Brokering and bridging knowledge in health and physical education: a critical discourse analysis of one external provider’s curriculum

ABSTRACT

Background: There has been a proliferation of external agencies ‘knocking on the door’ of, and being welcomed into, Health and Physical Education (HPE). This opens HPE up to new products, partners, and services. Although scholarship on the practice of outsourcing HPE is steadily growing in quantity and in scope, there is a significant gap in the literature around how external providers (or outsourcers) of HPE interpret the curriculum, and how this translates into certain kinds of products and services.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse one external provider’s interpretations of the curriculum and of the roles of key pedagogical agents and stakeholders (e.g. HPE teachers and students), as well as their translation of these interpretations into particular kinds of products and services. This is achieved through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Tennis Australia’s Tennis in Secondary School (TSS) Program teacher resources and interviews with key employees of Tennis Australia.

Methods: The larger study from which this paper draws is a network ethnography of the external provision of HPE. TSS was selected as a case study in the initial web-audit undertaken as part of this network ethnography. The criteria which resulted in the selection of TSS as a case study were: the utilisation of educational language within product descriptions or marketing, provision of services to a significant number of schools, and a rationale for services that included a contribution to HPE. A CDA was undertaken on the TSS advertising, product materials, teacher resources, and the transcripts of semi-structured interviews conducted with three employees of the organisation.

Findings: Tennis Australia markets an explicit alignment between their TSS Program and the Australian Curriculum: HPE (AC:HPE). For example, teacher resources are structured to include a ‘Learning Intention’ (i.e. a curriculum content descriptor); ‘Focus Questions and Teaching Points’ (i.e. pedagogical styles); and ‘Success Criteria’ (i.e. self-described ‘assessment criteria’). Significantly, however, there were several tensions and gaps in their interpretations and understandings of the AC:HPE and their approaches to pedagogy and assessment within the subject.

Conclusion: External agencies, such as Tennis Australia, are becoming increasingly sophisticated at marketing their products in relation to HPE curricula. Rather than divesting or relieving teachers of curriculum decision-making and design responsibility, however, we argue that these efforts from external agencies mean that now, more than ever, teachers need to recognise, articulate, and enact their pedagogical and curriculum expertise. This will allow teachers to better broker, bridge, and translate knowledge and ensure that HPE remains an educative experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Outsourcing
• external providers
• boundary spanner
• knowledge-broker

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Leigh Sperka http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9946-7548

Eimear Enright http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7206-4781

Notes

1. For the purposes of this project, a case study is considered to be ‘not a methodological choice but a choice of what is to be studied’ (Stake 2005, 443). The unit of analysis, or case, selected to be investigated within this project is the programme itself. It should also be acknowledged here that all research conducted on this case study had received ethical approval from the University Research Ethics Committee.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [Grant No DP140102607]; and the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.