Reconceiving Barriers for Democratic Health Education in Danish Schools: an Analysis of Institutional Rationales

Health promotion - and education researchers and practitioners advocate for more democratic approaches to school-based health education, including participatory teaching methods and the promotion of a broad and positive concept of health and health knowledge, including aspects of the German educational concept of bildung. Although Denmark, from where the data of this article are derived, has instituted policies for such approaches, their implementation in practice faces challenges. Adopting a symbolic interactionist analytical framework this paper explores and defines two powerful institutional rationales connected to formal and informal social processes and institutional purposes of schools, namely conservatism and Neoliberalism. It is empirically described and argued how these institutional rationales discourage teachers and students from including a broad and positive concept of health, the element of participation, and the promotion of general knowledge as legitimate elements in health education. This paper thus contains a perspective on health education practice, which, in a new way, contributes to explain the relatively slow progress of democratic approaches to school health education

"Youth" making us fit : on Europe as operator of political technologies

This article problematizes the construction of youth as a ‘driving force’ in the contemporary configuration of the European Union (EU) as an educational and political space. The study draws empirical nourishment out of documents that are central to the ongoing formation of the Union, be it White Papers, scripts or memos concerning political arenas such as youth and education policies and the Bologna process. Theoretically the article draws on insights from post-Foucauldian traditions with a focus on mentalities, subject constructions, technologies and practices operating within the ongoing governmentalization of Europe. Central questions are ‘who’ and ‘what’ the problematization of youth as political technology is about. Drawing on homologies in the coding of citizen, independent of age, the authors claim that problematization of youth is directed to all of us. We are all, in the name of youth, expected to constantly ‘adapt’ ourselves in compliance with the aim of the Lisbon process. Furthermore, as the Union itself is coded in a similar way, we may even claim that the EU, literally speaking, appears as a youth project in itself. Thus, the notion that youth can be seen as political rationality that becomes a powerful driving force in the ongoing European project