This collection brings together cutting-edge research on the history of embodiment, health and schooling in an international context. The book distinguishes a set of educational technologies, schooling practices and school-based public health programmes that organise and influence the bodies of children and young people, defining the curriculum of the body.
Taking a historical approach, with a focus on the period in which mass schooling became an international phenomenon, the book is organised according to four major themes. The first positions the school as a modern clinical space, followed by the second that explores programmes and curricula which influence the discipline of and care for the body. The third section examines the role of the built environment on the organisation and experience of children’s bodies, and the final section outlines the pedagogies, rules and routines that determine how the body is treated and experienced in school.
International and multidisciplinary in scope, this unique collection is of interest to postgraduate students and researchers in education and public health, as well as history, policy studies and sociology.
Introduction: Bodies, health and schooling Kellie Burns and Helen Proctor Part 1: Clinical practices 1. Raising a healthy nation: Provisioning public health in English schools, c. 1875–1914 Jim Harris 2. Schooling and medical assistance: The school clinics in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) Heloísa Helena Pimenta Rocha and Henrique Mendonça da Silva 3. The mediation of childhood health during the polio era in Australia Kellie Burns, Helen Proctor, Ilektra Spandagou and Heather Weaver Part 2: Programmes and policies 4. Educating the underworked: Dudley Allen Sargent and the influence of the rural worker on American physical culture, 1875–1919 Jason L. Newton 5. Determining biological citizenship: Creating and effacing difference in Puerto Rico’s education Bethsaida Nieves 6. Home economics as a school subject in Denmark: From disciplining girls in the kitchen to providing general knowledge about public health Annette Rasmussen and Karen E. Andreasen 7. In the name of health and comprehensive education: Historicising contemporary school health in Chile Felipe Hidalgo Kawada Part 3: Architecture and spatialities 8. The classroom as healthy pavilion: Fresh air, natural light, and student bodies in 19th- and 20th-century American schools Dale Allen Gyure 9. Escaping indoorness: Education and architecture in Italy’s summer camps during the Fascist era Paolo Sanza 10. Architecture of health: Hygiene and schooling in Hong Kong, 1901–1941 Stella Meng Wang 11. Better Towns: Building healthy communities in New Zealand school texts Frances Kelly Part 4: Routines and disciplinary practices 12. Glimpses into the black box of schooling: Continuities and discontinuities in ‘gymnastics between the desks’, 1880s–1970s Marta Brunelli 13. Who owns the body of the child? Human rights and corporal punishment in 1980s Australia Helen Proctor, Kellie Burns and David Magro 14. Historical and contemporary perspectives on gendered school uniforms in Australia Heather Weaver
Kellie Burns is a historical sociologist at the University of Sydney interested in the intersections of gender, sexuality, health and schooling. Her research investigates the socio-historical role of schools as public health spaces across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, examining how ideas about childhood disease and health were constructed. She is also engaged in various projects about vaccination literacy and school-based vaccination clinics, historically and contemporaneously. Helen Proctor is a professor of education at the University of Sydney, who uses historical methods and perspectives to examine the making of contemporary educational systems. She is interested in the history of how schools have shaped social and cultural life beyond the school gate, and how a range of relationships between schools, families and ‘communities’ have formed and changed from the late 19th to the early 21st centuries.
