Socio-critical lenses and threshold concepts in health, sport and physical education teacher education

ABSTRACT

Tertiary programmes responsible for preparing people for careers in Health, Exercise, Sport and Physical Education (HESPE) professions have a long association with educating for health in and through the physical body. However, in recent years, led predominantly by the World Health Organisation, there has been a shift from individualistic and behavioural health to focus on the social determinants of health. This broader perspective of health considers the environments, social and cultural factors that influence health, of which the physical body and associated behaviours are but one part of a complex interplay between determinants. Scholarship in the HESPE field has confirmed that students have been slow to uptake and embrace these sociocultural and environmental views of health, and indeed often refuse to consider more holistic ways of viewing health and the body which can often be dissonant from their own personal investment in narrower conceptions of health. Encouraging students to think and practice in sociocultural and socio-critical ways has been a perennial issue for those involved in HESPE programmes who align themselves with the critical project. Drawing on a recent doctoral study in a Health Education Teacher Education Program at a large metropolitan university in Queensland Australia, we provide evidence of students’ struggle with the sociocultural perspective of health and their fledgling attempts to incorporate it into their teaching practice. In undertaking this work, we discovered these students reflected the stages of Meyer, Land and Baillie’s (2010, Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning. Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei: Sense Publishers) threshold concepts. We propose that thinking about the sociocultural and socio-critical as threshold concepts offers new and generative ways of conceptualising student’s struggle with the sociocultural and socio-critical paradigms. This insight may provide new ways for those involved in HESPE programmes to support students making this developmental learning transformation to understanding more holistic views of health.

KEYWORDS:

• Threshold concepts
• socio-critical
• sociocultural
• health education
• sport
• physical education
• teacher training

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.