Making Healthy Child: How Health has been Conceptualized in Head Start Programs

• In Event: Making the learner, making the teacher, and their ambivalences

Proposal

Education policies and programs are made to “promote children’s health,” though health has different meanings based on different cultural and socioeconomic contexts. Cases include Japan’s Food Education program, America’s Head Start, and China’s Eye Protecting movement. Despite the good intention of promoting children’s health, the ambiguous definition of health also makes it difficult to catch the idea of what health is. This paper looks at Head Start as a case to analyze how health is conceptualized and discussed in early childhood education.

As one of the most important national early childhood education programs in the post-world War II era, Head Start was an innovative approach for intervention into early childhood education of children who were classified as “disadvantaged.” It was also explored as a model of comprehensive services for young children internationally (Ludwig & Miller, 2007). Despite the fact that much research about health in Head Start could be found, discussions that mainly focus on how health was conceptualized in Head Start has not been explored. Therefore, this paper aims at, firstly, looking at the historical research of HS and the existing research that are claimed to focus on doing research about health in Head Start. Secondly, to read health in the documents of Head Start Performance Standards as a way to explore historically how is health made into an object of the Head Start Program.

The first part of my paper looks at how health has been conceptualized in Head Start Program. First, This paper traced three different threads that researchers claim are the “historical roots” (Ross, 1979, p. 21) of Head Start: social models of intervening populations, the sociopolitical context, and institutional program construction. Second, this paper explored how health has been conceptualized in research on health and Head Start. This paper argues that the existing research on health and Head Start usually starts by discussing the close relationship between health and Head Start to justify that health is one of the major goals of Head Start. Then through the language of health, the existing research constructed images of certain populations as subjects who needed to be changed. The particular target population of Head Start is children and their families who labelled as in disadvantaged. Third, the existing research portrayed the pictures of how Head Start should work as a way to promote the target population’s health. Health was taken as one of the goals to fight for and worked as a whole package of medical standards and domains. Each domain and standard produce data that defines what counts as a livable life. What Head Start can do to achieve this goal is to provide health services and education to the poor families.

The second part of my paper looks at the Head Start performance Standards to explore historically how is health made into an object of the Head Start Program. The Head Start Performance Standards are the visible texts to take Head Start as a History of the Present to explore how health worked as a “style of reasoning” (Hacking, 2015) that mobilize education reform, knowledge production and the development of early child education as a field. To explore health as a style of reasoning is to take health not as a singular notion that has a solid boundary and definition. Instead, health is approached as what Deleuze calls “assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to explore how it was conceptualized historically in Head Start to provide a way of thinking about who the child is, what change should be made, and what kind of knowledge is considered as truth. In other words, health is explored not as the service, content, or object that is provided by Head Start, but as a rationale in the educational system which construct the way how we think about education. The discourse of health works as a value-loaded system that articulates and treats difference through the process of normalization. It also provides a language of expressing fear and hope. This part of the paper read these texts carefully to figure out the narratives of health, to compare different versions and point out the continuities and changes in these narratives, and to draw a map of the continuities and discontinuities of some particular kind of “health.” Then I explored and excavated the multiple historical practices that came together to make intelligible what are “seen” and acted upon as the objects of Head Start at different times, in order to figure out how constructing the healthy student came to be regarded as a specific kind of problem for specific authorities at specific times.




Bibliography

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hacking, I. (2015). Why is there philosophy of mathematics at all? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ludwig, J., & Miller, D. L. (2007). Does Head Start improve children's life chances? Evidence from a regression discontinuity design. The Quarterly journal of economics, 122(1), 159-208.
Ross, C. (1979). Early Skirmishes with Poverty: The historical roots of Head Start. In (pp. 21).

Author

• Xue Yin, University of Wisconsin-Madison