Practitioner initial thoughts on the role of the five propositions in the new Australian Curriculum Health and Physical Education

ABSTRACT

This paper engages with some of the opportunities and challenges presented by curriculum policy reform around the world in order to explore the enactment possibilities for educators engaging with the new Australian Curriculum Health and Physical Education (ACHPE). Tensions amidst curriculum policy reform are not unique to Australia, however, the ACHPE stands out for boldy attempting to guide pedagogy through the identification of five interrelated propositions made central to the curriculum. By focussing on the educative purpose of the learning area alongside a strength-based approach, critical inquiry, health literacy and valuing movement the five propositions signal a shift towards guiding how to enact curriculum reform. The enactment of these propositions is therefore of interest in the Australian context and to global curriculum policy observers. This paper reports upon practitioner (n = 9) initial interpretations of the five propositions and what they feel and think they might look like in their everyday work. Using an inductive approach to data analysis the paper privileges practitioner interpretations in order to build a theory that can make an account of their perceptions within the complex and contested terrain of curriculum policy reform; future possibilities for health and physical education in Australia and Internationally are teased out.

KEYWORDS:

• Health and physical education
• Australian Curriculum
• curriculum reform
• PETE
• inductive method
• five propositions

Disclosure statement

This research was approved by Monash University research ethics number CF15/817 - 201500036.

Notes on contributor

Karen Lambert has been teaching teachers to teach for the past seventeen years. Her teaching specialities lie in health and physical education pedagogies, youth health, gender and sexuality studies, and health promotion. She engages poststructural feminist and queer theory in her teaching as a result of her research interests in identity, place and difference. She is currently researching and writing in the areas of scholarship of learning and teaching, curriculum policy reform, and embodied learning and pedagogies in physical education.

ORCID

Karen Lambert http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6389-2451

Notes

1. Term borrowed from the diffusion of innovation theory to denote those who take up a product or innovation before others (around 14% of consumers) (WebFinance Inc., 2017).