Contemporary curriculum making and health education

This chapter presents the critical need to locate curriculum amidst policy contexts that span education and health, and to acknowledge the interplay between curriculum and political, social, cultural, historical and institutional contexts. It examines aspects of this interplay author point to possibilities for and constraints on health education curriculum in Australia, internationally, and in individual schools. The chapter focuses on curriculum in Victoria, Australia and in doing so, emphasise the need to acknowledge the different curriculum histories that can be constructed in relation to health education. The curriculum development in education systems and schools needs to be understood in relation to broader educational policy change, complex policy networks and discourse relations. Connelly and Connelly's concepts of formal, implicit and prudential curriculum policy have been explored to reveal some of the freedoms and constraints upon how we think about and talk about health education, and upon what constitutes health education in any school.