagogical expertise is made possible through her seemingly contradictory media practices and messages, whereby she cultivates an 'authentic' personal experience for her followers. We frame these productive tensions in her social media practices as a form of 'influencer pedagogy' -- the indirect, mediated processes of education produced through relatable interactions between influencers and their followers on social media platforms. We do not assess whether influencer pedagogy is 'good' or 'appropriate' but instead explore how influencers like Bines cultivate authenticity and expertise, and thus pedagogical potential.

School-based sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education is often reported as being inadequate and/or inconsistent. The aims of this systematic review were to synthesise teachers' perspectives on providing SRH education and their opinions about the support required to provide high-quality SRH education in primary and secondary schools. Seven international databases were searched for qualitative studies published since 2010 that reported on teachers' experiences providing SRH education in such settings. Of the 2478 studies identified, 17 met the inclusion criteria. Study quality was assessed using the Mixed-Methods Appraisal Tool. Meta-ethnography was used for data analyses and syntheses. Findings signal how SRH education varied within and between schools. The adequacy of SRH education was linked to i) teachers' confidence to provide such education, ii) school policies and environment, and iii) the priority given to SRH education. Within each of these themes were facilitators or barriers to the provision of good quality SRH education. Facilitators positively impacting on school-based SRH education included training (pre-service and in-service) for all teachers, supportive school environments, and the promotion of understanding of the importance of SRH within schools and in the broader context.

Notions of creativity are increasingly central to educational scholarship and policies, but few studies attend to the intersection between "Health and Physical Education" (H/PE) and "creativity." In this paper we explore the literature on creativity in education and identify how creativity is represented across a broad spectrum of enquiry yet limited in relation to specifically H/PE. Writing from an Australian context, we examine how the key ideas and propositions from the "Australian Curriculum for Health and Physical Education" and the "Critical and Creative Thinking" capability raise important questions regarding the social emergence of educative creative purpose and potential in H/PE. We outline the utility of a 'creative ecologies' conceptual framework to consider contemporary practices in H/PE, and apply this to two purposively selected resources; to showcase their contextual eminence for creative learning in H/PE pedagogy and practice. The first resource, "Phenomenom!," was funded by Horticultural Innovation Australia to develop food literacy and is linked to cross-curriculum learning outcomes. The second resource, "Fitter. Faster. Better," is a St Martin's Youth drama-arts performance where students were prompted to design and perform a fitness programme for adults. Utilising the creative ecologies framework we illustrate the complexity of interconnected creative processes in H/PE as a series of networked elements and cultural flows (policies, practices, products, process, material environments, and partnerships). This framework is then used to identify how the two educational resources exemplify and open up a socially creative practice in both H/PE and everyday life. Our theoretical developments offer new ways to identify, design and enact quality creative and contemporary socio-cultural H/PE curriculum within a broader creative ecology.

Purpose: Health education still tends to be dominated by an approach designed to achieve individual behaviour change through the provision of knowledge to avoid risk. In contrast, a critical inquiry approach educates children and young people to develop their capacity to engage critically with knowledge, through reasoning, problem solving and challenging taken for granted assumptions, including the socially critical approach which investigates the impact of social and economic inequalities on, for example, health status and cultural understandings. The purpose of this paper is to explore the conditions of possibility for a socially critical approach to health education in schools. It examines the ways in which preservice health and physical education (HPE) teachers talked about their experiences of health education during their school-based practicum. Design/methodology/approach: In total, 13 preservice HPE teachers who were about to graduate with a Bachelor of Health and Physical Education from a university in New South Wales, Australia were interviewed for the study. Five group interviews and one individual interview were conducted. The interviews were coded for themes and interpreted drawing on a biopedagogical theoretical framework as a way of understanding the salience of particular forms of knowledge in health education, how these are promoted and with what effects for how living healthily is understood. Findings: The HPETE students talked with some certainty about the purpose of health education as a means to improve the health of young people--a certainty afforded by a medico-scientific view of health imbued with individualised, risk discourses. This purpose was seen as being achieved through using pedagogies, particularly those involving technology, that produced learning activities that were "engaging" and "relevant" for young people. Largely absent from their talk was evidence that they valued or practiced a socially critical approach to health education. Practical implications: This paper has practical implications for designing health education teacher programmes that are responsive to expectations that contemporary school health education curricula employ a critical inquiry approach. Originality/value: This paper addresses an empirical gap in the literature on the conditions of possibility for a socially critical approach to health education. It is proposed that rather than challenging HPE preservice teachers' desires to improve the lives of young people, teacher educators need to work more explicitly within an educative approach that considers social contexts, health inequalities and the limitations of a behaviour change model.

The "neoliberal turn" in the higher education sector has received significant intellectual scrutiny in recent times. This scrutiny, led by many established academics working within the sector, has highlighted the negative repercussions for teaching and research staff, often referred to as the "academic precariat" due to their tenuous employment prospects within an increasingly market-driven system. This critique of the modern university can also inadvertently position academics as either resisting or complying with neoliberal governance. This does not adequately account for the nuanced and poetic ways in which professional, personal and gendered subjectivities are formulated, intertwined and negotiated. In this paper we draw on the six overlapping yet distinct narratives of the six female authors, all early-career academics from Australia. We capture and analyse these narratives through collective biography, a qualitative methodology underpinned by the work of Davies and Gannon and others, that helps us to move beyond the "good vs. bad", "resistance vs. compliance" debates about academic life. We identify aspects of our lived subjectivities that offer rupture through poetic and hopeful ways of understanding how academics construct and negotiate their lives.

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses articles within the issue on topics including approach to health knowledge with young people, role of photo-voice as a method of understanding young people's lives, and movement practices in physical education.

In this study we interrogate the ways nutrition and health have become increasingly influential to children's everyday life practices and conceptualisations of food. We challenge the orthodoxy of meanings afforded to food that draw a distinct binary between "good"/"bad" or "healthy"/"unhealthy"; ideas widely promulgated in health texts, popular culture and pedagogical practice. Whilst these dominant medico-scientific discourses are pervasive in accounts of food, they are not the only meanings that permeate the popular cultural and pedagogical landscape; for instance, there has been a burgeoning interest in culinary cooking programmes and food sustainability in recent years. In this study, we use Foucault's notion of biopower to trace the various ways food is governed through interventions; pedagogised by popular culture; and, taken up in school policies and practices. We draw on interviews with 32 Year five students from Australian public and private primary schools. Not surprisingly, the analysis demonstrates how students reiterated food as a practice of "temptation" and "risk", similar to nutrition-based knowledge of food circulated in popular culture and health programmes. This suggests that other meanings of food are often socially and pedagogically marginalised. We argue that because of the perceived risk attached to food practices, these young people see food as an object of guilt and a reason for self-surveillance. After discussing the results we consider some of the consequences for young peoples' sense of self and their relationships with food in every day life, particularly in light of the perilous effects of deeming food as "good"/"bad" from such a young age. As a point of departure we explore some of the subjugated knowledges that can be brought to the table of food pedagogies in schools in order to bring about a broader assemblage of food "truths".

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.

Health and wellness influencers are often criticised as dubious and unqualified sources of health education, presenting highly curated, commercialised lifestyles via social media platforms such as Instagram. While these critiques are important, they also present a narrow reading of complex digital cultures. In this paper, we examine a digital ethnographic case study of Australian entrepreneur and health influencer, Ashy Bines. We argue that Bines' pedagogical expertise is made possible through her seemingly contradictory media practices and messages, whereby she cultivates an 'authentic' personal experience for her followers. We frame these productive tensions in her social media practices as a form of 'influencer pedagogy' – the indirect, mediated processes of education produced through relatable interactions between influencers and their followers on social media platforms. We do not assess whether influencer pedagogy is 'good' or 'appropriate' but instead explore how influencers like Bines cultivate authenticity and expertise, and thus pedagogical potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we draw on interview data with three Vietnamese women to explore how categorical difference works through the ways that these women constitute themselves and are constituted as academics and doctoral students in Australian universities. Our analysis focuses on the arrangement of things that make neoliberalism an inexhaustive force, working via affective connections with other social, historical and material conditions in producing differences. Drawing on the Deleuzian concept of assemblage and contemporary feminist views of affect, we map moments when things come together via their affective capacities to produce identity categories, structures, binaries and power relations in Australian neoliberal universities. Our theorisation of categorical difference as affective assemblage is helpful in understanding the production of differences as affective arrangements of matter and meaning that are linked not only to contemporary neoliberal practices and regimes but also to historical pasts that are often Eurocentric, racialised and conventionally gendered. Given that the categorical difference is affective and contingent, we suggest that it can be surmounted when any of us, at any moment, can affect others via our capacities to think outside ordered systems no matter how powerful they might be in the thoughts of those engaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many young people in Australia leave secondary school with little understanding of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). This study aims to describe Australian teachers' experiences when providing SRH education, map their use of resources, and explore barriers and strategies to increase students' skills and confidence to protect their SRH. Quantitative data were gathered via an online questionnaire (n = 189) before qualitative data were elicited via semi-structured interviews (n = 16). Descriptive statistical analyses were conducted on non-parametric data, with Mann-Whitney U tests being used to explore differences between groups. Deductive thematic analysis identified three themes and five sub-themes. Participants valued SRH education and were confident to provide it. They reported having access to a range of resources but not the time or awareness to use these resources to greatest advantage. Participants believed that barriers to providing SRH education, such as non-specialist teachers and students not choosing Health as a subject in the later years of schooling can be overcome with teacher education and training. Findings paint a somewhat positive picture of SRH education in Australia including life-changing learning experiences for students, a range of useful resources available to teachers, and the potential of SRH education when staff and school leadership recognise it as a priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School-based sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education is often reported as being inadequate and/or inconsistent. The aims of this systematic review were to synthesise teachers' perspectives on providing SRH education and their opinions about the support required to provide high-quality SRH education in primary and secondary schools. Seven international databases were searched for qualitative studies published since 2010 that reported on teachers' experiences providing SRH education in such settings. Of the 2478 studies identified, 17 met the inclusion criteria. Study quality was assessed using the Mixed-Methods Appraisal Tool. Meta-ethnography was used for data analyses and syntheses. Findings signal how SRH education varied within and between schools. The adequacy of SRH education was linked to i) teachers' confidence to provide such education, ii) school policies and environment, and iii) the priority given to SRH education. Within each of these themes were facilitators or barriers to the provision of good quality SRH education. Facilitators positively impacting on school-based SRH education included training (pre-service and in-service) for all teachers, supportive school environments, and the promotion of understanding of the importance of SRH within schools and in the broader context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notions of creativity are increasingly central to educational scholarship and policies, but few studies attend to the intersection between Health and Physical Education (H/PE) and creativity. In this paper we explore the literature on creativity in education and identify how creativity is represented across a broad spectrum of enquiry yet limited in relation to specifically H/PE. Writing from an Australian context, we examine how the key ideas and propositions from the Australian Curriculum for Health and Physical Education and the Critical and Creative Thinking capability raise important questions regarding the social emergence of educative creative purpose and potential in H/PE. We outline the utility of a 'creative ecologies' conceptual framework to consider contemporary practices in H/PE, and apply this to two purposively selected resources; to showcase their contextual eminence for creative learning in H/PE pedagogy and practice. The first resource, Phenomenom!, was funded by Horticultural Innovation Australia to develop food literacy and is linked to cross-curriculum learning outcomes. The second resource, Fitter. Faster. Better, is a St Martin's Youth drama-arts performance where students were prompted to design and perform a fitness programme for adults. Utilising the creative ecologies framework we illustrate the complexity of interconnected creative processes in H/PE as a series of networked elements and cultural flows (policies, practices, products, process, material environments, and partnerships). This framework is then used to identify how the two educational resources exemplify and open up a socially creative practice in both H/PE and everyday life. Our theoretical developments offer new ways to identify, design and enact quality creative and contemporary socio-cultural H/PE curriculum within a broader creative ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘neoliberal turn’ in the higher education sector has received significant intellectual scrutiny in recent times. This scrutiny, led by many established academics working within the sector, has highlighted the negative repercussions for teaching and research staff, often referred to as the ‘academic precariat’ due to their tenuous employment prospects within an increasingly market-driven system. This critique of the modern university can also inadvertently position academics as either resisting or complying with neoliberal governance. This does not adequately account for the nuanced and poetic ways in which professional, personal and gendered subjectivities are formulated, intertwined and negotiated. In this paper we draw on the six overlapping yet distinct narratives of the six female authors, all early-career academics from Australia. We capture and analyse these narratives through collective biography, a qualitative methodology underpinned by the work of Davies and Gannon and others, that helps us to move beyond the ‘good vs. bad’, ‘resistance vs. compliance’ debates about academic life. We identify aspects of our lived subjectivities that offer rupture through poetic and hopeful ways of understanding how academics construct and negotiate their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]