- This article is the original accepted version of:
Philpot, R., & Ovens, A. (2023). O conhecimento indígena como parte de uma pedagogia crítica contra a precariedade em Saúde e Educação Física em Aotearoa Nova Zelândia. Motrivivência, 35(66), 1-14.
Abstract
Critical pedagogy is a dynamic and transformative approach to education that must continue to adapt to the rapidly changing social and historical contexts in which education is situated. In this paper we argue that pedagogical practices based on indigenous knowledge and principles, enable a critical pedagogy for school Health and Physical Education (HPE) that challenges the effects of precarity. Drawing specifically on the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, we describe the principles of Kaupapa Māori, an indigenous perspective that expresses Māori aspirations and specific Māori values, and how these principles are articulated in HPE. We argue that HPE practices underpinned by Kaupapa Māori have the potential to reduce anger, anxiety and alienation through strengthening connections between students, between student and teachers, to land, and to emerging identities.
Introduction
One of challenges we pose to the students in our degree programme is to consider whether Health and Physical Education (HPE) is still relevant in contemporary schools. Given that our modern world is awash with new technologies that allow young people to generate and source information on their health and wellbeing, the question becomes whether the subject area has become redundant. The challenge itself represents something about the precarity of the subject area in modern schooling (KIRK,2018). However, it is the arguments of the students that are most revealing. At first glance, most answers appear to reflect the rationalities through which precarity operates. They highlight the growing anxiety, anomie, and insecurity around mental health, employment, relationships, equity, sexualities, and environmental sustainability, amongst others. But within their comments, they also reflect a sense of criticality and ability to problematise these issues. They not only question the messaging normalised within such issues, but problematise the way such issues emerge from the socio-political networks within which modern societies are situated and propose transformative actions needed to ensure HPE remains relevant in modern school curricula. In this sense the students reflect how the critical pedagogies enacted within our degree develop a sensibility and awareness towards precarity. Core to this is the value of drawing on indigenous knowledge and principles within such critical pedagogies.
The purpose of this paper is to argue that in Aotearoa New Zealand, pedagogical practices in HPE based on indigenous knowledge and principles, provide a means for enabling a critical pedagogy for school HPE and challenging the effects of precarity. We suggest a critical pedagogy needs to draw on alternative ways of thinking, being and rationalising the world because, in the words of Foucault(1991, p. 79), “practices don’t exist without a certain regime of rationality”. That is, throughout the history of modern capitalism, education and precarity have operated as forms of ‘governmental rationality’ that integrate conventional ideological perspectives and political solutions to inform socioeconomic policymaking in capitalist societies (BROWN, 2015; READ, 2009). Asa socio-economic condition influenced by government policies and practices, precarity acts as a “theme-programme of a society [in capitalist orders] … in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players”(FOUCAULT, 2008, p. 259–260). Interpreted under this conceptual lens, precarity serves as a governmental rationality, (re)configuring and ruling the world ofwork and education (Standing, 2016). In this process, HPE contributes to precarity though maintaining competitiveness, self-care, ableism, and individual responsibility, all attributes needed for sustaining the socio-economic virtues of unfettered markets (LYNCH; WALTON-FISETTE; LUGUETTI,2021; ROBINSON; RANDALL, 2016).
In order to challenge and transform such rationalities as the rules that govern HPE practices, we suggest critical pedagogy needs to draw on different cultural knowledges and world views in order to evoke, “...a complex array of dispositions, values, suspicions, and questions relating topower inequities and how they lead to privilege and marginalisation” (PHILPOT; OVENS;SMITH, 2019, p. 2). As we have argued elsewhere (PHILPOT; OVENS, 2019), doing this cannot be reduced to a teaching method that is learned through transmission and then enacted with no consideration of the teacher, learner,and context. Rather, it involves an embodied awareness to different worldviews, different rationalities and belief systems and cultural experiences.With this in mind, we outline in this paper a critical pedagogy for precarity in Aotearoa New Zealand that draws on the principles of Kaupapa Māori. The specific aim of the paper is to outline the principles of Kaupapa Māori and justify how PE and PETE in Aotearoa New Zealand is, can, and should continue to endeavour to apply these principles. The intention of the paper is to articulates how, in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, adopting principles of Kaupapa Māori can transform HPE into a school subject that is more inclusive for students of all body sizes and shapes,genders, races, levels of ability and sexual orientations, more equitable in regard to whose interests are served by the subject, and more focussed on problematising taken-for-granted assumptions about the body and physical culture.
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