Using a Game Sense Approach to Teach Buroinjin as an Aboriginal Game to Address Social Justice in Physical Education

The Game Sense approach in physical education has mostly been applied to questions of strengths-based, educatively purposefully, inquiry based pedagogy for games and sport teaching for education in movement of technical and tactical competency. Mostly, the research 'on' approaches like Game Sense are verification studies seeking validating of tenets of the approach, comparative studies looking at 'technical' v 'tactical' approach outcomes, or naturalistic inquiries looking at the 'acceptance' of the approach. In a recent study, I had the opportunity to collaborate with John Williams from the University of Canberra on a project focussed on fostering a social justice perspective in PE - including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures. 

I have blogged before on the idea of 'post-colonial PE' that I have learnt about from my work with John ( see here ). In the most recent project, the novel use of the Game Sense approach with the game Buroinjin was to meet achievement standards expectations of the Australian Curriculum for HPE at Grade 5/6 Band. In contemplating and delivering the unit of work, we were able to make explicit linkage to this cross-curriculum priority by teaching student participants about the richness of Indigenous ways of knowing, and by providing some understanding of the distinctively Australian connections between people and country/place using a traditional Aboriginal game.

We concluded that it was possible to employ Western epistemological approaches present within the AC-HPE with Buroinjin as a form of Aboriginal knowledge to deliver a socially just version of games and sport teaching in PE. The Game Sense approach, chosen as a strengths-based educatively purposefully, inquiry based pedagogy and thus aligned with key ideas informing teaching for effective learning of the Australian Curriculum for HPE, showed how the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures cross-curriculum Priority can be used as a guiding framework to inform the teaching of a unit of work based in the curriculum focus area of Games and Sport. For those interested, I have written about the alignment of the Game Sense approach and the tenets of quality teaching here 

If you are interested in reading about the project using a Game Sense approach to teach Buroinjin see https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/jtpe/39/2/article-p176.xml