Environmental attunement in health, sport and physical education

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue on environmental attunement introduces seven papers that engage with a range of different insights and practices of nature-culture and embodied connections to place across health, sport and physical education. We have organised the papers into three themes that explore possibilities for: (i) notions of the environment and ‘nature’ in research and practice; (ii) possibilities and challenges of translating environment, sustainability and ‘nature’ from policy and curriculum documents into practice; and (iii) philosophical and theoretical links to emplaced and embodied learning – past-present-future. These are by no means exclusive themes and readers will recognise other patterns of theoretical and empirical possibility as well as important geographical and contextual nuances that need to be explored further. Because of this, we hope that this collection inspires further submissions via an extended call for papers that engage with the challenges and the possibilities of how we might approach the complex environmental, ecological, political and cultural factors that shape health, sport and physical education in current times.

KEYWORDS:

• Environment
• nature
• health education
• physical education
• embodied and emplaced learning
• epistemological habits

Introduction

This Special Issue, like many good ideas in academic spirit, was conceived through a themed symposium. We presented ‘Health as more-than-human: environmental attunement in health education’ at the inaugural Critical Health Studies (CHESS) Conference in May 2018, Queenstown, New Zealand (Fitzpatrick et al., 2019) under a simple (and optimistic) conversational premise; to ‘grow new grass’ rather than lament that ‘the grass is (or could) be greener’ elsewhere. The purpose was to expand possibilities and practices of educational and embodied connections to environmental knowledge of place, space and nature¹ in health, sport and physical education.² Utilising the notion of attunement, helped us to explore the ‘epistemological habits’ (Trout, 2008, p. 63) or ‘leaning in’ to notions of environment that focus on a body-mind-culture-nature connection to the lands and waters in a deep sensory and even spiritual sense of care for others (Brymer et al., 2010). At the time, Nicole was working on bluespace research and collecting data on how notions of participation in National Parks and greenspace were being increasingly converged with health and fitness discourses through advertising and social media. Rosie had been engaging in health and food and nutrition education with Australian Indigenous elders and making place-based links to environmental knowledge with field trips to gardens and farms. Through this practice with pre-service teachers, imagined possibilities for environmental attunement were materialised with students creating novel cross-curricular assessment for learning tasks that integrated and utilised the Australian Curriculum capabilities of Sustainability and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures (ATSIHC). Michael was rediscovering Ivan Illich, contemplating the rich multitude of possibilities of histories and purposes of health and physical education through time, and thinking about what we can learn from animals and multi-species in this endeavour.

We have attended to and travelled beyond these initial ideas to author the Introductory paper of this Special Issue (Welch et al., 2021); synthesising literature from multidisciplinary perspectives to understand more clearly why and how environmental attunement is necessary in the everyday actions and settings that relate to philosophies, histories and futures of health, sport and physical education. Our intention is not to burden teachers with additional demands, or seek to change the behaviour of students so that they become ‘good’ environmental citizens (Maniates, 2001). Some may see this Special Issue as timely, or even ‘late to the party’ in the scheme of environmental public discourse and educational research, yet in considering the dominance of global north/ colonial over global south/ subaltern local tendencies of scholarship (Naidu, 2020; Skerrett, 2017; Takayama et al., 2017), it is even more delayed in responding to the deep ancestral First Nations epistemologies and ontologies of relationality, landscape, healing and wellbeing (McGuire-Adams, 2020). In any case, for us ‘environmental attunement’ is an ongoing project given it's subjugation in meanings of health and physical education (Taylor et al., 2019) that appears to be of increasing concern in current times and thus poignant material for more focused theoretical and epistemological inquiry. In this Issue, we discuss the what, why and how of environmental attunement and take ongoing inspiration from research and practice at the interstices of local places, governance, educational systems and pedagogical practice (Aikens, 2020; Gray & Martin, 2012; Madsen et al., 2015).

We have structured the papers of this Special Issue into three themes: (i) notions of the environment and ‘nature’ in research and practice; (ii) possibilities and challenges of translating environment, sustainability and ‘nature’ from policy and curriculum documents; and (iii) philosophical and theoretical links to emplaced learning – past-present-future. We first introduce the notion of environmental attunement and then provide some commentary on the terrain of theory travelled in crafting this work.

‘Environmental attunement’

While we accept that a person’s surrounding conditions constitute part of what we are referring to as ‘environment’, we want to call for a more expansive and political approach to the concept. The Introductory paper of this Special Issue takes this up in more detail to examine how within the field of health and physical education the term environment is often used in a generalist sense to describe a particular context that could influence performance or participation. In Sport, Education and Society, articles have examined sports or athlete environments, or non-competitive environments (e.g. Dhillon et al., 2020), but few have examined the relationality of environment to pedagogy. The exceptions are Sanderud et al.’s (2020) work on Bildung and children’s perspectives on nature-play relationships in snow-covered playgrounds which examines the way movement memories are entangled in the geographical materiality of weather. Other examples include recent valuable scholarship on informal sport (O’Connor & Penney, 2021), exercise and the environment (Hitchings & Latham, 2017), eco–motricity (Pazos-Couto et al., 2021), outdoor education (Dyment & Potter, 2015; Quay, 2016) and sustainability (Truong, 2017), all of which has included notions of the environment and nature as a unique and important (yet often marginalised) intersection with movement and physical education. Across this collection of literature, the authors point to both longstanding issues for the field, especially in the marginalisation of outdoor education, as well as the more recent empirical developments of tracing the shifting social and cultural practices of participation in health and sport. There is much more literature beyond, but ancillary to the field, to turn to for inspiration; for instance, research on green exercise and restorative and therapeutic landscapes (Olafsdottir et al., 2017), natural environments and physical activity and health (Jansen et al., 2017; Merchant & Wiltshire, forthcoming), and issues of child health equity in access to green space (Feng & Astell-Burt, 2017). There are also the Sustainable Development Goals (Barakat et al., 2016) and the frameworks of the social, environmental and commercial determinants of health that are concerned with health equity, policy and promotion (Baum, 2007; Maani et al., 2020; Friel et al., 2011; Schwerdtle et al., 2020). In our first paper of this Issue, we clarify our stance on environmental attunement by outlining these four statements:

• We live in a world that is constantly changing and is challenging established approaches to managing human and ecological health (Patrick et al., 2015). Our attunement needs to be focused on the premise that environments shape health and that human health is reliant on the natural world.

• Health and physical education and environmental knowledge need to be integrated via holistic and participatory approaches that recognise shifting social and cultural practices in both built and natural environments. This includes especially a sensitivity to histories and ontologies of place; especially First Nations or Indigenous ontologies of land such as Country, and practices such as dadirri or deep listening (Atkinson, 2002) practices to establish emotional relationships of ‘love, care and solidarity’ (Renshaw & Tooth, 2017).

• While all disciplines could be linked to environmental attunement (e.g. STEM, Geography, The Arts), health and physical education offers a unique intersection of multidisciplinary learning through embodied and socio-cultural pedagogies that connect to self, place, space, community and more-than-human life. Adopting a critically mindful pedagogy (Tinning, 2020) is rich with learning possibilities in the cultural politics of human relationships to environment and ‘nature’. To this end the concepts of critical inquiry, problem-based learning, creativity, health literacy and valuing movement (in, through and about) can all be mobilised in practice.

• Reflection on what has shaped educators’ micro-biographies and ecological identities (Thomashow, 1996) is an important step, alongside pedagogical resources, in deepening epistemological habits of possibilities for environmental attunement across health, sport and physical education.

Grafting theoretical inquiry to the cause of environmental attunement: theory as a tool, timing and trap

Initially using ‘more-than-human’ in the title of this Special Issue we had included theoretical links to new materialist, post-human and agential realism ways of knowing, being and becoming (Massumi, 2009; Wright, 2015). The broader turn to decentre the human in research theory and methods has helped our conceptions and thinking about this Issue. We came to think about the perennial search for ‘new directions’ in theory and publishing and the need for theory to respond to the research problems of the times of social, environmental and political experience. While we generally agree that theories come at a particular moment of history, it can be quite hard to decide ‘when’ they began. Textbooks often say that Marxist theory emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century. As teachers, we often start somewhere and, in educational terms, that can be appropriate. But how do we guide students who may want more than an emergent narrative of Marxist theory. Like ideas, the ‘beginning’ of Marxist theory can be seen wherever you look. Should we go to Babeuf during the eighteenth century French revolution (Rose, 1978), or look to Spinoza philosophy (Dobbs-Weinstein, 2015) or ‘Diggers’ in the seventeenth century England revolution (Kennedy, 2008) or indeed to Early Christianity (Kurian, 1974)? We often talk about theoretical battles between theories – ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘liberalism’ – but there are also ‘fingerprints’ everywhere. Whilst following eagerly, we were sometimes flummoxed in what to utilise from post-humanistic (or more-than-human or non-human) theory in the context of this project on environmental attunement. In her discussion of the role of ‘gender’ in more-than-human literature, Probyn reflects that ‘sometimes my head begins to buzz with the ferocious pace of word play and theoretical riffs’ (2016, p. 109). We wonder, can terminology be a form of camouflage, or a trap? Monforte and Smith (2020) have conversationally discussed grappling with post-qualitative research as an early career researcher and later career researcher. Monforte speaks of the tension and trends, that ‘the problem of incommensurability and onto-epistemological incoherence has always been there, pinching me. Every time I think about and do research, I feel the tensions between conventional and post versions of qualitative research in the flesh’ (Monforte & Smith, 2020, p. 1). We wonder if ‘new’, complex and different terms can appear alluring but also unnecessary to describe a fairly straightforward proposition; we are a tiny part of a much larger de-centred human ecological context. We defer to Sonia Hazard (2019) here who has illuminated this theoretical tension:

We are in a moment in which many different kinds of thinkers are pursuing overlapping techniques of thought. Broadly speaking, what they have in common is that they approach materiality as generative. They recognize, in other words, that material entities and forces exert power on humans, in ways that make a priori separations between humans and nonhumans difficult to sustain. Some of these thinkers may self-identify as new materialists or align themselves with that canon. A great many more do not. (Nor are analogous ways of thinking utterly “new,” as archeologists, art historians, environmental and longue durée historians, and others, frequently point out.)

When we think of new materialism in this way – as an orientation or a technique of thought – it appears that new materialism is everywhere. For instance, several scholars have been re-examining even well-trodden areas of study by asking what comes into view when we consider nonhumans as social actors. (2019, p. 629)

Herein lies the challenge and opportunity, as Hazard points out, new materialism and non-human actors are everywhere, thus the possibility for environmental attunement to be theorised in this way is also ‘everywhere’. We have to live with believing and not believing our theories. Theories are an ideational tool: active, timeless, being both a religious and rational ingredient of life. Massumi (2009) in an interview describes the focus on the instant-by-instant analysis. He argues that we must be ‘alive’ to the interaction with every molecule, every word, every thought, every passing mood. On reading Massumi’s work, we reflected that ‘complexity’ can be useful, but we can be overloaded by theory for no good reason. Every theory can, unfortunately, lead us to madness. But we also want to emphasise the post-human spirit and the relationship with one’s self. An unresolved tension for us emerged, as post-human, new materialist and post-qualitative literature proliferates in educational scholarship, is it affording new thinking and writing about important questions on the environment and the relationship between people and more-than-human ‘actors’ in the world (e.g. Clarke & Mcphie, 2020). We follow Fullagar’s (2017, p. 255) lead in her article on post-qualitative inquiry and the new-materialist turn:

One of the challenges ahead is to create generative and generous intellectual cultures that enable us to think rhizomatically as we negotiate the changing power relations of austerity, audit culture, marketisation of education and the rise of conservative global politics.

One must live in both theoretical and practical worlds; as a micro and macro part of one’s own system. There are complex power relations that shape the conditions of possibility across theory and practice. Language in this resolve is unequivocally essential to understanding. The discipline techniques from cultural studies help to examine how language offers powerful ways to understand and mediate human experiences of ‘nature-culture’. Fullagar (2000), in earlier work, highlights the need for a cultural analysis of the nature-culture nexus, given that often environmental philosophy is drawn on to understand nature. Utilising tools from cultural studies, the mediation of language becomes a prism through which to understand the sensory experiences between self and ‘nature’ and can involve self-transformation. We see research that takes up cultural analysis of environmental attunement as essential, amongst other approaches, to understand and shape the epistemological habits of health, sport and physical education. Many tools are need to examine the complexity of nature-culture in health, sport and physical education. This led us to welcome papers to this Special Issue that engage with a variety of approaches; especially research that is imaginative and considered in the application of ethical methods of purpose (Gerrard et al., 2016). The complexity and richness of theory coalesces as either a purposive tool, a circular trap or in the timing of the zeitgeist.

Theme 1: notions of the environment and ‘nature’ in research and practice

After our first introductory paper that responds to the question, why environmental attunement in health and physical education? The second paper in this Special Issue by Holly Thorpe et al. (2021) delves into important possibilities of more-than-human theory in the social sciences.

Thorpe et al. (2021) make the point that sociology of sport scholars have been slow to take up environmental thinking, especially compared to feminist social theorists such as Donna Haraway who has been arguing for a more central exploration of humans relationships to nature in humanities research since the 1990s. They point to the ongoing search for environmental and nature-centered politics that has been pressed for decades by scholars outside the discipline, citing Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ in the 1960s, through to the intensified socio-political priorities in the present. They provide a rich literature review of feminist new-materialist methodological approaches and notions of the environment in sport. Demonstrating the utility of feminist new-materialist theory, they explore the ontological promise it holds for responding to the environmental challenges of our time, especially given the lag in the sports and movement scholarship, compared to social sciences, to problematise ‘anthropocentric foundations of sociology, and the tendency for sport scholars to focus on humans’ lived experiences and moving bodies’ (Thorpe et al., 2021, p. 4). This resonates with recent work by Martschukat (2021) that maps and historicises the individualised age of fitness that has been deeply celebrated in and dominated western democracies. Thorpe and her colleagues demonstrate the need for a fundamental relational environmental change in sport and highlight a range of recent literature that is addressing this in different ways. They also make links to examples of pedagogical possibilities for environmental attunement. In putting forward a feminist new materialist agenda, they point to the ethics of accountability and urgency, arguing,

we cannot understand ourselves as observing or thinking or writing from an external perspective, rather we are always implicated in and a part of the world’s becoming, and this includes our implications in the world’s undoing in times of environmental and climate crisis.

Drawing on materialist ontological theory for reconceptualising the relational ethics of sport, they map possibilities for methodological approaches that de-centre anthropocentric ways of knowing that have dominated sport and fitness research and practices.

The third paper by Howard Prosser (2021) offers a rich examination beyond the nature/culture divide to argue that within football there is a universal cultural experience of joy and social connection that is characteristic of human and non-human encounters. Using Critchley and Adorno’s philosophy of nature to explore the ethnographic experience of football in an international school in Argentina, Prosser engages in rich storytelling of the layered and embodied nature of playful seriousness and genuine reflection and interaction with the world that is possible via the structure of the football game’s lingua franca. His ethnographic exposition is situated in continental philosophy to offer a rich engagement in thought of what it means to play and how; for instance, he writes about ‘moments of playful seriousness’ or the ‘desire to emancipate ourselves from the taming of the nature’. In so doing, this paper points to the simplicity of social and ecological poetics in play, yet how humans tend to ‘overlay nature’s blankness with meaning’. Prosser eloquently balances some of the contradictions or tensions of nature/culture in the environment tracing how soccer is part of the success of modernity (with market-led organisation such as FIFA) and subsequently there is an environmental cost in sports grounds construction and maintenance with the use of pesticides and insecticides to achieve ‘the perfect playing surface’.

Theme 2: possibilities and challenges of translating environment, sustainability and ‘nature’ from policy and curriculum documents in practice

The papers in this section engage with curriculum documents and teachers values and beliefs from the Australian context to consider the challenges and possibilities of translating environmental attunement to practice. There is much scope to expand this theme through further research to examine the interstices of enacting environmental attunement in local places, governance, educational systems and pedagogical practice (Aikens, 2020; Gray & Martin, 2012; Madsen et al., 2015).

In the fourth paper, Rebecca Olive and Eimear Enright (2021) provide an analysis of the complexity and challenges of the way the Australian Curriculum Cross-Curriculum Priority (CCP) of Sustainability is articulated through the Australian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education (AC:HPE). Many outside the learning area have examined how the CCP of Sustainability, along with the two other CCPs (Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia (AAEA) and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures (ASIHC)), are not prioritised in practice. As Barnes et al. (2019, p. 380), there is ‘no explicit requirement (or accountability) for whether and how to teach them, nor are there specific metrics to determine how successfully teachers have implemented them’. Olive and Enright join forces, drawing on their backgrounds in recreational lifestyle sports and curriculum studies, to cross boundaries of youth activism and environmental issues in education in order to explore how these fields intersect in possibilities for enacting the AC:HPE Sustainability CCP. Drawing on the work of Val Plumwood (2000), they situate their work within ecofeminist theory to consider sustainability through ecological and ethical terms, pointing out that opportunities for environmental engagement emerge anytime the words ‘health’ or ‘wellbeing’ is used in the AC:HPE curriculum. Utilising ‘oceanic ways of thinking’ (Steinberg & Peters, 2015), as part of an eco-feminist approach, they apply this ontological approach to their textual analysis of reading curricular documents to highlight the multiplicity of possibilities in terms such as ‘community’ and ‘health’. This paper also takes readers into new terrain to consider how the human might be decentred in conceptions and enactments of sustainability and the AC:HPE to consider complex ecologies and Indigenous ontologies as they relate to knowledge and pedagogy.

The fifth paper by Nicole Taylor et al. (2021) examines the ways teachers of primary and secondary AC:HPE in Australian schools conceptualise gardens and garden-based learning in their practice. Curriculum policy documents that explicitly include links to gardening, as well as the rise in popularity of school gardening as linked to wellbeing, nature and educational discourses are examined. This backdrop is then brought into conversation with empirical data from a larger study with 24 health and physical education teachers about their meanings of environmental health within the learning area. Their work reveals how many teachers made obvious links to food, nutrition and physical activity. However, there was also a complexity to many of the teachers’ discursive meanings, and how these suggest conditions of possibility for garden-based links to Australian Health and Physical Education curriculum in teachers’ conceptions and practice, including sensory and embodied engagements with the materiality of gardens as well as a tool for student learning and management beyond the classroom. In resisting a romanticisation of gardening and health and physical education, this paper outlines possibilities for engaging with garden-based learning in primary and secondary contexts.

Theme 3: philosophical and theoretical links to emplaced learning – past-present-future

This third theme engages with language and experience of emplaced connections to environments. The papers grouped under this theme, have some overlap with the others in theoretical purpose, especially the work of social connection and joy in football expressed in Howard Prosser’s paper, in that they engage with rich accounts of making meaning of embodied experience, affect and emotion in pedagogy. There are also some similarities here to literature that engages the notion of pleasure in movement education (e.g. Brown, 2017; Pringle et al., 2015; Stevens & Culpan, 2021) and self and social learning (Thorburn, 2020).

The sixth paper by Stephen Smith (2021) brings a rich and evocative use of language to phenomenologically explore the sensory and affectively-charged interactions with water, or all aqueous bodies, including man-made and natural waterscapes. Drawing on the theory of Maurice Merleu-Ponty and Richard Shusterman, this work situates bodily knowledge as developed through ‘kinaesthetic registers’ between oneself and being in water. Smith examines links to swimming and the experiential aspects of sensorial feeling and affect. This is brought together with the notion of eco-pedagogy to examine ‘bringing attention to the dynamics, reciprocities, and textures of this distinctively motile manner of bodily immersion in a flow motioning world’. Through examining the dynamics of flow, the reciprocities of flow, the textures of flow in waterscapes, Smith points to the possibilities for ‘a fuller environmental immersion’. He argues that this is not mutually exclusive to a disciplined practice of swimming. In guiding the reader through how the practice of swimming itself is a living praxis, he theorises how reflective and analytic abstractions emerge from learning to feel the flow of motion. Smith demonstrates how agency arises from being pedagogically attuned to experiencing the world.

The seventh paper by Michael Gard (2021), concludes this Issue with a thought-provoking exposition of the political, philosophical and technological turns in the health and physical education discipline: from past, to present, to future. He highlights the ‘former glory’ of the learning area yet points to the unwavering educational importance of understanding physical experiences of the body. Michael espouses the precept ‘let many flowers bloom’; that is, not to close down possibilities in the context of opportunities to theorise divergent possibilities teaching movement, including what we can learn from animals. He draws on a range of theoretical devices, but particularly Ivan Illich’s work, to help historically situate the philosophical purposes of educating the physical body in schooling through time. With thought prompts of open endings and vicissitudes to entertain the timeliness and relevance of what physical education is for and can be, this is a piece to think with.

Conclusion

Together the papers in this Special Issue have taken various theoretical and empirical approaches to the notion of environmental attunement across health, sport and physical education; all central themes of Sport Education and Society’s readership. As noted in the abstract, there are many important geographical and contextual differences and similarities to explore further beyond this initial collection. Because of this, we do hope to inspire further diverse submissions via an extended call for papers that respond to this first Issue and engage with the challenges and possibilities of how we might approach the complex environmental, ecological, political and cultural factors that shape health, sport and physical education practice in current times.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professor John Evans and Professor Jan Wright for their ongoing encouragement and feedback in materialising this Special Issue. We immensely thank the authors of the articles – we couldn’t have made this happen without your scholarship and patience. We also thank all of the reviewers who responded so thoughtfully and helped to improve the collection through peer review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We need to qualify what we mean here by ‘nature’, as we resist essentialist debates and align this work to the non-separation of nature and culture. While the term ‘nature-culture’ is often used to avert such bifurcation of nature to humans, the built and unbuilt environment or landscapes our position is to have sensitivity to these complex interrelationships between nature and culture by applying inverted commas around ‘nature’ (see Plumwood, 2000; Fullagar, 2000; Tamboukou, 2020).

2 Health, sport and physical education includes Health and Physical Education (HPE). This grouping acknowledges the varied configurations of how the subject is taught in various places internationally and within individual countries states or provinces. HPE includes links to Health Education, Physical Education, or integrated notions of Health and Physical Education. At times we refer specifically to health education or physical education or related disciplines of leisure and sports studies which is not to exclude 'HPE' as part of these.