Environmental attunement continued: people, place, land and water in health education, sport and physical education

This second collection for the special issue on environmental attunement delves further into the possibilities of reimagining health, sport and physical education in relation to people, place, land and broader policy debates and governance about sustainable development. The collection represents a modest effort over time to sustain and circle back to the initial appeal to how these concepts can come together (Welch et al., 2021). In setting out to establish a cohesive collection that responds to current socio-political objectives of shifting social and environmental priorities in health, and socio-historical links to the present, the casting of a wide net as guest editors generated a space for a ‘wild’ and varied collection of ideas and research. Some authors explored those embodied and sensorial aspects of being in relation to self and others that have rich potential to connect to the more-than-human realm in health education, sport and physical education. Links to nature and land or Country in the Australian context also surface in this special issue as an important consideration for research that is methodologically attempting to understand and work with children’s perspectives and Indigenous ways of knowing and being. A number of authors explore the potential futures of health, sport and physical education by examining the complexity of sustainability enactment across governmental, social and individual policies and practices. Other papers in this collection, mostly from the European context, engage with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the governance of space, as well as individual and structural factors that shape health education, sport and physical education.

We begin the collection by introducing the article by O’Flynn et al. (2022) which reframes how we can approach health knowledge with young people methodologically. Reporting on a research project with children from the Eastern Australian Yuin Indigenous community, they argue for researchers to ‘see children as Country’ and to see the child spirit as central to research. This is a significant contribution to the literature for not only the readership of Sport Education and Society, but also more widely for those working in environmental education, child and youth studies. Narratives that frame the child spirit from an Indigenous standpoint are often subjugated in research and practice. This paper is a refreshing read in that it addresses a scholarly absence and can support others to critically engage with First Nations’ cosmologies of childhood in research and practice.

Writing from New Zealand, Marg Cosgriff (2023) draws on a socio-materialist notion of being to explore the role of photo-voice as a method to understand the complex social, political and cultural sites of beaches in young people's lives. Examining the emplaced and embodied experiences of young people in their ‘beaching’ practices, Cosgriff demonstrates how photo-voice offers insight into the inextricable presence of more-than-human becoming that is mutually constitutive in beach-human entanglements. This paper has relevance to those wanting to engage with photo-voice as a relational dialogue between participants and researchers to understand more-than-human attunement in not only blue spaces but also other environments where sensory and embodied meaning are relationally experienced, conceptualised and expressed. The method helps move beyond purely discursive methods to access participants’, often otherwise difficult to articulate, experiences and affective memories of mutually interdependent human-place relations.

Carl Woods (2021) in his paper Towards Ithaka, calls for the necessity of inquiry within the constraints of the everyday. Utilising Ingold’s notion of correspondence, Woods provides a proposition about the unfoldings of learning in the world as skilled behaviour and knowing ‘about’ rather than ‘of’ so that there is not a predetermined outcome or perceived orientation to the world. Using a parallel metaphor of journeying and walking, the engagement with knowing and being is positioned as an adventure to read, think and feel rather than a static or knowable existence. This orientation to the world draws in the complex socio-materiality of the everyday moments of learning and how when we move through these moments we are entangled in yet-to-be-encountered possibilities.

Drawing on notions of unfolding, Riley and Proctor (2022) write from the Canadian context to make the case for relationally derived movement practices in physical education. This entails moment to moment movement encounters through senses and sensing relationships, becoming with, rather than linear or individualised movement trajectories that are obtained as the goal of learning. The authors suggest that the pedagogies used in PE, particularly in relation to discourses of personal responsibility for physical activity and physical literacy, should be reconsidered to include a focus on the ethics and politics of children’s bodies and movement. They argue that neoliberal governance often reinforces norms of developmentalism, which can exclude children who don’t fit within such frameworks. To address this, Riley and Proctor use diffractive and cartographic storytelling, to reimagine physical literacy within a speculative empiricism, and reposition children in relationally derived movement practices.

Cumbo and Welch (2023) explore pre-service teachers’ ideas about ‘nature’ in Health Education curriculum planning in the Australian context. The authors argue that while there has been broad recognition of the benefits of nature-based experiences for children and young people’s health and wellbeing, dominant socio-political and economic systems have minimised the value placed on the natural world in health education. This study involved a co-design workshop with pre-service generalist teachers to generate ideas about nature-based learning activities in primary schools that align with HPE curriculum. The authors thematically report on opportunities and challenges for embedding environmental and nature-based education in HPE, highlighting how participants’ notions of ‘nature’ were largely taken for granted, and were not considered in a relational way. This paper concludes with the argument that contemporary health education must look to interdisciplinary links and opportunities, particularly those connecting to notions of the environment. This research raises questions for educators to take note of the quality of nature interactions provided within health education.

Examining the relationship between health and the environment, Lundvall and Fröberg (2022) explore what it might mean to adopt the educational aspects of sustainable development in Health and Physical Education. The authors call into question existing cultures, content and practices to critically reflect on how education for sustainable development can both challenge and enable a rethinking and reorientation of practices. Through curricula revisions, a reorientation of learning perspectives and reconceptualising notions of health and wellbeing, the researchers suggest a processual, critical dialogue where the environment is not just a backdrop, but is integral for thinking specifically with the UN sustainable development goals, which in turn suggests a necessary shift in practice in health education.

Baena-Morales and González-Víllora (2022) discuss the possibilities for connecting Physical Education with sustainable development, and how this might contribute to achieving the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). The authors argue that despite sustainable development being a constantly evolving concept with complex terminology, there is still a need to specify actions that contribute to the SDGs. PE is positioned as an educational subject in schooling that is well placed through a holistic approach to address environmental, social and economic dimensions of the SDG framework. The authors conclude that partnerships and community collaborations can enhance the connections that are possible between PE and the SDGs.

Kronsted Lund et al. (2023) have written a scoping study on ‘Whose blue healthy spaces?’, reviewing the literature in relation to ecological-justice and the blue space determinants of health. Through the review, the authors demonstrate how marine environments have been neglected in comparison to terrestrial environments in health planning. They set out to examine how marine planning and management can facilitate or enhance physical activity in socio-ecologically inclusive ways. Drawing on a salutogenic approach they traverse the complexity of policy and practices as well as organisational structures in governing health agendas within blue landscapes. This paper offers an important connection between the increasing number of blue health research projects and health and wellbeing, governance, management and access to these places for sporting and non-sporting recreational pursuits. This adds to a growing body of research shifting away from Western notions of health and disease as disconnected from naturescapes. The authors focus on the community and socio-ecological relationships or co-creation of blue health promotion in ‘upstream’ or salutogenic notions of health in hydrophilic environments.

Backman and Svensson (2022) investigate individual athletes’ perspectives on the use of artificially constructed sports landscapes. They focus on cross-country skiing and canoe slalom; traditionally sports with a long history dependent on specific natural environments. They demonstrate the logics of competing versus training in relation to environmental sustainability that govern individual athletes’ dispositions toward these types of artificial environments and material products. In mapping shifts toward the ‘indoorisation’ of traditionally outdoor activities, they refer to the thorny debates about what and whether sports should be reserved for only their traditional ‘natural conditions’. While noting that there is little research that takes an environmental perspective in the sports performance literature, they highlight the complexity of participation in sports that are decontextualised from their original natural environments. Through individual athletes’ logics of performance, competition, predictability, environmental consequences and individual action, the discussion offers insights into the structural role of sports organisations and the varied values and uses of artificial spaces for accessibility and public health.

Together these papers form a varied collection that dives into the interstices of environmental attunement in a variety of everyday static and dynamic practices and policies of health education, sport and physical education. The collection offers insights into how we can move beyond individual notions of behaviour, health and performance to collective, community, structural environmental knowledge and skills. Different approaches have been taken to the common challenge of climate change, the SDGs, embodiment, adaptable environments and change in policy and practice. There were, however, many themes and issues that remain unexplored in this, and the initial, special issue on environmental attunement. One of these is an in-depth examination of how the field of environmental sustainability sits uneasily with some of the traditions and practices of health, sport and physical education. In the previous issue, Thorpe et al. (2021) offered how there is a tendency for sport scholars to focus on individual humans’ lived experiences, performance (or moving bodies), but there also remain absences and unanswered questions about the uneven distribution of topics that relate directly to environmental attunement in the field. While some might argue that everything is interconnected with climate change and sustainability, and to some extent we agree, there are topics such as wellbeing or food and nutrition (e.g. Carlsson & Williams, 2008) that offer more readily available links to environmental knowledge. Similarly, different learning contexts, such as the early years (e.g. Pollitt et al., 2021) have different opportunities and constraints to enact environmental attunement than secondary schooling. We contine to highlight in this second issue that attunement to environmental knowledge needs to be integrated via holistic and participatory approaches that recognise shifting social, political and cultural practices in both built and natural environments on lands and waters with deep histories. There is also need to engage with policy makers and educators’ micro-biographies and ‘ecological identities’, alongside pedagogical and planning resources to deepen epistemological habits of environmental attunement across health, sport and physical education. This is not a simple process, as Stewart (2011) writes, ‘every attunement is a tuning up to something, a labour that arrives already weighted with what it’s living through’ (p. 448) and ‘particular attunements can become habitual and rind up, or they can slough off as they are replaced with what comes next’ (p. 451)

In sport and physical education, environmental attunement is in its infancy compared to other fields of environmental education. We need to take further a critique of sustainability discourse, risk discourse and its relationship to public health. Critical scholarship in environmental education literature already exists (e.g. Gough & Whitehouse, 2018), and it would be unwise not to learn from this literature before taking up environmental discourses in HPE and sport in an uncritical manner. While there are already some exceptions of scholarship that grapple with this complexity in the field (e.g. Rodrigues, 2018), there is more work to be done on research that engages with the tensions between individual and structural factors of health and environmental education. This work will be ongoing to explore ways that our field/s can learn from environmental educational research and the problems and debates that animate this work. For instance, what isn’t included in this issue are perspectives from the global south and a variety of perspectives that aren’t largely White, Western (with the exception of the O’Flynn et al. paper), and perspectives that work to continue to de-centre the humanistic ‘people centred’ approaches to HPE and sport that unsurprisingly stem from public health roots and traditions.

This collection seeks to deepen our understanding of the challenges of our time, including not only our ethical and social responsibility to engage with climate change and eco-justice, but also longstanding questions about equity, inclusion and social cohesion in the environments and places we research, learn and teach. There needs to be an intensified focus on the ways that environments shape health and human behaviour and how this is reliant on the natural world. How do we ‘become with’ the emergent health and wellbeing challenges of the anthropocene? (Somerville & Powell, 2022). We hope that this rolling issue expands the grounds for ongoing work as academics, practitioners and policy makers who seek to connect and extend their involvement in the environmental aspects of health education, sport and physical education.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the authors for their contributions to this issue as well as the work of the blind reviewers that strengthened the individual papers and collection. We also thank Sport Education and Society editors, Professor John Evans, Professor Jan Wright and Professor Lisette Burrows for their support of this collection and providing a format that supported slow scholarship and the notion of ‘degrowth’ in our approach to crossing new terrain.