Thoughts from a Trial Game Observations 1 - PE, Sport and Physical Activity

I watched my son’s Cricket trials this week and I had the opportunity and time (as you do as Cricket spectator) to reflect on two key issues that have been unresolved in Physical Education. Firstly PE’s ‘blurred relationship’ with Sport and more recently, Physical Activity and secondly, the attitudes of students to the more cognitive aspects related to the problems that are presented in Physical Education environments, in this case, a Sport.



For years, Physical Education in school has had a very close (and often an overlapping) relationship with Sport. Most of our games and sports units still revolve around students learning certain sports in the Scope and Sequence, still based on the idea that if we give students a broad experience in sports, they may take on a competitive version of the sport in later life. However, it can only be shallow because of the inadequate amount of time teachers have to develop expertise in the essentially chaotic dynamic learning environments that are sports. This has placed the teaching of ‘Games and Sports’ in an unenviable position. PE teachers cannot achieve what they are supposed to in the four / five hours they have per unit, it is incredibly difficult to ‘grade‘ sports in Scope and Sequences between Stage 4 and Stage 5 so there can be a building of all skills associated with play and we have issues with trying to create equitable, non biased assessment where we have students with 1000's of hours of learning not gained in PE lessons and against those with very little. Yet we keep trying to achieve this expertise in our students (despite teaching seniors that autonomous skill development takes many years), through movement skills and more recently in the more expanded areas of strategy and tactics and decision making as outlined by Game Centred Approaches such as Teaching Games for Understanding’ and Game Sense’. The result has been to focus attention on the inadequacies having ‘Sport’ in Games and Sports units as the problem as opposed to this unrealistic expectation of trying to do so in the time available or more importantly, in the philosophy we have in relation to teaching games and sports. While focus has been on changing models of teaching, it still does not address the issue, it just delays it and in many cases, models such as Game Sense have been used in a manner that seems to have taken PE teaching in games and sports back to when I was at school; playing the ‘sport’ for the whole lesson.

An interesting side effect is the movement into ‘Games and Sports’ of the Physical Activity agenda. GAmes and Sports are seen as contexts for students to be physically active rather than as contexts to learn the complexity of games and sports. As a result, striking fielding sports such as Cricket or softball, target sports such as bowls and net court sports such as volleyball and large sided invasion sports such as AFL, all perfectly appropriate contexts for learning movement, may be in danger of disappearing because many students are not necessarily active all of the time. If we have the classic Judith Placek outcome of ‘Busy, Happy, Good’, combined with the aim to achieve moderate to vigorous activity at the expense of educational experiences through movement as the appropriate outcomes for Physical Education lessons and programs in schools, what place is there for such sports? Will they fall by the wayside or do we only include them if can have, for example, the fielders and non striker / base runners jog on the spot to get PA levels up? It is a major challenge for Physical Education and one we have not dealt with very well due to the PE Sport issues mentioned above. This has resulted in the latest NSW syllabus losing movement education focus especially in Strand 4. Our challenge is address how we teach in these areas and the way we teach to create meaning for the students. If not, we have very few arguments to counter the PA encroachment. If PA is all we want, why the need for specialists?


Regards

Greg