Making Healthy Children: Health Discourse in the Project Head Start

• In Event: Discourses and Problematization: Considerations of Protest, Healthiness, Whiteness, Propaganda, and Urban-Rural Divides

Proposal

Current education practices are interested in changing health disparities through early childhood education programs. This passion reminds us of Project Head Start, the national early childhood education program that targets changing Students' life through education in the United States. With the passion for health disparities, we must be careful about the coloniality of health discourse. Based on post-structural theories, this research explores how certain “truth” of health has inscribed and mobilized Head Start. In the first section, this research outlines the change contours of the “truth” claims about health discourse in Project Head Start. In the second section, this article explores the conditions that make the “truth” of health possible. It explores truth-telling devices, the grounds on which they are based, and their links to specific strategies and tools of intervention. By doing so, this research contributes to the discussion of the deconstruction and decolonization of health discourse.

Keywords: Health discourse, Project Head Start, Coloniality, Biopower

The covid-19 pandemic makes current education reform’s passion for health more urgent. While a significant amount of research explores strategies about how to educate a healthy child or how to improve or maintain children’s health (Hoagwood et al., 2021), some worries about health become a new governmentality mechanism to manipulate the population that endangers the liberty of the modern states (Agamben, 2021). Through Project Head Start, a national program supporting “disadvantaged children” to improve the socioeconomic situations of the children, their families, and their communities, (Zigler, 2010), my research intends to show how educating healthy children works as the imagination of Humans, the fabrication of education, and the making of kinds of people (Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2004). It argues that the mission of making healthy students through Head Start programs shares the same episteme as the health discourse's coloniality.

Current Head Start studies on health have explored how health and Head Start are historically entangled, especially on how Head Start has worked to promote the target population’s health ((edited by Edward Zigler, 1979; Hale et al., 1990; Vinovskis, 2005). My preliminary findings have shown that health in this research is mainly taken as a self-evident notion discussed through the medical language (Beatty & Zigler, 2012; Ludwig & Miller, 2007). Inspired by Post-structural theories, I take health not as a singular noun or an entirely self-evident concept but as a “style of reasoning” (Hacking, 1992) to explore how a certain kind of objectivity becomes possible.

Drawing on analyses of biopower in the 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 et al., 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, in this truth claim, what subjects are made possible as “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. This article takes coloniality beyond the geographical perspective, not just to locate it in particular historical facts, such as national countries, but to focus on how one structure of reasoning becomes the structure of truth-telling. Further, it explores how “the structure of truth” is embedded in a hierarchal system that produces the social identity of the biocentric “Man” and its binary otherness(Wynter et al., 1995). The intention is to destabilize the label of “subaltern” (Spivak, 2015)by historicizing the conditions that make the “subaltern” possible.
Data used in this research include but are not limited to dissertations, handbook chapters, textbooks for training practitioners, evaluation reports, teacher's guides, videos, images, posters, newspaper headlines, and all sorts of data that produce meaning about “what is health.” I specifically explore how these work as truth-telling devices (and the grounds on which they're based) and their links to specific strategies and tools of intervention. Therefore, data are organized as primary and secondary. For the primary data, I refer to any forms of data that institutional agents of Project Head Start directly produce to guide the program, train the teachers, evaluate the program, etc. For example, agents like the Head Start office, the Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families. For example, in 1971, in Leadership Development and Training for Head Start Coordinators of Nutrition and Cook Manager (Development, 1971), the documental film “Jenny is a good thing.” The primary data works as the “face” of Head Start” that works as a space to capture “truth,” assumptions, continuities, and discontinuities. For the secondary data, I refer to any forms of data that are produced along with the primary data. These data could be in the forms of dissertations, book chapters, journal articles, newspaper headlines, etc. The secondary data served as an important source to capture the conditions that make the discourse of Project Head Start possible.
This paper contributes to curriculum studies by arguing that underlying the discussion and concerns about educating healthy children is the fabrication of a certain regime of the truth of health, the imagination of education, and the making kinds of people. 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