Teaching sport in PE: A hybrid TGfU:Game Sense and Sport Education Model - Sport Literacy

 Research challenges the directive, technical and textbook discourse of the “physical education method” (Metzler, 2011, p. 173) that the physical education community of practice has traditionally shared.  Engaging in this contested space, I did my doctoral study on curriculum and pedagogical innovation for sport teaching, which I termed sport literacy as I theorised sport teaching in PE using multi-literacy theory (Drummond & Pill, 2011; Pill, 2009, 2010). Siedentop (1994) defined literate sport participants as understanding the culture, ritual and traditions of a sport. In my research, I defined sport literacy as the functional use of sport knowledge for active and engaged citizenship. Four distinct understandings of knowledge are considered in this definition of sport literacy: 1.Sport is an applied, practised and situated set of skills; 2.Sport creates embodied meaning, and meaning that can be communicated, interpreted, understood, imaged and used creatively; 3.Sport creates a ‘text’, which can be read for understanding; and 4. understanding sport requires a learning process (Pill, 2009). My research had two themes for the curriculum: Firstly, that sport in physical education can enhance students’ access to practices and ideas that can enable them to make positive contributions to society; and secondly, that sport can help students to understand the self and the society in which they live (Drummond & Pill, 2011).

I have blogged before on how Arnold's (1979) framework of PE as education in, through and about movement also informed my thinking about sport teaching in PE as education towards sport literacy. (if interested, see here). Many PETE programs have embraced and adopted the idea of models-based instruction (Metzler, 2011) and there are various models for games teaching (Gurvitch, Lund & Metzler, 2008). Sport literacy is a model that seeks to bring together elements of Bunker and Thorpe’s Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach (1982, 1983) and Siedentop’s Sport Education model (1994). Through the idea of sport literacy, I sought to promote synergies in TGfU and Sport Education, rather than regarding them as competing possibilities for secondary school sport teaching. While Siedentop (1994) introduced the idea of literate sport participants as an objective of Sport Education - “A literate sportsperson understands and values the rules, rituals, and traditions of sports” (Siedentop, Hastie & van der Mars, 2011, p. 5), I believed that this definition separated the literate aspect of learning from the other objectives of Sport Education: competent and enthusiastic sportspersons. 

Bunker and Thorpe (1982, 1983) proposed game appreciation and understanding as objectives of teaching games for understanding. With sport literacy, I attempt to  merge the objectives of TGfU and Sport Education through a revised definition of game appreciation that includes socio-cultural as well as sport skill learning (Drummond & Pill, 2011) (Figure 1) to provide teachers with a larger pedagogical “toolbox” (Gurvitch et al., 2008, p. 452) through which to achieve education in, through and about sport (Arnold, 1979; Drummond & Pill, 2011). Through a hybrid model for sport teaching in PE, I sought to shift thinking away from instructional models as “one box containing only a few specialised tools with limited application” (Gurvitch et al., 2008, p. 452).

Research suggests that often teachers’ narrow interpretation of curricula to a focus on teaching students to develop technical expertise for sport. Despite cognition being generally regarded as arguably the most useful and valuable aspect of any field of education (Felshin, 1972; Green, 1998), its marginalisation in sport teaching in PE is one of the reasons PE has repeatedly been left open to criticism that it is essentially extraneous to the purposes of education (Alexander & Luckman, 2001; Alexander, Taggart & Thorpe,1997; Green, 1998; Siedentop, 1992). The supremacy of one type of knowledge (declarative knowledge of motor skill or sport specific textbook [Pigott, 1982] techniques) has arguably long constrained the knowledge base of sport in physical education. Learning has been both reduced and limited to psychomotor performance (an educational outcome emphasising the learning of fundamental movements, motor and sport performance skills (Lumpkin, 2005). This is reflected in many international commentaries identifying that a curriculum and pedagogical emphasis on technical expertise for sport has frequently led to teaching that simply reproduces textbook movement techniques (Alexander, 2008; Bunker & Thorpe, 1982; den Duyn, 1997a; Grehaigne, Richard & Griffin; 2005, Kirk, 2010; Kirk & Gorley, 2000). Declarative knowledge as motor skill technique is framed within a process of progressive, or ‘additive’, motor skill acquisition (Annette, 1994; Jenkins, 2005; Kirk, 2010; McMorris, 1998) in a multi-activity curriculum (Alexander, 2008; Capel, 2007; Hastie, 2003; Laker, 2002; Launder, 2001; Taylor & Chiogioji, 1987). The prominence of this model and its associated dominant pedagogy is regarded as a major factor in the educative potential of sport teaching in physical education arguably remaining unfulfilled (Crum, 1983; Locke, 1992; Penney & Chandler, 2000; Siedentop, 1994).

While TGfU and Sport Education have often been presented as alternative choices for sport teaching in physical education (Metzler, 2011) increasingly, synergies between and within have been acknowledged (Dyson, Griffin & Hastie, 2004; Siedentop et al., 2004) and a number of hybrid models developed (Alexander & Penny, 2005; Collier, 2005; GubacsCollins & Olsen, 2010; Hastie & Curtner-Smith, 2006). Sport literacy (Drummond & Pill, 2011; Pill, 2009, 2010) integrates the two models to re-consider the purpose of sport teaching in physical education and the nature of game appreciation and game understanding. As explained earlier, sport literacy is the integration of the curriculum expectations and pedagogical elements of TGfU/Game Sense and Sport Education. It is an innovation for sport teaching in physical education that seeks to move curriculum and pedagogical considerations away from questions of which model and towards a framework for sport teaching that considers the nature of being sport educated.

If interested in further reading, in a previous blog here I introduced the curriculum progression from Game Sense to Sport Literacy that aligns with common expressions of physical education curriculum movement and participation continuums that I have considered in the two connected resource texts for PE, Play with Purpose for Fundamental Movement Skills and Play with Purpose: Game Sense to Sport Literacy. If concept and thematic curriculum interests you, I have also written about how sport literacy aligns with this approach to planning here.

This blog contains extracts from 

Pill, S., Penney, D., & Swabey, K. (2012). Rethinking Sport Teaching in Physical Education: A Case Study of Research Based Innovation in Teacher Education. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 37(8). http://dx.doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2012v37n8.2 available  here

Play with Purpose for Fundamental Movement Skills for Reception (kindergarten) to Grade 4 PE is available here

Play with Purpose: Game Sense to Sport Literacy or Grade 4- Grade 10 PE is available here