Time to SHAPE Up: developing policies, standards and practices that are socially just

ABSTRACT

Background: The Society for Health and Physical Educators (SHAPE) America has guided physical education curriculum, instruction, and assessment in the United States (US) for well over 100 years. We contend that in the US context for physical education, the National Standards and Grade-Level Outcomes for K-12 Physical Education (Society of Health and Physical Educators America. 2014. National Standards and Grade-level Outcomes for K-12 Physical Education. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics) and the Initial Physical Education Teacher Education Standards (Society of Health and Physical Educators America. 2017. 2017 National Standards for Initial Physical Education Teacher Education. Reston, VA: Author) are policy documents that strongly influence curriculum in physical education. While there has been forward movement in identifying and addressing diverse learning needs across these standards, we argue that a more explicit and overt focus on social justice education (SJE) is needed. Specifically, the SHAPE America standards need to be challenged and revised to become more equitable and socially just to meet the needs of all of our students, both at the higher education and K-12 levels.

Purpose: We explore each standard and grade-level outcome in the standards to identify how social justice is currently being considered and expose the paucity of explicit and intentional focus on SJE. In this study, we draw on policy reform and network theory (Penney, D. 2016. “Policy and Possibilities.” In Routledge Handbook of Physical Education Pedagogies, edited by C. Ennis, 131–142. New York: Routledge; Ball, S. J. 2007. Education Plc. Understanding Private Sector Participation in Public Sector Education. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge; 2015. “What is Policy? 21 Years Later: Reflections on the Possibilities of Policy Research.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 36 (2): 306–313) as frameworks for theorizing the data.

Data collection and analysis: We utilized a document analysis qualitative research method to examine and evaluate how SJE is represented in the standards. The intent of document analysis is to examine and interpret data in order to elicit meaning, gain understanding, and develop empirical knowledge. Our process involved a 3-stage process, which included a superficial examination (skimming), thorough examination (reading), and concluded with an interpretation of our analysis. We utilized this process for the current and previous editions of the K-12 and PETE standards.

Findings: Across the Initial PETE Standards (Society of Health and Physical Educators America. 2017. 2017 National Standards for Initial Physical Education Teacher Education. Reston, VA: Author) and the National Standards and Grade-Level Outcomes for K-12 Physical Education (Society of Health and Physical Educators America. 2014. National Standards and Grade-level Outcomes for K-12 Physical Education. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.) there was limited intentional and explicit emphasis on social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion in the current editions. This was consistent across previous editions in both sets of standards; however, there was more of an overt and intentional focus on SJE in the initial standards developed in 1995. 25 years ago, the K-12 national standards and student expectations had greater emphasis on SJE than we do today.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy
• educational reform
• curriculum
• social justice education

Disclosure statement

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

ORCID

Jennifer L. Walton-Fisette http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2753-4400

Sue Sutherland http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4059-3133