Background: Physical literacy (PL) has generated substantial international interest across sport, health and education sectors. Teachers play a crucial role in supporting children's PL growth. Despite PL featuring in several physical education curricular texts, research into teacher understanding and perception of the concept is scarce. This study…

The staffing and outsourcing of the marginalised curriculum area Health and Physical Education (HPE) has been an area of growing concern, alongside rising concerns for the decline of students' health due to increased sedentary behaviour and mental health problems, yet there has been little research attention to the staffing and delivery of HPE in…

Health and physical education (HPE) is a discursively white, Western learning domain. Despite minor disruptions through radical scholarship in HPE research and teacher education (often referred to as PETE), and the implementation of curricular devices and/or models-based practices promoting inclusion in HPE teaching, more radical work to honour…

This paper presents a heuristic tool that can be used to analyse and reflect on the inclusion of digital competences in Health and Physical Education Teacher Education (HPETE) programs. The tool is used to identify and compare how HPETE programs in three Southern Hemisphere countries address digital competency as an aspect of learning to teach…

New Zealand and Australia introduced health and physical education curricula espousing a socially-critical perspective more than two decades ago. Yet, despite growth in advocacy and teaching resources, there is little research exploring how HPE teachers are enacting these pedagogies. This article addresses the challenge of understanding what six…

Policy classifies and shapes people/subjects in particular kinds of ways. Focusing on the context of Health and Physical Education (HPE), this paper analyses policy documents from Australia, the United States of America (USA) and Wales. We pay particular attention to how learners are represented within and across the three policy documents, and we…

Sport Australia released the Australian Physical Literacy Framework (APLF) in 2019 to advance a national agenda for physical literacy (PL) and specifically, clarify and promote the development of PL in Australian sport and education sectors. For teachers, this policy initiative followed a period of curriculum development guided by the Australian…

This paper documents historical and contemporary evidence of the HPE field's honouring Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing -- and argues that much more needs to be done. Underpinning this is our philosophical belief that honouring Indigenous knowledges ultimately contributes to planetary health. We begin the paper with the positioning of…

It is well-documented that schools fail to adequately engage with contemporary content about intersex awareness and education or inclusion of people with intersex variations. Where sexuality and relationships education are the remit of Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum in countries such as Australia, the learning area shows little…

Digital technologies are increasingly used in many areas of sport, exercise and health, including in schools. In this article, I engage with sociomaterial theory, and particularly concepts drawn from feminist new materialism, to address the question of how health and physical education (HPE) teachers in the context of the Australian education…

This paper draws on critical discourse analysis to examine how health and physical education (HPE) curricula from Sweden, Norway, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand may influence possibilities for the enactment of social justice in schools. The findings highlight the presence of social justice intentions across the five curricula as related…

Over the past three decades, a body of research has highlighted the benefits and challenges of what might collectively be referred to as critical pedagogical approaches to Health and Physical Education Teacher Education (HPETE). This research shows that praxis facilitated through critical pedagogies can challenge dominant accountability regimes in…

This paper explores Health and Physical Education (HPE) students' understanding of Civics and Citizenship Education (CCE) and discusses some of the links that connect HPE, sport and CCE in Australia. A brief overview of CCE key features is provided. Second- and third-year HPE pre-service teachers at an Australian regional university were surveyed…

This project investigated how Australian Capital Territory (ACT) teachers of physical education (PE) assess games and sports as a Focus Area in the "Australian curriculum health and physical education" (AC: HPE). Figurational sociology, including the concept of habitus was used to inform the study and make sense of the findings. The…

Artefacts are an important part of policy work, and a means of representation, translation, re-negotiation, and resistance of policy. While research has established their integral role in policy enactment, little research has examined the production and/or dissemination of artefacts by teacher educators. This paper reports and analyses the…