Education for Social Justice - Social Justice Pedagogies School Health and Physical Education (Symposium)

Abstract

As a compulsory school subject in most Western societies, Health and Physical Education (HPE) is charged with providing important health outcomes for children and young people. The world summit on HPE in 1999, for example, stated that HPE provides 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 Burke (2008) similarly argued that school HPE can make a unique contribution to the physical, cognitive, emotional and social health of children and young people. The authors of this proposed symposium share this vision for HPE but believe that positive health outcomes are accelerated when teachers of HPE are critically conscious and engage in socially-critical pedagogies that foreground inclusion, democracy, social justice and equity. The aim of this proposed symposium is to present and discuss the findings of a three-year international, collaborative research project called Education for Equitable Health Outcomes - The Promise of School Health and Physical Education (EDUHEALTH) consisting of Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) teachers and HPE researchers from Sweden, Norway and New Zealand.

The EDUHEALTH project sought to identify school HPE teaching practices that promote social justice and more equitable health outcomes across the three different participating countries. A focus on equity, democracy and social justice in HPE is pertinent when education is in an era of risk where, for instance, these ideals are currently under threat from neoliberal globalization (Azzarito et al., 2017). Neoliberal approaches to health and education also tend to negatively impact on the most marginalized and/or minority groups in society (France and Roberts, 2017; Rashbrooke, 2013). Azzarito et al. (2017) further caution that school HPE curricula based on principles of global neoliberalism have emphasized competitive-based rather than equity-based goals, that in turn lead to the marginalization of the social justice project. In fact, research shows (Sirna, Tinning & Rossi, 2010) that many HPE teachers tend to be insensitive to such social justice issues. The session will begin with a brief introduction to the symposium and overview of the project, followed by the first paper which will discuss our conceptualisation of social justice in relation to HPE and present the methodology of the project with a focus on the analysis. This paper examines the concept of social justice in HPE as constituted and addressed across the three different countries. As part of the methodological discussion we will describe how our tri-country research teams completed structured classroom observations informed by the principles of Critical Incident Technique (Tripp, 2012) and Stimulated Recall Interviews (Lyle, 2003). In this paper, we also explicate our iterative process of thematical analysis of the data generated. The second paper will represent findings that elucidate how HPE practice can support social justice on three different levels: individual, group and society level. Additionally, the paper demonstrates how such teaching practices in HPE can relate to social justice in different ways as shaped by the context within which they occur. Employing new institutional theory (Scott 2007), we draw attention to how social justice pedagogies are informed differently by institutionalised governing systems and may act differently in different societies and teachers’ work. The third paper will represent and discuss findings relating to HPE teaching practices about and for social justice. The findings presented in this paper will be analysed by drawing on the principles of social justice pedagogies (Tinning, 2016) and transformative pedagogy (Ovens & Philpot, in press). This paper will also address the implications of the EDUHEALTH project for HPE and PETE practice.