Social Justice Pedagogies in Health and Physical Education

Göran Gerdin, Wayne Smith, Rod Philpot, Katarina Schenker, Kjersti Mordal Moen, Susanne Linnér, Knut Westlie, Lena Larsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000413335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

This book makes the case that school Health and Physical Education (HPE) can make a unique contribution to young people's physical, emotional and social health outcomes when teachers of HPE engage in pedagogies for social justice that emphasise inclusion, democracy and equity.

Drawing on observations and teacher interviews across Sweden, Norway and New Zealand, the book explores successful school teaching practices that promote social justice and equitable health outcomes. In particular, it draws attention to the importance of building relationships, teaching for social cohesion and explicitly teaching about and acting on social inequities as pedagogies for social justice. The book also argues that context matters and that pedagogies for social justice need to recognise how both approaches to, and focus on, social justice vary in different contexts.

This is essential reading for academics and students interested in social justice and working in the fields of education, HPE and teacher education.

Part I

Background

Chapter 1

Introduction

Introduction

As a compulsory school subject in most Western societies, Health and Physical Education (HPE¹) is charged with providing important health outcomes for children and young people. The world summit on HPE in 1999, for example, stated that HPE offers the most effective means of providing all young people, regardless of their ability, disability, sex, age, culture, race, ethnicity, religion or social background, with the skills, attitudes, knowledge and understanding for lifelong health and well-being (Doll-Tepper & Scoretz, 2001). Morgan and Bourke (2008) similarly argued that school HPE can make a unique contribution to the physical, cognitive, emotional and social health of children and young people. We, the authors of this book, share this vision for HPE but believe that positive health outcomes are accelerated when teachers of HPE are critically conscious and engage in pedagogies that foreground inclusion, democracy, social justice and equity. The aim of this book is to present and discuss the findings of a three-year international, collaborative research project, titled ‘Education for equitable health outcomes, the promise of school health and physical education’ (EDUHEALTH), that sought to identify successful school HPE teaching practices, which promote social justice and more equitable health outcomes.

In this chapter, we provide a brief introduction to the EDUHEALTH project, explain why we embarked on this project, the goals of the project, what it involved, how the project progressed and, significantly, how it provided international perspectives on not only HPE but also the geopolitical contexts in which HPE is practiced. We then introduce the other chapters in the book.

Why focus on social justice in HPE?

As HPE teacher educators and researchers, we recognise and acknowledge that the way HPE is often taught and conceptualised in schools does not always provide equitable health outcomes across gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and social class (Doll-Tepper & Scoretz, 2001; Wright, 2004; Klomsten, Marsh & Skaalvik, 2005; Morgan & Bourke, 2008; Redelius, Fagrell & Larsson, 2009). Although HPE has the potential to contribute to lifelong health and well-being, it can be counter-productive and, in fact, be unhealthy for some students (Schenker, 2018). That is, despite decades of research and curricula reform, HPE continues to make both friends and enemies (Tinning, 2000; Fitzpatrick, 2019). Öhman et al. (2014), for instance, highlighted how HPE is often strongly influenced by neoliberal individualism, where students are seen to be responsible for their own health and the students themselves rather than society are solely blamed for their ‘failure’ to achieve health. Unfortunately, the role of HPE in contributing to, or challenging, such an ideological perspective is seldom considered. Neoliberal approaches to health also tend to negatively impact the most marginalised and/or minority groups in society (Rashbrooke, 2013; France & Roberts, 2017). Azzarito et al. (2017) further cautioned that school HPE curricula based on principles of neoliberal individualism have emphasised competitive-based rather than equity-based goals that, in turn, lead to the marginalisation of the social justice project. In fact, research shows that many HPE teachers tend to be insensitive to such social justice issues (Sirna, Tinning & Rossi, 2010).

In many societies today, HPE teachers are being called upon to address significant social health problems commonly associated with low socio-economic lifestyle pressures, family violence, mental illness and high rates of morbid obesity as well as poor academic outcomes from schooling, which can ultimately result in poor lifestyle choices. More than 20 years ago, Tinning (1997) and others advocated for a critical approach to HPE that emphasises inclusion, equity, involvement, enjoyment, social justice, caring, cooperation and movement. Tinning added that critical HPE of this nature should confront issues relating to gender equity, cater to diversity and challenge unjust practices such as motor elitism.

Following this advocacy, it is our belief that health equity goals can be accelerated when socially-critical perspectives and social justice pedagogies are enacted in school HPE lessons. However, these complex health issues require strategic education programmes that take account of and aim to address the root causes of health inequities rather than simplistic interventionist physical activity programmes designed to ‘make’ children healthy. Unfortunately, research shows that many teachers of HPE are not equipped to deliver these outcomes (Mordal Moen & Green, 2014; Gerdin, Philpot & Smith, 2018; Larsson, Linnér & Schenker, 2018). It appears that many HPE teachers are not sufficiently prepared to understand the issues nor do they have the necessary pedagogical skills to address them.

In this book, pedagogies for social justice are considered to be teaching practices that assist ‘students to examine and challenge the status quo, the dominant constructions of reality and the power relations that produce inequities, in ways that can lead to advocacy and community action’ (Wright, 2004, p. 7, italics added). Already at this juncture of the book, we find it necessary for us to explain to readers why we have chosen to use the term ‘pedagogies for social justice’ rather than the perhaps more common term ‘critical pedagogy’. The reason for this is that the EDUHEALTH project highlighted for us that the researchers and HPE teachers have different conceptions of the notion of critical pedagogy and the very nature of social justice itself, which we now recognise to be contextual in nature (see Chapters 3 and 4). Whereas some see critical pedagogy to be necessarily radical in nature and, as such, seek to critique, disrupt and transform existing social structures that support societal inequities and injustices, others focus more on the class environment and possible issues of inequity and injustice that exist within this context. For this reason, we have chosen to use the term ‘pedagogies for social justice’ which we view to be the teachers’ practices that seek to address a broad-brush of inequities and social injustices of significance to HPE. In this regard, it is not dissimilar and is intended to capture Kirk's (2020, p. 101) description of critical pedagogy in the context of HPE, as being ‘concerned with the organization and alignment of curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment in ways that render physical education (PE) inclusive, fair and equitable as an embodied experience for young people’.

Advocacy for social justice pedagogies in HPE has been accompanied by changes to PE policy documents in countries such as Aotearoa New Zealand² and Australia where PE curricula have been replaced with HPE curricula that expect HPE teachers to integrate a socially-critical perspective into their pedagogy (Macdonald & Kirk, 1999; Leahy, O’Flynn & Wright, 2013). As awareness of socially-critical perspectives has become more prevalent in these HPE curricula, there has been a corresponding growth in the adoption of critical pedagogy in classroom-based health contexts, perhaps more than the practical gym or field-based teaching spaces of physical educators. A study by McIntyre, Philpot and Smith (2016) that explored Aotearoa New Zealand secondary school HPE teachers’ understandings and use of social justice pedagogies in HPE reported that critical-health practices were conceived as health education rather than PE pedagogies. Similarly, Scorringe (2016) reported that the teaching practices of Aotearoa New Zealand HPE teachers that focussed on social justice were primarily confined to the classroom. Pedagogies for social justice in HPE appear to be less evident in the movement-orientated PE classes. That is to say, it appears that for many teachers it is more difficult to teach both for and about social justice in the gymnasium and on the field than it is in a classroom-based health education lessons. Enactment of social justice perspectives in and through the physical in HPE classes remains a challenge for many HPE teachers.

In Sweden and Norway, HPE does not have a health education component that is classroom based and separate from HPE rather learning about health is meant to be integrated within all PE practice. However, studies from both these countries (e.g. Leirhaug & MacPhail, 2015; Brolin et al., 2018) show that learning about health in its broadest sense often receives little attention and, as such, health is still assumed to be the outcome of being physically active. For instance, a recent Norwegian study by Mong (2019) highlighted how teachers often put emphasis on the physical and do not explicitly plan for the health aspects of the curriculum in their teaching practice. In Sweden and Norway, social justice perspectives are also not explicitly expressed in the HPE curriculum documents, rather social justice perspectives are more explicitly integrated across the overall national school curriculum. For instance, the directives for education in Sweden (SFS, 2010:800) and Norway (UHR, 2014), stipulate that issues of gender, equality and social justice should be addressed according to laws that address discrimination in both countries (Kommunal- og regionaldepartementet, 2005; SFS, 2008, p. 567). Despite such directives, research from Sweden and Norway continues to highlight that these issues are still being given little attention both within HPE teacher education (HPETE³) programmes and the school subject itself (Klomsten et al., 2005; Redelius, Fagrell & Larsson, 2009; Mordal-Moen & Green, 2014; Larsson et al., 2018).

Despite an increasing volume of literature that advocates for social justice in HPE, there have been few articulations of how HPE teachers can teach for and about social justice, that is, what HPE teachers can do in classrooms and through coursework and for whom social justice is sought. Calls for tertiary teacher education institutions to ensure that their graduating HPE teachers have an understanding of how pedagogies for social justice in HPE can be enacted have led to a growing research base that articulates relevant practices in HPETE. Yet there is a paucity of research that documents how HPE teachers are enacting social justice pedagogies in their schools. In this book, we aim to address this knowledge and practice gap and build on the substantive body of literature that advocates for pedagogies for social justice in HPE, by discussing the role of HPE and presenting the practices of HPE teachers who are using pedagogies for social justice in school HPE.

In order to achieve this aim, the book will draw on the findings of a three-year collaborative research project that set out to identify successful pedagogies for social justice in HPE across three countries, Sweden, Norway and Aotearoa New Zealand.

The EDUHEALTH project

The project, EDUHEALTH, was a European Union (EU) ‘Horizon 2020’ funded project between Linnaeus University (LNU), Sweden, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences (INN), Norway and the University of Auckland (UoA), Aotearoa New Zealand.

This research project grew out of our (all authors) lived experiences as HPE teachers, teacher educators and researchers from three different countries. As a collaborative group, we shared Tinning's belief that it is ‘how HPE teachers think and feel about education, social justice, physical activity, bodies and health’ (Tinning, 2012, p. 224, italics in original) that is of greatest importance in terms of striving for more inclusive and socially just teaching practices in HPE. Indeed, the genesis of this project started when Richard Tinning visited LNU in September 2014 as part of an ongoing teacher and student exchange between LNU and UoA that had been ongoing for some years. Göran Gerdin, who had recently finished his doctorate at UoA and was working together with Wayne Smith on a research project looking into graduate teachers’ enactment of critical pedagogy in HPE practice, was also there at the time working part-time as a lecturer at LNU. In the discussions with Richard, while focusing on the outcomes of the project involving UoA graduate teachers (see Gerdin et al., 2018) we acknowledged that although a large amount of research had critiqued and questioned HPE practices that lead to marginalisation and inequities or had advocated for critical pedagogy and social justice, very little had been published that provided guidance and examples for teachers of how this could be done in practice.

Over the next years, both Wayne Smith and R...