Models-based Practice in Physical Education

Ashley Casey, David Kirk

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000298949
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Métodos de enseñanza de la educación

This book offers a comprehensive synthesis of over 40 years of research on models in physical education to suggest Models-based Practice (MbP) as an innovative future approach to physical education. It lays out the ideal conditions for MbP to flourish by situating pedagogical models at the core of physical education programs and allowing space for local agency and the co-construction of practice.

Starting from the premise that true MbP does not yet exist, the book makes a case for the term "pedagogical model" over alternatives such as curriculum model and instructional model, and explains how learners' cognitive, social, affective and psychomotor needs should be organised in ways that are distinctive and unique to each model. It examines the core principles underpinning the pedagogical models that make up MbP, including pedagogical models as organising centres for program design and as design specifications for developing local programs. The book also explores how a common structure can be applied to analyse pedagogical models at macro, meso and micro levels of discourse. Having created a language through which to talk about pedagogical models and MbP, the book concludes by identifying the conditions - some existing and some aspirational - under which MbP can prosper in reforming physical education.

An essential read for academics, doctoral and post-graduate students, and pre-service and in-service teachers, Models-based Practice in Physical Education is a vital point of reference for anyone who is interested in pedagogical models and wants to embrace this potential future of physical education.

1Why models-based practice?

A positive approach

A typical approach to answering the question “Why models-based practice?”, and thus making a case for an alternative to the dominant form of physical education, is to point out the shortcomings of the dominant form. Enright, Hill, Sandford, and Gard (2014) have argued that to do so is to engage in “deficit scholarship,” which, they suggest, is prevalent in physical education, particularly among socially critical researchers. Supporting this concern, McMillan (2017) argues that talking down physical education teachers is both unfair and inaccurate since there is a tendency in socially critical research to mischaracterise and overlook good teaching. We agree with both authors to the extent that only to highlight shortcomings, deficiencies and failures for the sake of critique is inappropriate. At the same time, we think it is important to face the “brutal facts” of our situation if we are to comprehend where we are and why (Cohen, 2007). Identifying shortcomings is also a means of judging the extent to which the alternative we proposed offers a better educational experience for all students than that which they currently “enjoy.”

Our starting point, therefore, is to take a positive approach and point out why we can’t afford not to have high quality physical education in primary and secondary schools. In doing this we echo Cathy Ennis (2014) who noted that the health of school students was the first of seven Cardinal Principles of the American National Education Association in 1918. She wrote:

Many citizens still believe that we should fund physical education after we fund everything else. In fact, the opposite is the case. We need to reverse this perception! Student-centered learning in sport and physical activity serves as the foundation for a lifetime of healthy decision-making. It is what all of us and especially the most vulnerable people in our society depend on for future well-being. It must come first.

(Ennis, 2014, p. 68)

As Kirk (2020) has recently pointed out, while health has been a recurring preoccupation among physical educators for over 100 years, conceptions of health within physical education have shifted since 1918, from a medico-health and posture-focused rationale to the currently popular notion that exercise is medicine (Sallis, 2009). From this latter perspective, school physical education is viewed as a means of managing the risks, inherent in sedentary lifestyles, of cardio-vascular disease and obesity. Influenced by the New Public Health, Sallis and McKenzie (1991) proposed that physical educators join with other health-related professionals to form intra-professional teams to combat these diseases. Nearly 20 years later, McKenzie, this time with Lounsbery (McKenzie & Lounsbery, 2009) makes the case for Moderate to Vigorous Physical Activity (MVPA) as a key feature of lessons in schools, though they bemoan the fact (and staying with the medicine analogy) that all too often physical education is “the pill not taken.”

Fitzpatrick (2018) more recently argued that to take health as a starting point in a rationale for alternative forms of physical education, as Oliver and Kirk (2015) do in their work with adolescent girls, is to buy into this risk-management agenda, with its “questionable” capacity to genuinely benefit women’s lives while reproducing gendered inequalities. While Fitzpatrick’s point is well made, we don’t think that this connection between health and a risk-management approach is a given. We think Ennis’s mention of “vulnerable people” takes us in another direction from the pathogenic concerns of physical education as a form of “medicine” to a salutogenic position which lies at the heart of McCuaig, Quennerstedt, and Macdonald’s (2013) advocacy for a “strength-based” approach. Building on the work of Antonovsky (1979), a psychologist of stress who asked “What are the salutary factors that keep people healthy?”, Quennerstedt (2008), McCuaig et al. (2013), and McCuaig and Quennerstedt (2018) have applied a salutogenic theory of health promotion to curriculum development in physical education. These authors adopted a key feature of Antonovsky’s approach and asked, “How do people stay healthy?” rather than “how do we reduce the risk of people becoming sick?”

Antonovsky (1979) argued that the common denominator in empirical studies of healthy people was that their lives had a Sense of Coherence, insofar as they were meaningful, comprehensible and manageable. Healthy people are able to access what he calls Generalised Resistance Resources (GRRs), specific to their circumstances, that individuals and communities can draw on to keep them healthy. By way of example, Ferreira’s (2019) empirical research has shown how physical activity programs are one source of GRRs that support a Sense of Coherence among older people.

McCuaig and Quennerstedt (2018), among others, argue that school physical education can provide access to GRRs that contribute to a Sense of Coherence. But in order to do so, it needs to take particular forms. As we will see shortly when we come to discuss the shortcomings of the currently dominant form of physical education, this positive and educationally beneficial effect is unlikely. Staying for now with the question of why we can’t afford not to have quality physical education in schools, we can note that for the rising numbers of young people living in or at risk of living in precarity, access to GRRs is limited (Kirk, 2020). State funded school physical education, free at the point of delivery, is for many of these young people the only access they may have to engage in physical activity programs and to develop the physical competences and knowledge for human wellbeing. This is not just an individual good but, as Ennis points out, benefits society as a whole.

Personal health is the asset on which our economies, our sustenance, our livelihoods, and our ways of life depend. Today, we need to secure our futures by investing in our physical capital through high quality physical education programs that establish strong foundations of health and well-being. This investment is essential and timely, not an afterthought.

(Ennis, 2014, p. 11)

In many countries the importance of physical education is recognised, particularly where it is a required part of the curriculum in both primary and secondary schools, where specialist facilities and equipment are available, and where teachers have specific qualifications in the field. In such places the bill to the public purse, funded through taxation, can be considerable. Even for a small country such as Scotland, for example, with a population of approximately 5.5 million and just under 700,000 children and young people attending state schools, the cost represents a serious government commitment. Kirk (2020) estimated that, in Scotland, the cost of physical education teachers’ salaries alone is around £80 million per year. The majority of these teachers are in secondary schools, arguably a misplaced resource in itself (Kirk, 2005). This figure does not take into account facilities, equipment, teacher education programs in universities, nor funding for school inspection. We suggest this outlay is likely to be similar in other countries, proportionate to their size, where physical education is a required subject in schools. Taxpayers would reasonably expect to see tangible benefits to children and young people for recurrent spending on this scale. And indeed, we want to argue that physical education funded in this way can provide genuine and evident educational benefits for all children. But not in its current form.

We begin to make a case for Models-based Practice (MbP), then, from a positive perspective. We believe children and young people, particularly those who are socially vulnerable and growing up in precarity, cannot afford not to experience high quality physical education. This is because some of the GRRs that assist children and young people to stay healthy can be sourced in the physical competencies, knowledge, motivation and values developed in and through physical education. Our view is that inclusive, fair and equitable forms of physical education, free at the point of delivery in state schools can, along with other quality educational experiences, contribute to young people’s sense of the meaningfulness, comprehensibility and manageability of their lives. This is only possible, we think, if physical education in its currently dominant form is changed. In order for change to happen, we need to face the brutal facts about this dominant but failing approach.

Multi-activity, sport technique-based physical education

The currently dominant form of physical education in schools, possibly more so in secondary than primary (Griggs, 2015), is multi-activity, and is practised in sport technique-based programs (Kirk, 2010). These programs first appeared in schools in Britain in the post-World War Two era, during the 1950s and 1960s, and in other places a little earlier (e.g. the USA, Ennis, 2014) or a little later (e.g. in Brazil, Costa & Tubino, 2005). Pühse and Gerber’s (2005) edited collection of accounts of physical education in 35 countries suggests that the multi-activity, sport technique-based approach is a global phenomenon, notwithstanding important local variations on this theme (Larsson & Quennerstedt, 2016). Indeed, this form of physical education seems able to persist regardless of the existence of diverse national curricula in many countries. The shortcomings of this approach are documented and widely accepted by physical education scholars (Ennis, 2014; Kirk, 2010; Locke, 1992), if not the teaching profession more broadly (McMillan, 2017), and don’t need to be rehearsed in detail again here. It is nevertheless worth highlighting, for the purpose of answering the question “why MbP?”, three issues with the multi-activity, sport technique-based approach.

The first issue is that this dominant approach to physical education is not inclusive of all young people. There is a strong body of research, produced over many years, that shows the children and young people who benefit most from multi-activity, sport technique-based physical education are “just like” their teachers (Ennis, 2014), who as Standal (2015) describes them, are White, relatively affluent, and “severely able-bodied.” Multi-activity, sport technique-based physical education, according to this research, underserves many children and young people who are from ethnic minority backgrounds, who live in precarity, who are disabled, and who are female. Moreover, many children and young people are underserved by the dominant form of physical education because they belong to more than one of these groups, further compounding their adverse experiences. This well-documented exclusion of a significant proportion of the school population from the educational benefits of physical education is unacceptable, given the amounts of public funding spent on its provision year on year.

We need to stress here that we do not believe this situation is in any way an intentional outcome of the work teachers do under very challenging circumstances. Nor do we believe that this situation is an intentional outcome of policymakers who are often seeking to produce inclusive curricula in the face of growing diversity among school-age children and young people. Indeed, much of the research literature is critical of the failure of the physical education community, as a whole, to be as responsive as we should be to constant changes in the circumstances of children and young people. The rising prevalence of precarity in Britain, and its mal-effects on the health and wellbeing of vulnerable people after more than a decade of austerity, is just one example of an emerging crisis that seems to be passing physical educators by (Kirk, 2020). In contrast, we believe positive action for appropriate change to school physical education is essential in response to such examples of significant social change.

A second issue is to understand how multi-activity, sport technique-based physical education excludes a significant proportion of children and young people from benefitting educationally. It excludes some children and young people because multi-activity, sport technique-based physical education does not recognise nor cater for the diversity among the school-age population, neither in terms of physical endowment, nor embodied subjectivities. It is, according to its critics, hypernormative and heteronormative, a form of “straight pedagogy” that seeks to “correct” the queerness of bodies (McGlashan & Fitzpatrick, 2017; Landi, 2018; Standal, 2015). This process of “straightening queerness” is not only concerned with gender and sexuality. It is, in crude terms, a matter of overlooking the exceptionality all young people bring to physical education classes. It does this in favour of a collective, narrowly defined and stereotypical norm of appropriate body shape, physical competence, and the “right” attitude.

Again, we stress that this is not something teachers intend to do, at least not most teachers for the most part. Straight pedagogy is borne out of necessity in terms of the ways in which schools as institutions are organised, the purposes they serve in society, and their unavoidable hidden curricula. The “industrial-age school” continues to be the dominant institutional form of the school, operating within and informed by late 19th and 20th century forms of industrial capitalism, even when many countries of the Global North are primarily neoliberal, post-industrial capitalist societies. Through its primary instruments of the timetable and the classroom, the industrial age school seeks to construct young people who “fit” and who are “fit for” particular adult roles in society. Lawson (2008) explains how this institutional form of the school works in the case of the USA:

The industrial age American school has been oriented toward workforce preparation for the factory and the assembly line, and the school’s social organization has followed suit…. Justified as a meritocratic system, s...