Creating thriving and sustainable futures in physical education, health and sport

ABSTRACT

The idea for this Special Issue, ‘Creating thriving and sustainable futures in physical education, health and sport’ arose from the Association Internationale des Écoles Supérieures d’Éducation Physique (AIESEP) World Congress in Edinburgh, 25–28 July, 2018. The quadrennial World Congress welcomed an international audience of over 400 delegates from 40 plus countries to critically consider some of the demanding issues and resurgent possibilities for productive engagement in physical education, physical activity, health and sport. Early career researchers and established scholars alike presented and discussed their research on ways in which physical education can thrive in schools and also articulate with wider societal objectives for increasing physical activity, enhancing health and encouraging sporting participation and achievement. In doing so, the World Congress sought to explore how physical education could make the most of policy and practice opportunities through exploring and critiquing contrasting conceptual visions and by reviewing the pedagogical possibilities for improving student outcomes. In exploring the overarching conference theme, the World Congress had four sub themes: physical education, policy engagement and economic liberalism; empowering practitioners and supporting professional learning; transformative learning and teaching in physical education and sports pedagogy and innovative perspectives on physical education, physical activity, health and wellbeing and sport. There are two papers from each sub theme in the special issue: one paper from each keynote lecture and the other from paper presentations which were particularly well-received for their relevance and incisiveness by congress delegates and members of the Scientific Committee. Collectively, the papers investigate a range of questions and utilise a range of methodological approaches for exploring the critical issues raised. Our editorial aspiration is that these papers can stimulate further professional discussions and inform future research agendas.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical education
• learning
• pedagogy
• innovation
• policy engagement
• empowering practitioners
• physical activity
• health and wellbeing

Introduction

At times, even getting on the front foot in critically considering how to create thriving and sustainable futures for physical education in relation to health and sport can seem a task in itself. Concerns exist about subject intentions (Kirk, 1988), coherence of supporting arguments (McNamee & Bailey, 2010), and of physical education and sport pedagogy related anxieties becoming largely unresolvable amidst a sense that ‘our field has stalled’ (Armour, 2014, p. 853). However, while recognising that a perception of crisis discourse surrounding physical education may continue to exist, the overarching theme at the AIESEP 2018 World Congress was that the occasion provided an upbeat and vibrant context for critically reviewing how thriving and sustainable futures for physical education, health and sport could be created and to some extent recreated. Therefore, the World Congress sought to advance arguments for active engagement in physical education and health and sport as a positive and enhancing contributor to a flourishing life. In this light, the World Congress engaged with questions, insights and perspectives which could sustain more thriving and buoyant futures. In mapping out this position, the Scientific Committee tried to articulate an intention which recognised that understanding and appreciating our field is altogether a finer grained and more nuanced matter than considering that physical education and health and sport is either in crises or not in crises, or that, for example, a strengths-based perspective on experience and social engagement is automatically the way to progress without appreciating the complexities of how such intentions might be enacted. Moreover, there is a need to recognise that some of the most lucid and longstanding voices in supporting our subject area are very often the same authors who are most insightful in highlighting the improvements which are merited in various areas of professionalism and practice, see for example, Kirk and Macdonald (2001), Armour and Yelling (2007).

In all of this, a key question for change agendas in education is how can you promote a sense of constructive disruption without unduly alienating the very professionals charged with enacting reforms and building sustainable improvements? For as research from policy enactment in schools makes clear, at least some degree of compatibility with teachers’ beliefs and practices is pivotal to progress (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012). One of the bolder recent attempts to engage with a collective research-practitioner agenda is from Lawson (2018) who sought to initiate an international-informed, evidence-based, outcomes-driven redesign of physical education. A central tenant of their work is that research and development needs to dovetail coherently with evidence of impact on policy and practice. Time will tell whether Lawson’s (2018) redesign principles are enacted in bold and imaginative ways and what the implications are thereafter for professional learning. That said the similarity of the reform and improvement agenda being taken forward by Lawson (2018) and the AIESEP 2018 World Congress theme and sub themes, suggests that there is research momentum and interest in trying to create thriving and sustainable futures for physical education, health and sport. Framed by the four conference sub themes, the papers in this Special Issue outlined below reflect some of the most compelling critical ideas and findings from leading authors who presented their papers during four warm and mostly sunny days in July, 2018 in Edinburgh.

Physical education, policy engagement and economic liberalism

For many established professionals working in schools, the more settled arrangements which characterised the beginning of their careers are likely to have undergone marked changes in recent years. For physical education and related developments in health and sport in schools, has become ripe as a context for privatisation and the outsourcing of delivery to private services. This shift has been accompanied by a decline in central and local government involvement in many aspects of educational provision (Macdonald, 2014). The change in the funding and management of education is likely to impact on how schools are conceived and network with each other, and of how teachers may need to adapt to more overt performative work cultures. In this light, Sperka and Enright (2018) consider that given the untested nature of many of the assumptions endorsing the outsourcing of provision in schools, there is a need for further research enquiry which benefits educators in understanding in greater detail the ramifications of privatisation-related developments.

Given certain key events in the history of education, these appear wise words. A century ago there was a struggle for control of education in the United States of America between pedagogical progressives with a deep interest and concern for child-centred education and administrative progressives who wanted to reconstruct the management, organisation and curriculum of schools (Labaree, 2005). The progressive vision lost out in the struggle for control of schools, the utilitarian trumped the more romantic perspective and pedagogical progressivism has often failed to influence the practice of learning and teaching in schools ever since. Thus, education became largely geared to social efficiency rather than social renewal. A concerning adjunct to this account is that the remaining stalwarts of pedagogical progressivism often ended up working in schools of education in Universities. Thus, lecturers in practice often faced the compromising dilemma of preparing student teachers to teach in schools to which they were not ideologically well disposed. Over time, this created an unfortunate fissure and lack of trust between academics and practitioners. This historical episode suggests that changing how schools are envisioned, funded and managed may have a range of consequences, some intended and some unintended; and the unintended consequences can affect the detail of everyday schooling practice as well as the nature of how theory and practice are conceived by academics and practitioners alike.

Meg Maguire et al., in their thought-provoking and pertinent empirical-based paper, Policy, Contextual Matters and ‘Unintended Outcomes’: the English Baccalaureate (Ebacc) and its impact on Physical Education in the English secondary school, analyse many of the policy-related complexities influencing curriculum coherence and subject status. In doing so, the authors carefully detail some of the areas of disconnection between policy assumptions and policy-related concerns in schools, most notably, that at a time of wider societal unease over health and wellbeing among young people that the positioning of physical education under the Ebacc is a marginal and unhelpful one. The authors call for a much greater critical resistance to traditional academic subjects occupying a privileged position relative to physical education in curriculum arrangements, as the former is considered more vital in terms of knowledge significance and contribution within high-stakes testing regimes. On this basis, the authors call for a reconfiguring of physical education that focuses on subject values and better support for teachers. The teachers surveyed and interviewed in the paper acknowledged these concerns through their reporting on subject positioning under Ebacc arrangements noting an associated decline in student numbers and the perceived distortion to subject contribution as knowledge acquisition was favoured over practical led learning. This reporting dovetails with key aspects of related literature in the field, which cites the challenges of subject matter and pedagogical change within a high-stakes assessment context that utilises language-based examinations in order to measure knowledge driven attainment, and where the generation of results can be used thereafter for comparing teacher and school effectiveness (Casey & O’Donovan, 2015). There are new findings as well, for example, in noting how the popularity of physical education has enabled initial teacher education providers in England to offer additional places provided students agree to study another subject as well. Arguably, this could result in physical education occupying a rather ignominious position, whereby the subject in itself is considered as being low in terms of subject status but quite useful nevertheless for attracting much needed new entrants into teaching. Maguire et al., conclude, in ways redolent of the disconnection between the administrative progressives and the pedagogical progressivists a century ago, by calling for a reconceiving of education in England which in terms of physical education focuses on a broader view of subject aims and provision and which engages with wider populations and citizenries in supporting new thinking.

Leigh Sperka and Eimear Enright in their paper ‘And if you can’t hear us?: Students as customers of neo-HPE’ seek within the complexities of neoliberal ideologies and associated interventions in schools, to capture something of students experiences during a partially outsourced Cardio Tennis unit in one independent co-educational secondary school in Australia. There is an urgent need for such research, the authors noting in their scoping review of 31 studies on the outsourcing of health and physical education that only one included student-generated data. Through utilising selected theoretical ideas on pedagogic voice and control by Bernstein, the authors analyse some of the most prevalent structural and interactional aspects of practice. Most notably, they explore the shared school and external teaching set up and of how students perceived this arrangement in terms of their engagement in learning. What was found is that students found their teaching episodes rather modest in meeting their needs as consumers of education. There was little, for example, by way of teaching that fostered citizenship, engaged students as co-producers in learning and where students had a greater role in educational decision making. Thus, what emerges is a rather pale version of democracy in education. One particular benefit of the research is to highlight that teachers need to tease out further the pedagogical implications associated with working in a context where they are often positioned as an intermediary between visiting coaches and students. Progress here is necessary so that professional boundaries do not become unduly blurred and where the educative nature of physical education can be assured and concerns over de-professionalism suitably assuaged. More widely the authors are alert to the irony they are highlighting i.e. that by seeking to improve the quality of outsourcing support on students learning experience it may unintentionally widen the gap between independent and state school physical education provision.

Empowering practitioners and supporting professional learning

Pivotal to physical education sustaining improvements and thriving in the future will be supporting the professional capital of teachers and early career scholars. However, as an intention, this aspiration is far from straightforward to achieve. The rather fragmented nature of teacher education provision for physical education within university schools of education, combined with a wide array of professional development options for practicing teachers, bears testimony to some of the challenges ahead. In this context, it is often difficult for those providing professional support to step back from the immediacies of their situation, and to scan further ahead and more widely in understanding and defining the context of their career-long personal grand challenge.

Mustafe Levent Ince through his paper on ‘Supporting learning of practitioners and early career scholars in physical education and sports pedagogy’ has set out on just such a journey. Following the six-fold identification of the importance of: learners’ specific needs; the socio-ecological impact of learner characteristics on educational context and policy; stakeholders’ ideals and aims; creating, sustaining, and supporting local and global professional learning communities; being future-oriented in educational decisions, and being data-driven in practice, Levent engages with the societal complexities of supporting professional learning in Turkey. This involves recognising the current social and geographical challenges which exist and where a young rising and increasing city-based population places considerable strain on providing educational equality and enhanced learning opportunities within a centralised education structure. In analysing and discussing the six identified areas of importance, the paper merges research led findings with Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) multi-level social-ecological thinking in a physical education and sports pedagogy context that recognises the interrelated complexities of curriculum aims, teaching time, students’ reporting on subject contribution and the possibilities for transferability of learning in physical education. In doing so the paper recognises the specifics of national circumstance, where professional learning opportunities are infrequent, modest and only occasionally relevant. While improvement is always to an extent a work in progress and never a settled ending, Levent’s paper highlights the possibilities of improvement when stakeholders can share the same goals and create together future-oriented supportive learning communities.

Okseon Lee et al., considers the ‘Landscape of Secondary Physical Education Teachers’ Professional Development in South Korea’ and highlights a range of issues that detract from effective professional development and the capacity of policy to innovate practice. Teachers preferring collaborative networks are instead experiencing a range of packaged products that superficially impact practice with modest alignment to more contemporary curriculum goals. As such, policy appears to be a driver of short-term, decontextualised and pre-packaged professional development that yields a ‘tips and tricks’ type learning for teachers. The consequence is that professional development appears to be somewhat ineffective in meeting the expectations of a changing curriculum through innovating practice. The authors outline an opportunity for professional development to be reimagined so it can better meet the desire of teachers for novel, relevant and practical content that invites interaction, and collaboration over time.

Transformative learning and teaching in physical education and sports pedagogy

At the heart of teaching that is educative in purpose, sits the notion of transformation. Dewey (1933) suggests that as a consequence of reflective inquiries into experiences that confuse, disturb or perplex us (an indeterminate situation), inquiry is aroused, reflection is incited and transformation occurs. Dewey did not suggest these disturbances were cognitive, but rather were embodied, sensory and felt (English, 2013). Sensed at a point of incongruence with the world as it was encountered in lived experience, it was the transformation of self and the uncertainty of the world encountered through lived experience that Dewey considered important.

Mikael Quennerstedt, in his paper from the Cagigal Lecture at AIESEP, Physical education and the art of teaching – Transformative learning and teaching in physical education and sport pedagogy, draws on Dewey and others to suggest that transformation is about the meaning of experience in relation to a future unknown or as yet undecided, that can lead to the growth of further experience due to open-endedness, uncertainty and the creation of new beginnings unique to the individual. Quennerstedt highlights concerns with starting with the activity first or the ‘what’ (invasion game, fitness, etc.). When the ‘what’ is prioritised it is inevitably followed by the how (e.g. Teaching Games for Understanding) with a retrofitting of the ‘why’ last of all (cooperation, fitness, tradition).

Quennerstedt argues this leads to a kind of role playing in the name of physical education and pre-packaged sameness that for many can be mis-educative. Quennerstedt instead argues that the way forward for physical education is to focus on the art of teaching where the purpose is prioritised (i.e. social justice) to give direction to the content and how it is presented. Amongst a range of pedagogies that are potentially educative, Quennerstedt points to pedagogies of becoming, hesitation, discovery and inquiry that generate uncertainty, lead to reflection and generate learning, with a view that the child is always in the process of becoming physically educated. Quennerstedt also suggests a pedagogy of meaning where there is a focus on meaningful experiences and making new or revised meanings from experience.

In a more practical exploration of pedagogy of meaning, Stephanie Beni et al.’s paper ‘A focus on the “how” of meaningful physical education in primary schools’ explores through a self-study, features of physical education practice that can support meaningful physical education. For Quennerstedt, the art of teaching is relationally positioned between the learner, the teacher, school community and society with the core question of ‘why’ driving the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. Beni et al., focus on the ‘how’ by reviewing pedagogies that support meaning and in doing so provides relevant insights into challenges and opportunities for teachers. Not least is how teachers cannot control for the unique beginnings students arrive at learning ‘with’. In calling for a broader definition of competence that encapsulates the cognitive, social and the motoric, the authors see a need to widen the ‘why’ of physical education to align better with personally relevant learning. It is perhaps no surprise that meaningful pedagogies are tied to student voice and a degree of open-endedness. Here, Quennerstedt frames what Beni et al. find, namely that in guiding the ‘how’, a purposive focus on meaning helps provide a license to move away from ‘what works’ instrumentally, towards bringing something unexpected to the experience. The pedagogy of meaning that Quennerstedt refers to and that Beni et al., attempt to deliver, is one of lifelong learning and can be considered in this light relative to Dewey’s indeterminate situations. From Quennerstedt’s perspective, this is a position from which students can deliberate, inquire and use perceptive actions to solve problems more intelligently; a viewpoint which is open ended and geared towards different directions and different outcomes rather than towards fixed predetermined homogenous ends.

Innovative perspectives on physical education, physical activity, health and sport

One of the dilemmas highlighted in the earlier part of the Introduction is that physical education needs to premise change agendas on coherent and plausible perspectives that are well theorised and which clearly reflect societal needs and the lives and preferences of young people. This position also broadly mirrors Lawson’s (2018) advice that research and development requirements need to dovetail with evidence of value, impact and outcome. Thus, there is a need to create fresh ideas on physical education, physical activity, health and sport which is based on empirical and conceptual research, and which is founded on high standards of disciplinary and interdisciplinary rigour. In this way, progress can match Carr’s (2003, p. 57) requirement that while academic theory is also genuine theory, normative inquiry or excessive speculation ‘is less evidently (or strictly speaking) any form of theory at all.’ Therefore, while pursuing plural aims is inevitably complicated (e.g. while digital technologies and wearable monitors might encourage physical activity and promote social negotiation and renewal they can also be used for health surveillance and for supporting societal efficiency), there is a need for aims in our field to be critically discussed and reviewed. In this way, our field will be better positioned to engage with new global sensitivities which dictate the need for education systems to more obviously reflect how greater fairness, access and equality of opportunity are evident throughout schooling, and which also dictate that students will not be disadvantaged due to ability/disability, social circumstance, race, gender and many other forms of social injustice and discrimination. Similarly, it is highly likely that the changing lifestyles and interactions of young people with their age group through social media will require greater insight and research findings to help support their engagement with health related information (Goodyear, Armour, & Wood, 2018).

In terms of understanding our field better, Laura Azzarito’s paper ‘Look to the Bottom’: Re-writing the Body Curriculum Through Storylines’ highlights the ways in which neoliberal education in the USA serves to disadvantage Black youth and other ethic-minority groups. In doing so, the paper challenges the idea that the USA has become race-neutral, and draws attention to the way in which the notion of colour-blindness serves to make whiteness invisible, while also highlighting the visibility of ethnic minorities through their underachievement and deficits. Azzarito claims that neoliberal education has neglected the institutionalised issues of social inequality and instead views racism as an individual problem which neglects and silences the institutionalised social inequalities present in schools. Furthermore, neoliberal priorities in education, for example, control, completion and accountability do not sufficiently consider social, cultural and economic differences. These control mechanisms not only deepen social inequalities, but also have a negative impact on young peoples’ identity construction. Moreover, Azzarito highlights that this situation exists in relation to the ‘health gap’, where a culture of deficit thinking has acted to control the body, and where the normative cultural of health and fitness is based on white, middle-class bodies and bodily practices. From this perspective, the bodies of Black and ethic-minoritized students are ‘othered’, inferior, even bad, with few positive identity positions for them to take-up. It is against this backdrop that Azzarito presents the Body Curriculum and suggests that schools have a responsibility to create spaces where Black and ethic minoritized students can understand and develop their own culturally relevant sense of self. Within this curriculum, boys and girls are encouraged to read, name and deal with the media’s white-derived representations of fitness and health. They are encouraged to defy ableist, racialised, classist and heteronormative norms and see ‘difference’ in a positive guise through their storytelling experiences. As such, students can produce ‘counter-stories’ where they express their experiences of the body in a culturally relevant and meaningful way. This approach encourages teachers and students to see how the intersecting roles of, for example, race, class and gender affect embodied identity. Azzarito concludes by stating that white, middle-class students can also benefit from such a curriculum, as it enables them to learn from culturally diverse experiences and see the world through difference lenses.

In the final paper, ‘Postfeminist biopedagogies of Instagram: Young women learning about bodies, health and fitness’, Maria José Camacho-Miñano et al., explore the ways in which young women from three Spanish schools engage with Instagram, a photo and video sharing social network, and the impact this engagement has on how they learn about their bodies, health and wellbeing. Given the gendered nature of this field, it brings together work on biopedagogies (Wright, 2009) and postfeminist sensibilities (Gill, 2007) to draw attention to the complexities of the young women’s experiences. In doing so, the authors illuminate the tensions that young women face in a context that seems to empower them to make decisions about how to be, yet at the same time, disempowers them so that they are incapable of making health and body choices beyond a desire for a normative feminine body. Findings from focus group interviews and face to face follow-up interviews coupled with the authors post-structural discourse analysis revealed the ways in which content on Instagram reached young women and the impact it had on their subjectivities. For example, the authors found that the young women were repeatedly exposed to images of other people’s bodies and exercise practices, images that were ‘laden with fitspirational rhetoric’. Such images seemed to shape their perceptions of what a female body should (and should not) look like, with a slender, toned and curvy body highly valued. The young women in the study were aware that many of the posts on Instagram were too perfect, superficial and fake, yet still desired such bodies. Pleasure did not come from engaging in exercise, but by being successful in cultivating the visual effect of the body. This research contributes to our understanding of how young women engage with and learn from Instagram, and indicates that, although engagement with social media can be informed and critical, it is not always positive. Furthermore, given the rapid rate at which digital learning spaces are evolving the authors call for further research which can help understand digital learning in a variety of different cultural and socio-economic contexts. They also suggest that schools and teachers should review ways to develop digital literacies and critical digital pedagogies so that social media might become a space where young people can resist dominant discourses around health and the body and learn about alternative ways of being.

Collectively, the papers in this Special Issue underscore how the nature of physical education and health and sport provision are changing in an increasingly dynamic, digital and connected world. A range of pressures, that include market pressures and the burden of realising policy gains, can lead to disconnections that are often manifest in simplistic response-driven approaches or in losing sight of the values and meanings that underpin teaching/coaching, learning and participation. Yet, as the papers in this Special Issue show, there exists a healthy imagination for challenging potentially reductive impositions and for highlighting how innovations which focus on values and meaning can play a constructive part in giving voice to teachers and students interests and aspirations in education. Taken forward on this basis, the papers in this Special Issue play a part in emphasising the importance of an education of the body in future education-related national and international thinking.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.