Exploring senior secondary health education in Aotearoa New Zealand: A cabinet of curiosities

Abstract

Senior secondary Health Education in Aotearoa New Zealand is somewhat of a curiosity: Often misunderstood and certainly under-researched. The school subject is uniquely placed internationally; one which can contribute to the national school qualification and one which shares equal status with any other subject in The New Zealand Curriculum at the senior secondary level.

The purpose of my inquiry was to investigate how learning in senior secondary Health Education in Aotearoa New Zealand might contribute to our twenty-first century world. Embracing Barad’s intra-action and Braidotti’s affirmative ethics, I engaged with posthuman and feminist new materialist theoretical underpinnings. I produced data by conducting in-depth interviews with 25 people who had studied the subject to the final level of schooling in Aotearoa New Zealand. I analysed the data post-qualitatively; with a bricoleur approach which encompassed diffractive, narrative, and assemblage-focused analytics as I thought with theory to encounter the unexpected, the puzzling, that which can often be obscured from view, and that made me wonder.

I discovered a wide range of insights into senior secondary Health Education, encompassing structural issues facing the subject, materialities of the Health Education environment, pedagogical arrangements used in the subject, and learning outcomes experienced by students of the subject. I connected the findings to the field of critical health literacy and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD’s) global competence capabilities needed for people to thrive in a rapidly changing, globalised, and culturally diverse twenty-first century world.

My inquiry sheds light upon new, previously obscured insights into Health Education, enabling both me and my readers to open the drawers of the Health Education cabinet, look inside, and see something new, unexpected, curious, and wonderful. As a result, I hope to plant the seed to enable scholars and practitioners across the fields of health and education to embrace new ways of thinking about what Health Education in school settings can do, as well as what Health Education can become, if it is given the opportunity to flourish.