Governing Through Curriculum: A Poststructural Analysis of the “Australian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education”

One of the central contributions of poststructuralism to the rethinking of curriculum is to more deeply and critically consider what curriculum does. As an epistemological and methodological lens, poststructuralism offers ways of thinking about curriculum as a product of a particular time and space which works to govern through constructing particular knowledges and ways of being. The recent development of a new national curriculum in Australian provides a particularly relevant context for analysing curriculum in this way. Following Carol Bacchi’s (2009, 2012, 2016) argument that we are governed through problematisations, I reason it is pertinent to extend existing poststructural engagements with curriculum by interrogating problematisations. Primarily concerned with how curriculum governs, I employ What’s the ‘problem’ represented to be (WPR) (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016) to analyse the Australian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education (AC: HPE). This analysis considers the productive effects of the curriculum rather than merely naming and describing its elements and contours. The analysis begins by identifying key ‘problems’ that the AC: HPE is proposed to respond to, focusing on the ways HPE is rationalised as an investment in the future of the Australian population, which relies on the figures of healthy, safe, and active citizens. It then interrogates these problem representations, with specific attention to their shape, the socio-political and historical conditions that make them possible, and the potential effects of ‘problems’ being represented in these particular ways. Finally, the analysis opens up space for proposing alternative ways of thinking about, and approaching, HPE and curriculum. Offered as an example, the application of WPR establishes how such an approach allows for interrogating problematisations within curriculum, thereby analysing how curriculum governs