Teachers' perspectives on the school-family-health nexus

In this chapter we draw on data collected within the context of the Teachers as Health Workers (Macdonald et al, 2013–2015) project conducted in Queensland, a state of Australia. As schools are increasingly positioned as critical in the promotion of children and young people’s health and well-being, this research seeks to understand the contemporary nature of health-related work being undertaken by teachers in Australian schools and what facilitates and constrains this work. Two underpinning theoretical frameworks of the study are Bourdieu’s concepts of field and practice to locate and understand teacher’s work, and Foucault’s notion of biopolitics to understand how it is that individuals and populations come to comply with or resist responsible citizenship as it is enacted within schooling. These Australian data suggest that while teachers place a high priority on communicating with parents, this is often done from the perspective that teachers are compensating for what they consider are deficit parenting practices, particularly in relation to the co-production of healthy citizens.