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A critical endeavour? Supporting teachers’ journeys towards critical engagement with curriculum in physical education through cross-border dialogue

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posted on 2025-02-07, 17:19 authored by Shirley Gray, Julie StirrupJulie Stirrup, Oliver HooperOliver Hooper, Anna Bryant, Rachel SandfordRachel Sandford, Nicola Carse, Stephanie Hardley

For decades, scholars have advocated for critical perspectives in Physical Education (PE), encouraging more creative and inclusive ways of thinking about and doing PE. Unfortunately, this critical work has had limited impact on how PE is conceptualised - within curricula or by teachers - both in the United Kingdom (UK) and internationally. As such, there is a pressing need to consider how we might advance this agenda. Working with PE teachers from across the four home nation of the UK (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales), we organised a series of workshops to enable PE teachers from across these contexts to reflect on and discuss their respective curricula. This novel approach – of engaging in cross-border dialogue – was found to have potential for fostering critical thinking around PE curricula. Indeed, teachers were supported to begin thinking more critically through learning about other curriculum contexts and considering alternative possibilities for PE and their learners – though persistent challenges around blocks of activity and teaching games were acknowledged. We argue that these teachers are on the (challenging) journey of becoming critical, but time and support is necessary to interrogate prevailing discourses in PE and allow new ways of thinking to emerge.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Curriculum Studies in Health and Physical Education

Publisher

Taylor and Francis

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

Acceptance date

2024-06-12

Publication date

2024-07-06

Copyright date

2024

ISSN

2574-2981

eISSN

2574-299X

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Rachel Sandford. Deposit date: 18 June 2024

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