Balancing act: recent school leavers’ experiences of paradigms of health education in New Zealand secondary schools

The setting for this paper is New Zealand, where the national curriculum – and health education within – is in a state of flux. In the paper, we explore how recent school leavers in New Zealand have experienced differing approaches to health education and the impact of these approaches on their learning. Against a landscape where research exploring young people’s perspectives of health education learning is limited, we conducted an abductive analysis grounded in the moralistic, democratic and socio-critical paradigms of health education [Dixon, R., & Robertson, J. (2023). Paradigms of health education in Aotearoa New Zealand: A heuristic for critiquing the promises, practices, and potential of school-based health education. Curriculum Studies in Health and Physical Education, 14(1), 56–72; Jensen, B. B. (1997). A case of two paradigms within health education. Health Education Research, 12(4), 419–428]. We did so in the hope of developing new theoretical insights about the paradigms as they are experienced by learners in New Zealand secondary school health education. We found that the paradigms of health education are evident in the contemporary health education experience in secondary schools in New Zealand. Moreover, we make a case for a balancing act of the paradigms of health education to enact a responsive, meaningful and effective health education learning experience. Finally, we explore implications of the research for curriculum policy, practice and future research.