Making Healthy Children: The Coloniality of Health Discourse and the Head Start Program

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: Coloniality of Educational Knowledge and Discourse: Health and Education (Table 1)

Abstract

The current covid-19 pandemic makes the discussion of making healthy children and education more urgent. While a significant amount of research explores strategies about how to educate a healthy child or how to improve and maintain children’s health(Hoagwood, Gardner, & Kelleher, 2021), some worries about health become a new governmentality mechanism to manipulate the population that endangers the liberal modern states(Agamben, 2021). This research joins the conversation by investigating and unboxing the notion of health, to work on a history of “health”, to explore the fabrication of health discourse in education through looking at the mutual construction of the Head Start program and health discourses.

Drawing on analyses of biopower in discourse studies (Kirchgasler, 2018; Wright, 2012; Ziols & Kirchgasler, 2021), this study contributes to a growing literature on health discourse studies in education. As a history of the present(Foucault, 1990), the paper explores the Head Start program as an event of biopolitics (Foucault, Davidson, & Burchell, 2008) to historize “three minimum elements of biopower” (Rabinow & Rose, 2006) and the “three dimensions of Foucauldian questions” (Gros, 2010): First, what kind of health discourse are constructed as a regime of truth in Head Start? Second, what kind of subjects are made possible for the disadvantaged children or the so-called Head Start children? Third, what are the power dynamics in forming the subjects and making the knowledge?

Building on that, this paper argues that the mutual construction of the Head Start program and health discourses reveals the coloniality of health discourses. The article takes up coloniality in two ways. First, I historicize how the Head Start program is both the effect and an actor for the construction of the social identity of the biocentric “Man” and its binary otherness(Wynter, Hyatt, & Nettleford, 1995), that is the healthy children and the Head Start Children. Second, I consider how Head Start constructs the Head Start students as the “subaltern… whose voice could not be heard, being structurally written out of the capitalist bourgeois narrative” (Spivak, 2015).

To explore the mutual construction of the Head Start program and health discourse. The first half of the paper explores how Head Start became possible by analyzing the domain discourses of health that were mobilized when the initiation of the program in the 1960s. The second half of the paper historizes how the coloniality of health discourses became possible in the project of Head Start by tracing the four released Head Start Performances Standards since 1968 to explore the productive power of Head Start in advocating certain health discourses in education.

This paper contributes to curriculum studies by arguing that underlying the discussion and concerns about how to educate healthy children is the fabrication of a regime of the truth of health, the imagination of education, and the making kinds of people(Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2004; Popkewitz, Pettersson, & Hsiao, 2020). Head Start program is an effect and an actor of the coloniality of certain health discourses through which Head Start children become possible.

Author

• Xue Yin, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author