The enactment of social justice in HPE practice: how context(s) comes to matter

Abstract

For more than 40 years, health and physical education (HPE) academics in universities and teacher education colleges have drawn attention to issues of social justice specific to the context of PE and advocated for teachers in fields, gymnasiums and other physical activity spaces to do a better job of promoting more equitable outcomes for all students. Building on this advocacy, in the late 1990s, countries such as Sweden, Norway and New Zealand designed HPE curricula that address social justice. However, limited research has focused specifically on the enactment of social justice in HPE practice. Drawing on a larger international project involving Sweden, Norway and New Zealand the aim of this article is therefore to explore the constitution of social justice pedagogies across these three different HPE contexts and more specifically how HPE teaching practice may be understood from regulative, normative and cultural perspectives on social justice. The data reported on in this paper were generated from educational acts, curriculum documents, observations of HPE lessons in each of the three countries and follow-up teacher interviews. In order to analyse the data, we employed Scott's (2008. Institutions and organizations: Ideas and interests (3rd ed). Sage) institutional theory to further understand and discuss the enactment of social justice across the three different countries in HPE practice. In our representation and analysis of the findings we draw attention to how social justice pedagogies are informed differently by institutionalised governing systems and therefore they may be enacted differently by teachers in different societies. In particular, we highlight the influence of (i) regulative; (ii) normative; (iii) cultural-cognitive elements on practice. We conclude by pointing out the complex interplay between regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements that both enable and constrain HPE teachers' enactments of social justice in HPE practice.

Sustainability Awareness of In-Service Physical Education Teachers

“…This is achieved through actions such as promoting active commuting to school and working on sports content in natural environments such as orienteering or climbing, complemented by transversal activities in natural environments. Second, under the social aspect, Physical Education has traditionally been considered a fundamental element in promoting social justice [22], recognised as capable of creating egalitarian educational contexts that favour participation and cooperation [23,24]. Finally, in response to the contribution to the economic dimension, it is apparent that a student population that is more adherent to the practice of daily physical exercise is related to savings for the public health system, both in terms of visits to doctors and in the use of drugs, which in turn contribute to a more significant expulsion of greenhouse gases by the pharmacological industry [25,26].…”

Teaching for Student and Societal Wellbeing in HPE: Nine Pedagogies for Social Justice

“…We therefore call for the development of strategies to integrate these nine (and other) pedagogies for social justice across various school subject activities and interactions in school community contexts aimed at holistic school wellbeing to contribute to greater equity and social justice in society. However, we would also like to reaffirm the point that context matters (Tinning, 2010;Linnér et al, 2020. Pedagogies for social justice need to be sensitive to both subject matter and socio-cultural context in which they are enacted.…”

“…This included aspects of indigenous Māori culture and language that were evident in schools and infused in the practices of some teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand and the social-democratic practices of Sweden and Norway, such as the provision of school lunches in Sweden, the non-hierarchical clothing of teachers, and reference by first name rather than surname. While we do not report formally on these observations in our study findings, these experiences heavily influenced our understanding of how different cultural contexts frame our understanding of social justice in HPE (Schenker et al, 2019) and the enactment of social justice in HPE practice (Linnér et al, 2020).…”

Development and validation of an instrument to assess the level of sustainable competencies in future physical education teachers. PESD-FT questionnaire

“…In these research studies, the 169 targets of the SDGs have been analyzed, emphasizing above all environmental sustainability and health (Yelamos et al, 2019). In other studies, in contrast, the contributions of PE to the social (Anderson-Butcher, 2019;Casey and Goodyear, 2015;Linn er et al, 2020), economic (Scartascini and Jaitman, 2017) and environmental (Gard, 2021;Olive and Enright, 2021;Thorpe et al, 2021) domains have been investigated independently and not very comprehensively. Furthermore, Baena-Morales et al (2021a) concluded that in-service teachers have difficulties integrating SD into their teaching practice.…”