A sociocultural perspective as a curriculum change in health and physical education

Abstract

As a lens through which to read and understand a subject area and its curriculum content and issues, a sociocultural perspective is a recent and arguably significant change for the Health and Physical Education (HPE) Key Learning Area (KLA) in Australia. Its significance lies, first, in the fact that it seems to represent a notable departure from the predominantly medico-scientific, bio-physical and even psychological foundations of the learning area as it stood throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and second, because its attention to social and cultural influences on health put it in direct opposition to notions which locate health almost solely in the individual and his or her decisions. Despite the potential ramifications of these shifts for practitioners, to date there has been little research that has examined this change within the context of the classroom. This paper reports on a research project conducted in two classrooms in the Australian state of New South Wales, which began with the question ‘what happens when you introduce a unit of work planned with the aim of developing a sociocultural perspective into the HPE classroom?’ I respond to this question by drawing on teacher and student interviews, planning sessions, and classroom observations and recordings to discuss the most prominent discursive tensions and organisational constraints that stand as impediments to a sociocultural perspective as a practiced curriculum change.

Keywords:

• Curriculum
• Sociocultural
• Health and physical education
• Pedagogy
• Knowledge

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and to Professor Jan Wright for her intellectual contributions to the PhD research that this paper reports on.

Notes

1. It is important to note that at the time of writing each state/territory authority within Australia is responsible for producing HPE curriculum documents for use within their own jurisdiction. As such there is considerable variation across the country, both in terms of how the learning area is represented through official curriculum documents and how it is put into practice at the school and classroom levels.

2. Between 1988 and 1993, the Australian Federal government made a push for a national curriculum. While this push failed at the 11th hour due in large part to lack of support from the states/territories, one of the lasting results of the process was the integration of Health Education, Physical Education and some aspects of Home Economics into the HPE ‘Key Learning Area’ (KLA). While this new nomenclature may have brought the previously separate subjects together, in practice ‘integration’ has varied considerably across different states/territories and at the school level. For further reading see DinanThompson (2009a, 2009b).

3. Within the NSW 7-10 PDHPE syllabus (2003) content is organised first via ‘Strand’ (4 in total) then by outcome statements (20 in total), which are further broken down into detailed descriptions of what students should ‘learn about’ (65 in total) and ‘learn to’ do (152 in total). For example, one of the outcomes in Strand 3: ‘Individual Community Health’ is Outcome 5.6 ‘A student analyses attitudes, behaviours and consequences related to health issues affecting young people’ (p. 37). This is broken down into 5 learn abouts, one of which is ‘healthy food habits’ (which is further broken into ‘sources of nutritional information’, ‘disordered eating and body image’, ‘diets, dieting, exercise and energy balance’, ‘sociocultural influences on food’, and ‘nutrition and fluid replacement for physical activity’), and 3 learn to statements: ‘explore the relationship between body image and gender, and the impact of the media on the manufacture of the ideal male and female body types’, ‘investigate factors that influence food choices, eg. culture and customs, gender and media’ and ‘identify appropriate fluid replacement strategies for participation in physical activity and actions to manage dehydration’ (p. 37). Anecdotally, the specificity and detail in these statements, in conjunction with the fact that all material in the syllabus is compulsory, has led many teachers to understand the syllabus as a ‘prescriptive’ document.