Transforming health and physical education in Indonesia: a Foucauldian exploration of salutogenic curriculum reform

The reform of the Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum in Indonesia often faces challenges and struggles, especially when promoting a new orientation towards salutogenic. Through Foucault’s perspective on power relations, texts, and discourses, we describe and explain the dynamics of the process of integrating salutogenic into the reform of the HPE curriculum in Indonesia. Using an interpretivism paradigm operationalised through a critical inquiry framework, we explore how the HPE curriculum development team championed the concept of salutogenic. The findings of this study illustrate that HPE curriculum reform in Indonesia is a discursive battleground that reflecting broader power relations in the shift from pathogenic to salutogenic orientations, thereby repositioning HPE as a transformative space. These findings emphasise that HPE transformation requires epistemological changes that go beyond policy texts, while also opening opportunities for the development of a more contextual theoretical and pedagogical framework for salutogenic education in Global South countries, particularly Indonesia.