Health Promotion Education : Between Moral Imperative, Heartfelt Desire and Free Choice

Abstract

The paper discusses the implications of health promotion in education. The paper is based on my PhD project entitled “Health promotion education seen through a power/knowledge and subjectification perspective” (in prep). The PhD project explores how professional health promotion skills are conceived in a specific educational setting; namely the Danish social and health education programme. Here, health promotion is formally conceived as a qualification aimed at citizens and patients - and not at the students themselves. However, as the paper will demonstrate, conceptions of student’s and citizen’s health, health habits and health concerns merge within the educational framework. Through empirical findings, based on 20 qualitative interviews and participatory observation studies from four schools, I show that there are widespread ideas, among teachers as well as students, that professional health promotion workers should ideally act as health promotion role models. This claim leads to a series of educational and morally anchored dilemmas and challenges. Inspired by Foucault and others who have developed this line of thinking (eg. Signild Vallgårde) health promotion is viewed as a heartfelt self-technology that requires the subject to take on the ideology and practices prescribed by health promotion in order to conduct themselves and others to better health. But where there is power and attempted government, there is also resistance. The paper will investigate and discuss the resistance strategies that teachers and students take up when they (from different perspectives) engage in the educational practices of shaping and becoming professional health promotion workers