Understanding policy: why health education policy is important and why it does not appear to work
Abstract
Drawing on research investigating the impact of health imperatives around obesity, diet and exercise on the actions of teachers and pupils in schools, this paper offers a reflexive account of the relationships between the ‘noise’ of obesity discourse in the public domain, policies forged to tackle health issues and the realities of teaching in schools. Our analyses suggest that intersections of bio-policies, body pedagogies and human agents forge assemblages of meaning that frame and regulate but cannot determine either teachers' or young people's lives. Teachers and pupils experience the capriciousness of policies as they flow through specific school contexts and intersect with ‘local’ institutional cultures, expectations and interests. We suggest that Basil Bernstein's concepts and poststructural social theory prove useful when addressing how the aforementioned processes are emplaced, enacted and embodied.
Policy and social reproduction
It's certainly increasing, or has increased. In the last 10 years there's been a much higher profile but I'm not actually sure in practical terms that that's actually getting through to the chalk face and we're actually able to do things about it and address those issues. (Martin, head of PE, Bentley Grammar School)
It is axiomatic that research should be dispassionate. To this end we reflect in this paper upon nuances and ambivalences in our data, such as Martin's reference to obesity, above, that highlight the complexity of policy processes focussed upon nurturing particular forms of embodied consciousness. Like many others, we have over recent years asserted the pervasive influence of obesity discourse (public health messages about healthy diets, weight loss and exercise) in western societies, documenting mostly negative effects of its underlying ‘perfection’ and ‘performance’ principles and codes on the actions of teachers and pupils in schools (Evans & Davies, 2004). In so doing, we have tended to emphasise the damaging effects of health policy while, in this paper, we turn more reflexively towards lines of inquiry previously not fully explored or developed. These concern complicated processes of policy recontextualisation, which have tended to get lost in analyses in our previous work of young women experiencing disordered eating (Evans et al., 2008a).1 The latter study presented relationships between policy discourse and subjectivity as policies having demonstrably direct and negative affects, contingently mediated by families, peer groups and popular pedagogies purveyed through TV, film imagery, IT and so forth. To test this view's adequacy (also see Rich, 2011) we now wish to reflect on data more recently collected and analysed that on the surface belies our former claims as to the authority of ‘official’ health messages and their influence on young people's lives. Such ‘dislocations’ are important, constituting spaces in pedagogical processes in which alternative practices and identities that are not always radical, resistant or progressive are to be found.
Our data derive from an ESRC-funded study of the impact of ‘health imperatives’ (relating to diet, exercise and weight) on the lives of young people in schools in the UK. The research explored the views of school-age children using questionnaire and interview techniques to interrogate what cultural resources were being used to make sense of health messages transmitted in schools. Interviews with school staff, e.g., teachers of physical education (PE) and personal social and health education (PSHE) were also conducted over the course of a year to gain understanding of how messages deriving from official public discourse and policy around obesity and health were being interpreted and enacted, formally and informally, in context. The study was located in eight mainstream, state-funded and private (fee paying) schools: three secondary (age 11–18 and 11–16), two middle (age 11–14) and three primary, in rural, suburban and inner city areas of middle England. Empirical detail on each of the school settings and the voices of the pupils therein is provided elsewhere (DePian, 2010; Evans et al., 2011). In this paper the voices of teachers and pupils from three of those schools, Huntington (a state-funded, 11–14, middle school), Fielding (a state-funded, co-educational, 11– 18 comprehensive) and Bentley (a 11–18 private, i.e., fee paying, grammar school) are brought to the fore in order to highlight both the policy recontextualising processes we attest and to assess the strengths and limits of our previous endeavours to conceptualise them. Together these schools selectively illustrate key ways in which ubiquitous health imperatives are interpreted and recontextualised through distinctive pedagogical relationships peculiar to each setting, facilitating opportunities for the development of particular forms of embodiment and subjectivity.
The embodiment of policy
In recent years many have attempted to document ways in which liberal, individualist principles and values in health policies generate particular forms of ‘body pedagogy’ and embodied subjectivity (e.g., Gard & Wright, 2005; Evans et al., 2008a; Wright & Harwood, 2009). We have pointed towards the ill-effects of obesity discourse, especially on the identities of vulnerable young women (Rich et al., 2004; Evans et al., 2008a; Rich, 2011), as have Halse et al. (2008), among others. But just how influential has it been and what is the nature of its ‘impact’? Having talked of fabrication and exaggeration on the part of proponents of ‘obesity discourse’, has our attention to the flow and assemblage of discursive practices associated with it (Rich, 2011 2010b) unintentionally helped attune only to particular and perhaps limiting features of policy processes? For sure, obesity discourse can and does have far reaching consequences for some young people, especially when mediated unthinkingly and uncritically by parents, teachers, health workers and others, manifesting itself in forms of severe body dissatisfaction, troubled subjectivities and, in some cases, dangerous weight loss (Evans et al., 2008a; Halse et al., 2008). And in alerting others to the painful experiences that many of the young women depicted in our previous work had experienced, we sought to highlight ethical and moral features of policy deserving careful attention.
In the schools we have studied more recently we have again encountered ‘troubled bodies’ among a very much larger and more varied sample of young people, most of whom, however, appear to demonstrate either a more ambivalent, critically resistant or apathetic relationship with obesity discourse that seems to have had little obvious impact on how they view their own bodies, exercise or diets. The relationship between their subjectivities and the imperatives of government or school health policy can best be described as tenuous or loosely coupled, albeit always strongly framed by wider media discourses about obesity and health, as we see below. While revealing both that health education initiatives in schools could be generative of deeply ‘troubled bodies’, producing a few (but significant) individuals who seemed to think nothing of themselves and were plagued by its practices and prescriptions, as well as some ‘emboldened ones’ who profited from its expectations, our larger scale data drawn from a variety of school establishments point firmly to a majority of young people appearing either indifferent to or critically dismissive of messages transmitted through school ‘body pedagogies’ (Evans et al., 2008a; Shilling, 2008). In our terms they are ‘insouciant bodies’, seemingly adopting a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward the health messages they heard inside school (see De Pian, 2010). Obesity discourse and the body pedagogies and performative modalities that it has been depicted as engendering, clearly did not determine how they thought or behaved. Others have documented similar ‘non effects’ (sic). For example, Rail (2009), in her study of Canadian youth's discursive construction of health in the context of obesity discourse, reported that the 13–16-year-olds that she interviewed in her study ‘can speak health as they construct it, but they seldom do health. Institutions are compelling the youthful body to obey, they are “territorialising” it but the body seems to retaliate’ (p. 152, emphasis in original). These findings call for further nuance in our theoretical position and earlier claims, such that in totally pedagogised societies (TPS) and schools, health messages are not only inescapable and deeply intrusive, part of a new form of governance, surveying and monitoring all aspects of our lives but also affecting us ‘all’ deeply (Evans et al., 2008a, 2008b).
The affects of policy
It has to be acknowledged that looking for ‘impact’ in such obvious places as change in curriculum content or pedagogical mode or other manifest behaviors, is an incomplete focus if we want to understand how social reproduction occurs. In social democracies the ‘authoritative allocation of values’ (Easton, 1953) is unlikely to be achieved through such means alone. Obesity policies (such as those contained, for example, in the Department for Children, Schools and Families and Department of Health [DfE&S & DfH] 2010 Healthy Schools initiative, or those constructed by the schools themselves) cannot simply control or determine the social interactions, transactions and body pedagogies on which its intended outcomes depend, so that understanding ‘impact’, requires us to look beyond the more obvious effects on pupils' or teachers behaviour to the subtle but potentially more intrusive psychosocial affects of policy on their lives.
Clough (2007, p. 17) has claimed that late-capitalism has ushered in a biopolitical shift toward what Deleuze has called ‘societies of control’ (White, 2008). As Clough (2003) explains in an earlier article, ‘societies of control’ target ‘not subjects whose behaviour expresses internalised social norms’ but ‘aims at a never-ending modulation of moods, capacities, affects, potentialities, assembled in genetic codes, identification numbers, ratings profiles and preference listings; that is to say, bodies of data and information (including the human body as information and data)’ (p. 360). It may be that such a focus can, indeed, provide more complex purchase on how we might conceptualise obesity policy and the way surveillance operates and circulates in schools (see Rail, 2009; Fraser et al., 2010). Rich (2011), for example, has drawn upon Haggerty and Ericson's (2000) notion of the ‘surveillant assemblage’ to examine how surveillant practices in schools are part of meanings constituted by a range of agencies, institutions, bodies and socio-technological developments. Far from there being a clear, linear relation between regulation and subjectivity, child subjects are constituted through a complex series of rhizomatic flows. Children's bodies function and are constructed within assemblages of meaning that circulate through ‘relations of affect’ and are lived out through feelings of pleasure or shame, guilt and anxiety about the presence and value of their bodies.
Attention to the ‘affects’ of obesity discourse and related policy on the lives of teachers and young people in schools has, indeed, revealed a certain homogeneity of ‘effect’ across countries, states and school systems, that is to say in how young people and adults now think and speak about health (see Rail, 2009), due not to changes in the content of health education curricula but, rather, principles that regulate communication in classrooms and wider school social settings and spaces where languages of performativity and perfection prevail (Evans et al., 2008a; Wright & Harwood, 2009). Communication through both cognitive and emotive modalities is, indeed, potentially generative of certain ‘moods’ and attitudes, even though we cannot claim that policy, even when considered as a complex surveillant assemblage, is determinate of behaviour and thought of the majority of teachers' and pupils' actions either in or outside schools. While regarding ‘effects’ in this way presages recognition that the ‘moods’ invoked in processes of policy formation, enactment and transaction are diverse, we still need recognise that they are as likely to induce insouciance, indifference, resistance and contempt as they are of acceptance and consent toward ‘late-capitalism's’ controlling efforts. If concentration on them fails to register how these are transacted through the social relations and contingencies of institutional life in complex organisational settings, we are once again likely to be left with a rather incomplete, limited, linear and over determined view of the relationships between policy, education and subjectivity and late-capitalism's dehumanising a/effects. As we see below, only registering the complexity of policy both as discursive act and complex social process emplaced, enacted and embodied in time, place and space, can begin to offer purchase on how and why different affects/moods, relations and outcomes (not least ‘insouciance’), including those underpinning policy/practice dislocations, may occur (see also Braun et al., 2010). Building on our previous study then, our interest here is to better understand the complex and multiple ways in which obesity discourse is variously being relayed, recontextualised and experienced by more diverse populations, communities and individuals, including teachers and pupils in school (see Burrows, 2010; Lee & Macdonald, 2010). We claim that the manner in which policies are produced and relayed through the social relations of schooling emplaced and enacted (Pink, 2011) within specific locations, organisational contexts and distributions of resource may be as important as their intended discursive messages in determining ‘effects’. In short, the inactions, indifferences, resistances and coolness/insouciance to be observed in our data below appear to be yet another example of how policy processes may frame and regulate, but do no more than marginally control action and thought or guarantee specified outcomes.
Mediating policy
‘Enhancement pedagogies’
Huntington is a large, state funded co-ed, ‘comprehensive’ middle school for pupils age 11–14, mostly from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds, located in a semi-rural area of England. The school had enthusiastically embraced the imperatives of contemporary health discourse to change children's and parents' lifestyles by lowering their risks of becoming obese or overweight. In our terms (Evans et al., 2008a) its commitment to body-centred ‘perfection code’ (Evans & Davies, 2004) principles of Health Education (HE) was ‘full on’. Its PSHE coordinator and others centrally involved in HE, such as staff in Food Technology and PE, enthusiastically embraced the imperative to deal with obesity, a commitment commonplace among their peers in England and elsewhere (see Burrows et al., 2009; Wright & Harwood, 2009). Having achieved ‘Healthy School Status’ (DfE&S & DfH, 2010) ‘health’ was defined as everyone's concern, as something to be tackled everywhere within and beyond the school, entailing that diets and healthy eating were encouraged and carefully monitored at school meal times using, for example, the latest fingerprint monitoring technology. Exercise was vigorously promoted in and outside school. As a privileged and privileging text, HE as obesity intervention was accorded time, space and resource in the curriculum, articulated in a language of lifestyle change, commitment to good diets and lots of exercise for weight loss. Pupils and their parents were expected to embrace an ethic of self-amelioration and regulation, in and outside school, pursuing health ‘enhancement’ through educative alignment between the school's privileging text, associated official pedagogic practice (i.e., central government sanctioned policy) and family and peer group practices.
Children in this school (see Evans et al., 2011), perhaps unsurprisingly given the schools commitment to ‘health’, seemed acutely aware of obesity imperatives, their body's presence in time and place and expectations made of it. They were also abundantly aware of public messages circulating on TV and in magazines and websites telling them, not without contradiction, to eat less, exercise more and lose weight. They constantly monitored and managed their body weight, assessing and defining themselves and others within ambiguities, contradictions and tensions of assemblages of meaning around weight, exercise and diet that structured their lives. Their subjectivities refracted such relationships. Tour questionnaire data suggested that the majority of boys and girls defined and perceived health in terms of weight loss, size and shape. In this sense their ‘mood’ could be said to have been altered in line with the imperatives of contemporary health discourse. However, even so, the relationship between school expectations and those of its pupils was neither linear nor unproblematic. We have elsewhere documented (Evans et al., 2011) that in the masculine sub-culture of some its pupils, for example, of Charlie's working-class family and peers, size and weight meant power and authority, offering protection, a more secure presence amongst male peers. But they represented valuable social capital to be gained only at cost of allegiance to his school's official practices and potentially his position as a ‘good pupil’ in relation to its privileging text. Achieving his preferred shape required eating more of the kind of food that he hoped would make him bigger (‘a McDonald's’), contravening school and his own healthy eating ideals. The authority of his family's cultural values therefore positioned him in a particularly problematic relationship to the official pedagogic practices of the school. Though he conceded that disciplined action was required to achieve his and school's desired state in relation to size, getting bigger had priority as the physical capital acquired would confirm his commitment to family values and culture and reduce potential risks of bullying in and outside school. For Charlie, as for others in this context, then, family dispositions, proclivities and cultural values mediated his interpretations of school texts, shaping the possibilities for him ‘to enact the kinds of institutional practices endorsed within and outside the school’ (Burrows & McCormack, 2009, p. xx).
Girls in this context mediate health messages rather differently. For example, Milly, like Charlie, saw her body as a source of physical capital offering immediate protection, status and distinction amongst peers and longer-term gain. Milly however, was emboldened by obesity discourse believing that her ‘natural attributes’, tallness and perceived good looks not only won her immediate status and position among peers but would also facilitate realisation of longer-term aspirations to become a fashion model. Like many girls in our study, however, although she desired slenderness, Milly was critical of the media's (TV and magazine) celebration of over-thin (‘size zero’) models. She wanted to be slender but ‘not too thin’ (see, Rich et al., 2010a, 2010b). ‘I want to stay like quite skinny but not like too skinny like size zero or anything like that. I think it would be good to be just like a normal size’ (p. 6). Milly's female peers and school accepted the importance of ‘weight loss’ through correct/good diets, exercise and healthy eating regimes, official codes having become firmly embedded in their desires and the pedagogical practices of their families.
For these children, like many others at Huntington, weight issues were lived reality, an ongoing, constant struggle either to be slender, while avoiding being ‘too thin’, or ‘big’ but not too fat. The notions that as individuals and families they were at ‘risk’ of ill-health and constituted health risks were firmly embedded in their lives. They ‘read’ media imagery and official school discourse cerebrally and attuned it to the cultures and pedagogies of their homes. Awareness of their own physicality and the status and authority they exacted from their body's geography in time, place and space was radically heightened by the body pedagogies of the school to become sources of some psychological tension and turmoil as they dealt with tensions and contradictions between the expectations of home and school and the messages they received. For example, Charlie acknowledged his susceptibility to fatness, a risk to health, but celebrated its cultural propriety within his family and, thus, had no choice but to be both compliant and resistant to his school's privileging text. He reported having once been very depressed as he ‘flip flopped’ psychologically over these issues (Burrows & McCormack, 2009). In such circumstances, classificatory relationships between ‘sacred’ (official school knowledge) and profane (local) knowledge intersect, forging bricolage corporealities and hybrid subjectivities—amalgams of contradictory/ambivalent/ambiguous attitudes and dispositions towards one's own and others' bodies propriety with respect to size, shape and weight (Evans et al., 2011).
‘Restricted/reparative’ pedagogies
basically when I started my role it was a matter of trying to develop these links with outside agencies and.. .you know, push forward the agenda about smoking and push forward the agenda about erm.. .teenage pregnancies. (HE coordinator)
they [referring to women and girls especially] don't have this concept that they can achieve, that they can go on, that they can do better erm.. .and it gets very wound up in their self-consciousness and very wound up in, you know.. .I've got.. .got to fit in with something. (HE coordinator)2
people round here they can't pay for enough like sports, yeah, you just go onto the field, but its dangerous these days so most parents don't want them going out on the streets and then so… .The only safe thing to do is to go to an actual place that's indoors or something and then play there, but children pretty much have to pay for themselves. If you get a paper round you can do it, it's just, you're just not rich enough to be able to do it these days. Everything's going up in price so you can't do it. (Rory)
The visceral pleasures derived from fast food and the security provided while eating it in spaces/places relatively independent of adult and potentially threatening peer intervention were important resources rationally sought and valued as ways of dealing with problematic aspects of their lives. Lack of money, perceived risk, parental concern and the failings of school and wider social systems all underpinned their decisions to eat ‘unhealthy’ food and exercise little. These were internalised as expressions of either their own or their school's inadequacy. The risks, especially for girls, were seen as severely prohibitive. They knew how they should act/exercise and what they should eat ‘ideally’ but costs, tastes and perceived risks overrode all other cerebral concerns—'chicken and chips, it's better than healthy foods' (Rory).
larger people are much more caring and stuff and, you find that's a good thing because if you didn't have them then you wouldn't have anyone to turn to and therefore have characteristics that are different. (Becky)
At Fielding, relationships between school health discourse and peer groups and popular health imperatives were strongly classified. School privileged direct intervention in what were seen to be the pathological, impoverished lives of children invited to involve themselves in seeking out or being given advice on matters such as pregnancy or drugs when and as required, not as matter of routine. This prevention and protection from specific ills of local working-class life was experienced by pupils as problematic. It constituted deviation from public health agendas having greater authority privileged and sanctioned in the wider public domain, alienating and abjectifying them as having no escape from the material conditions of their lives, neither giving them ‘enough’ nor the ‘right’ health knowledge. It did not pressurise them sufficiently to escape their environment. Their bodies were thus made inescapably abject, in need of correction and repair but with no real possibility of achieving escape from the adversities and contingencies of community and home, the well meaning intentions of their school and teachers seen as another instance of powerful others not caring sufficiently, of failing to deal with the priority concerns that these children saw sanctioned in the media's attention to obesity. Thus they constructed their subjectivities through their ‘failure’, their inability to acquire and display the corporeality, the physical capital, in terms of body shape, exercise levels and good diets that could command recognition, reward and release from the limitations of their class, communities and families.
Enrichment pedagogies
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- Interviewer
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- Do you have any understanding of how staff feels about delivering PSHE?
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- Martin
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- I think it would be fair to say that the vast majority of staff is uncomfortable delivering it.
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- Interviewer
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- Could you describe how obesity within the media has had an impact on this school, if at all?
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- Martin
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- I think it's fair to say that we wouldn't view obesity as being an issue in this particular school.
Martin believed that his school's clientele, by virtue of their social class position, were not ‘at risk’ of the obesity epidemic. Health education, relatively speaking, was thus positioned as relatively inessential and insubstantial in the formal curriculum but had significant presence in ‘hidden form’, teachers articulating it through a performance discourse, as something (a corporeality) achieved indirectly through being actively involved in sport. Health was assumed to have indirect relationships to a rich fabric of opportunities routinely available to pupils at the school and considered an aspect of lifestyles already lived, not merely anticipated, projected, talked of or sought after, as was the case in our other schools. Health was not only the product of opportunities for sport in and outside school but structured into the fabric of children's lives, defined by absences, such as removal of vending machines and salt from school meals. In this curriculum of distinction health (body) knowledge was not taught but assumed, children learning informally and subconsciously of their disengagement with the profanities of vending machines and poor quality food. There was assumed contiguity between the school's policies and those of its pupils' families. Ample sport and leisure opportunities offered cultural enrichment, a continuation of ‘the making up’ of the middle class child (Vincent & Ball, 2007, p. 1): ‘Yeah, I've been brought up to have quite a healthy lifestyle. Me and my sister have been brought up to do tennis. We've always been encouraged to do a sporty activity and play for a team' (Alex). Health was a consequence of lifestyles in which leisure and work are closely integrated and in which opportunities for both were assumed.
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- Amit
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- I weighed myself like three weeks ago, I do like loads of exercise and then like a week ago or two weeks ago after I weigh myself to see how much I've lost and then I get like a present or something if I've lost weight, if I've put weight on I get told off.
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- Interviewer
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- What sort of present?
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- Amit
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- Like a fiver.
Amit, against the wishes of his parents, wanted to put weight on, ‘but not like a fat person.. .someone who doesn't try to do anything, someone who you can tell by their face is not happy in themselves’. Even so, he and others knew that if they ate (‘bad foods’) on ‘chip Friday’ they could ‘burn it off straight away’ (Amit).
These children's subjectivities were, relatively speaking, neither constrained by economic cost, lack of opportunity, fear of injury, nor contamination by the profane things of life. This distance from necessity and ‘others’ cultures perpetuated caricatures, complacency and a level of insensitivity rarely evident amongst pupils in other schools. For these boys, obese and overweight people had neither the discipline nor innate desire to do well, either academically or in health terms: ‘it's just instinct, they'd just think all their friends would do that so I'll do it’ (Jack). The ‘othering’ of obesity/health as a problem was a marked feature of their discourse, simultaneously announcing their own class distinction while abjectifying others for whom they have some concern but no real empathy: ‘they don't live very long’ (Alex), ‘it's easier for them to just go and get fast food’ (Alex), ‘maybe lack of discipline, what they're eating and how they're brought up to eat’ (Jack), ‘They're being dangerous with their lives, they're not staying safe, they're not eating the right foods, they're not trying to do any exercise’ (Ashwin). Thus, they announced a ‘verbal demography’ (Bernstein, 1990, p. 56) of the other. For them, obesity and obese people were abstractions rather than narrative descriptions of their immediate, lived circumstances or of people they knew. They could only surmise as to what it would be like if they were obese or fat by signalling what they wouldn't have, a deficiency, pathology of the person and culture (Evans et al., 2011).
In each of the above schools, teachers and children neither simply read nor internalised ‘health’ messages and meanings either uncritically or merely ‘cognitively’ through disembodied ‘knower structures’ of their culture and class. They were always mediated by their flesh and blood, developing bodies, chemistries, biologies and physiologies in particular circumstances. For the children concerned, at different levels of maturation, the grammar and syntax of their ‘textured feelings’ were strongly influenced, if not determined, by sub-cultural location in specific times and spaces. These young people located their difficulties with peer, academic and public/popular expectations viscerally and relationally in their antecedent experiences of fast changing, sometimes awkward, less than ‘perfect’, bodies over which they had little or no control. They were inescapably subjected both to their own and others' evaluative gaze, at home, leisure and, perhaps especially, amid the pressures of totally pedagogised schools. Engaging in radical body modification involving excessive exercise and eating little food or, alternatively, remaining and ‘celebrating’ ‘fat’, became perfectly rational, morally acceptable goals in avoiding the pain of being ‘othered’, made to feel different, less worthy or excluded, especially for those lacking economic or symbolic means to pursue publicly defined ideal forms of embodiment.
The above analyses not only register the agencies and individuals involved in the making of policies and pedagogies that carry dominant sets of meaning into schools, but also embrace the complex, constantly shifting (class- and culturally- based) relationships that people, like discourses, experience as they ‘circulate through particular arrangements of time and space’ (Walkerdine, 2009, p. 203). Particular policy discourses are ‘made’ and re-made, classified and encoded at various levels of practice, shaping how both acceptable and pathological bodies are brought into being and privileged or alienated in the process. On such logic, comprehensive accounts of ‘failure’ to adhere to or follow public health imperatives would have to address the institutional and social settings that generate the conditions and meaning systems under which success and failure and associated feelings are possible. Our data help in identification and mapping of these dynamics concerning the interpolation and agency of subjectivity. They certainly signal that we can neither simply ‘read subjectivity off from bio political modes of regulation’ (Walkerdine, 2009, p. 201) nor predict ways in which flows of knowledge relating to health, the body and obesity will be read, assimilated and embodied by young people. Our data eschew direct relationship between global health discourse, bio power, policy, subjectivity and social control/reproduction and underline the centrality of agency. Research in primary fields of knowledge production and the policy and practice that they sanction rarely sets out intending to discipline populations, reproduce extant social categories or effect social control, but these may well be the effects of its reductive discursive practices. All the children with whom we were in contact were aware of the imperatives of obesity discourse to be slender, exercise and eat well circulating through the media; all were subject to HE, albeit in forms recontextualised to refract school ideologies and perceived needs, interests and values of the populations they served; and not every child was alienated or disaffected by the messages they received. As Walkerdine (2009) has rightly perceived, globalised knowledge and regulation ‘flow across continents and enter into different relationships and communities of practice.. .they circulate through particular arrangements of time and space’ (pp. 201–202). Multiple agencies, agents and contexts are involved as apparently ubiquitous health messages are mediated and recontextualised, not least by school practices. The way young people relate to them will vary according to the proximity of relationships between their cultural values and predispositions and those prevailing across various sites of practice in and outside schools. And as health knowledge flows across these contexts and is recontextualised in schools it plays a role in reinforcing power relationships, social categories and hierarchies, positioning some as less capable, disciplined, intelligent and civilised, even psychologically ill or underequipped to act in ways that ‘rational, decent people’ know is good for one's health (2).
Conclusion
The above analyses thus rest on a particular view of policy as process not object, inherently social in its making, implementation and purpose, inevitably value laden and loaded with cognitive and affective intent. At least rhetorically, policy texts are designed to inspire action and bring about certain behavioural change, but entail complex, multi layered and uncertain processes, involving many players (see Ozga, 1987; Penney & Evans, 1999; Ball, 2007; Braun et al., 2010; Davies et al., 2010; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010; Ball et al., 2011). Their unintended outcomes are perhaps unsurprising, given the diversity of the institutional settings and multiple social relations involved in their attempted implementation. National government policies on education are recontextualised in schools that have different histories, catchments and clientele and are located in states or LEAs that have different priorities, politics and ways of distributing economic and human resource. The inherent opacity and multiplicity of meanings contained within health policy texts ensure heterogeneity rather than homogeneity of commitment, practise and purpose at the level of adoption or ‘implementation’. As we have seen, the imperatives of obesity discourse relayed in ‘official/government policy’ and wider public discourse on health are no exceptions to such a fate. In all the above cases, as in others, the recontextualisation of obesity policy collided with pedagogies, agendas and other institutional interests and practices already present within the institution, mediating teachers' access to and engagement with the flow of official health policy. They saw their professional actions as constituting best case scenarios, which deviated from ‘official’ health policy agendas, accompanied by feelings that their schools were neither giving pupils ‘enough’ nor always the ‘right’ health knowledge to make a difference in officially defined terms. It was, therefore, perhaps not surprising that they often displaced responsibility for such perceived ineffectiveness onto pupils and their families and that many pupils, refracting their ambivalences while reporting awareness of obesity discourse, seemed largely unaffected by it.
If nothing more, these and all other findings in our recent work underline that the outworkings of obesity discourse have to be emplaced (see Pink, 2011) if they are to be understood; its attendant body pedagogies are made and enacted within specific relations of knowledge production and organisational activity with given clienteles. Teachers' careers and interests are constructed within them and their regulating principles in specific contexts. In schools like Grange Park, in our private and overtly selective sector school, their distinction and school objectives were achieved through engendering high-level student performance in academic subjects and sport and showed exasperation towards the notion of an ‘obesity problem’. In Huntington, our state middle school, teachers made their mark through attention to assembling innovative whole-school PEH and in Fielding, our inner-city community college expressed despondency and impotence in reducing and realigning health discourse to the perceived pathologies of children and their impoverished locales (Evans et al., 2011). In each, recontextualising policy intent to fit contexts of implementation involved dislocation of policy rhetoric from the realities of action in schools and led to transference or displacement of ‘failure’ from schools to society, teachers variously pathologising the lifestyles of working class parents, the work obsession of the middle classes and loss of family structure and ‘traditional’ eating habits. No doubt, such views gave expression of their personal feelings toward health, obesity and weight issues as well as reflecting their location and emplacement in specific institutional contexts with given histories, clienteles and social relations.
Certainly, our data indicate that the intentions of health policy makers may not concur with those of teachers, their schools or those of the pupils they serve. All makers and re-makers of policy are located ‘within different logics of practice and differential power relations.. .they have a prior history, linked to earlier policies, particular individuals and agencies [and] interact with polices in other fields’ (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010, pp. 15–18, emphasis in original) and belong to a wider ensemble of policies reflecting what Bernstein (2001) has called the totally pedagogised society. Their implementation is often not well thought out or adequately funded; that serendipity rules is certainly endorsed by our data. Schools are not, then, simply sites of policy re-contextualisation and reproduction, but of cultural production forged in the dynamic between family and peer group values and those of the teacher and school (Willis 1981; Braun et al., 2010; Burrows, 2010; Lee & Macdonald, 2010). Policies help forge cultures that frame thinking and even the nature of inaction, as we have seen in the data above. Recontextualisation, then, implies and announces cultural production: the ‘collective creative use of discourses, meanings, materials, practices and group processes to explore, understand and creatively occupy particular positions, relations and sets of material possibilities’ (Willis, 1984) sometimes to conservative effect. If we are to avoid over-determined views of the relationships between policy, subjectivity and embodied consciousness, we need ways of looking at them that retain a sense of emplacement, enactment and embodiment, hence a greater sense of selfhood, social relation and discursive practice (see also Braun et al., 2010).
This view presses us to consider how the ‘diverse constituents of place-events become entangled to produce specific configurations’ (Pink, 2011, p. 354), as fore- shadowed in Waller's (1932) classic work on the sociology of teaching. Our data clearly illustrate that health and obesity policies and the body pedagogies they induce are always inexact outcomes of official intent and have multiple, uncertain effects (Evans et al., 2008a, 2008b; Braun et al., 2010). They are also inevitably cognitively and affectively loaded when transacted through the complex array of social relations, institutional contingencies and value systems that help shape them. Policies will inevitably have different outcomes depending on how schools and teachers understand, engage with and operationalise them in specific locations. How teachers interpolate and implement policy and teach ‘health’ and how young people learn through official body pedago, which mediate ways in which ‘policy knowledge’ is experienced, valued and enacted (Braun et al., 2010). Certainly, the above analyses resonate with ideas currently advanced in ‘actor-network theory’ (Fenwick, 2009; Fenwick & Edwards, 2010), an approach that suggests that the enactment of policies within schools is best understood as a fluid, unstable, interpretive process, involving negotiations, conflicts and creativity, rather than as a linear process of prescription and implementation (Braun et al., 2010). Like these authors, we too would advocate the need to recognise the messy complexity of policies as they get reassembled and ‘performed’ within organisational and social relations and alliances that are inevitably, transient, unpredictable and contingent. Policy is always compromised both in its making and enactment, that is to say when recontextualised in contexts where conflicting ideas, experiences, ideals, values and preferences, as well as unequal distributions of material resource, prevail. However, our data also attest that while focussing on policy as emplaced and enacted should be a necessary element of policy analyses, such processes are likely to evade our understanding if the multiple ways in which they are encoded and embodied is left unaddressed. Policies invoke transactions (in the form of curriculum and body pedagogies) that are both cognitively and affectively loaded and thus have potential to either deeply hurt or enhance the careers, health and well being of those teachers, young people and others subjected to them. If nothing more, taking this perspective clearly means that we cannot view school policy (or more broadly government health imperatives from which they derive) as simply having ‘failed’ in the aforementioned or other school contexts. Rather, they are to be viewed as texts having been reassembled, reordered and ‘performed’ differently in unique organisational settings in respect of extant imperatives, cultural orientations, attendant clienteles and distributions of material resource.
