Thoughts on Connected Curriculum and Physical Education

Concept based learning and thematic curriculum for physical education have been suggested for reconceptualisation of PE curricula that is more educatively focused and strengths-based. In an early 2020 blog available here I summarised how concept based learning attempts to foreground a 'three-dimensional' PE curriculum composed of concepts (understanding), knowledge (knowing), and skills (doing). Basketball as a 'concept' (Figure 1) for a unit of work is different to a concept based PE curriculum 'packaging' knowledge of the PE as a discipline into themes (Figure 2). Basketball as a concept might be the focus of one term of PE which is dedicated to the theme: education in movement.

Figure 1. Basketball as a series of concepts to enable technical and tactical teaching as complimentary pairings 

Figure 2. Thematic physical education curriculum

In Australia, it might be considered that teachers are already directed to a thematic curriculum as PE is required (although no one is checking!) to address specified focus areas (Figure 3). I looked at how this might 'work' in a 2018 blog here

Figure 3. Australian Curriculum HPE Focus Areas (curriculum themes)

However, history tends to show that curriculum documents are of themselves not sufficient to transform the continuing persistence of what critical research suggests is low efficacy PE occurring from a curriculum 'a mile wide' in activity experience however an 'inch deep' in the repetition necessary for learning to develop and consolidate. This is something I wrote about in a 2014 blog, How Do We Design Our PE Programs available here, and in 2018 in Physical Education - A Wicked Problem available here.

In reading for a paper recently, I returned to a few articles by Ken Alexander. Ken is well known in Australian PE through his work at Edith Cowan Uni and the SPARK research centre translating Siedentop's Sport Education model into Australian HPE curriculum as the "SEPEP Program' in the late 1990s. In the articles, a conference paper in 2008 and a paper in the 2013 ACHPER International Conference proceedings, Ken suggested that secondary school PE programs should heed the research indicating the need to move away from generic multi-activity programs (Figure 4) and to what he called a 'main-theme curriculum model' (Figure 5). In looking again at Ken's "Welcome Curriculum" in a 2014 article, I see overlap with the AC:HPE focus areas for a thematic curriculum model:

Term 1 Welcome: Challenge and Adventure Activities

Term 2 SEPEP: Games and Sport and/or Lifelong Physical Activities

Term 3 Resilience: Health Education Focus Areas (AD, FN, MH, RS, S)

Term 4 HALs: Health Benefits of Physical Activity and/or Lifelong Physical Activities

Figure 4. Multi-activity curriculum model (Image from Alexander, K. (2014) Collegiality, vision and our Year 7s: Challenges for HPE Department leaders and their staff. Active & Healthy, 21(1), p. 4.

Figure 5. Alexander's thematic curriculum for Year 7. Image from Alexander, K. (2014) Collegiality, vision and our Year 7s: Challenges for HPE Department leaders and their staff. Active & Healthy, 21(1), p. 7.

A MAP curriculum model is often implemented on assumptions that students will eventually engage with something they like, hopefully sufficiently to pursue it 'now' or in their future. This 'folk theory' of PE is subject to much rebuke in physical education literature, and stands in contrast with community experiences of physical activity 'learning' in sport clubs, recreational centres, and gyms that persist for seasons (e.g. sport clubs) and terms or semesters (e.g. recreation centre programs) or through 'levels' (e.g. swimming certificates for progressive levels of achievement; martial arts belts).

Daryl Siedentop (1972) once wrote (and I paraphrase here) that physical education isn't restricted to a subject called 'PE'  in schools, and cannot even be presumed in some PE programs because of the curriculum structure and student experience. Physical education can occur at a summer camp, a YMCA, or in a sport club program - and in some cases may even be more likely there than in a school PE program (to read more on Siedentop's analysis of PE, see here). In 2008 and in 2013, Ken Alexander offered similar thoughts in his papers and suggested that physical education should stop seeing school co/extra curricular activities as outside of the PE program but rather embrace them and explicitly target student engagement in these programs and activities beyond the school gate. This would necessitate what Ken called a 'connectedness pedagogy' that abandons multi-activity programming to tap into more meaningful engagement in health enhancing and physical activity promoting education and the opportunities available to students within the school and beyond the school gate. Connectedness pedagogy exists where content is relatable to the student world, both within and beyond the classroom. For connectedness pedagogy to exist, there needs to be links with students prior knowledge and experience and to the opportunities that exist in the 'real world' beyond the school gate (Churchill, 2011). As a 'productive pedagogy', connectedness describes the extent to which content has value and meaning beyond the lesson context to the larger social context within which students live (Education Queensland, 2004).

Changing the hegemony of 'traditional' or 'common' MAP physical education has not proven to be easy. I blogged on this challenge in thinking about sport teaching in PE here and whether physical education's curriculum marginalisation might be a problem of its own making here. What I keep coming back to is physical education should be justifiable as an educative purpose (Kirk, 1996) which means student learning and not physical activity accumulation defines the endeavour of teachers and students. In building a connected curriculum for students, the PE teacher needs to know student prior experience, interest, potential and how that can be developed and then afforded as physical activity and health promoting activity at school (such as co/extra curricular activities) and/or within the local community.

Thomas Wood (1883) 'The great thought of physical education is not the education of the physical nature, but the relation of physical training to complete education, and then the effort to make the physical contribute its full share to the life of the individual.'