School HPE: Its mandate, responsibility and role in educating for social cohesion
Authors: Wayne Smith, Rod Philpot, Göran Gerdin, Katarina Schenker, Susanne Linnér, Lena Larsson, Kjersti Mordal Moen & Knut Westlie
As a compulsory school subject, Health and Physical Education (HPE) has a mandate,responsibility and potential to contribute to lifelong health and well-being.This paper argues that there is a need for educators to recognise forces that impact an individual’s health at a societal level and that the educative mandate of HPE extends beyond the individual determinants of health. This paper analyses the findings from an international research project which included classroom observations and interviews with 20 high school HPE teachers in Sweden, Norway and New Zealand to provide examples of how HPE teachers contribute to wellbeing through social cohesion and how HPE teachers can teach in ways that can improve individual and societal health, and thereby increase health outcomes for all.
What is Social Cohesion?
Although we often view social cohesion as ‘cooperation’, it is much more than that. True social cohesion is a collective understanding, empathy, acceptance of difference, and willingness to be inclusive and abide by common values and rules in our shared social spaces. When individuals and groups with different cultures, values, beliefs, life-chances, and socio-economic resources share the same social space in classes, teachers must address matters of social cohesion and inequity so that students can learn to recognise the unique cultural resources of different students and collectively address unjust structures in society that create unequal life-chance outcomes.
Findings
The following sub-themes were found as examples of the teachers’ enactment of pedagogies for social cohesion:
1) A focus on inclusiveness:
Many of the teachers emphasised the importance of including all students to make them feel that they belonged. This was done through their positive and supportive attitude and through seeing each student as a unique individual, with many intentionally providing different forms of support and different opportunities for different students
One teacher greeted all her students and gave some a hug as they arrived, and another maintains a positive disposition, stating “enthusiasm gives enthusiasm back again.”
2) Including culturally inclusive pedagogy:
As an extension to inclusive pedagogy, some teachers recognised the need to be culturally inclusive or culturally sensitive.
The teacher used te reo Māori on a chart and on the whiteboard, writing “He mahitahi tatou mo te oranga o te katoa” (We should all work together for the wellbeing of everyone), or speaking instructions in te reo Māori such as “Haeremai” (come here) or “taonga” (the treasured ball in the middle).
3) Building positive teacher/student and student/student relationships:
Building strong teacher/student relationships helps to build trust, acceptance and equal status, and the teachers employed different techniques to strengthen these relationships such as warm relationships, humour and one-on-one relationships with students who might need this most
Humour and jokes were helpful, as teachers found they “take away the authoritarian approach” and “break down social barriers”.
One-to-one relationships are also crucial, and one teacher mentioned she “talks one to one with the students before and after class, so that students feel safe to express themselves”.
4) Building Trust
Building student/student relationships is also crucial, to build the quality of social networks, develop trust and solidarity and reach below the surface to alter prejudice. There were a number of ways teachers helped to build trusting relationships
One teacher introduced the lesson by explicitly showing the aim was to develop collaboration and tactics through games, pointing out the word “collaboration”early on in the lesson.
While the games were competitive in nature, most of them were not formal sports involving high stakes competition but rather made-up games that required teamwork, with the reward being a sense of collective achievement.
Many games were self-governed, encouraging cooperative interaction. e.g. One teacher chose small teams, to make self group management possible. The expectation was that all students, no matter their background, would participate equally.
5) Team building, heterogeneous groups and cooperative games
Team building, team games, cooperative group activities, and the use of teacher structured heterogeneous groups was a cross-nation feature of most HPE classes observed.
One teacher used cross-group mixing, using different combinations to encourage intragroup diversity and social integration. n
Teachers consciously paired students who do not often communicate together. The teacher noted that cooperation is something that not all students do well....
6. Developing personal and social responsibility
Two important broader aspects of social cohesion are the acceptance of societal norms and support for authorities, law or custom which leads to solidarity and a common good. In HPE, teachers can focus on developing personal and social responsibility and compliance to social order:
The teacher used Hellison’s (2011) well-known pedagogical model of ‘Teaching for Personal and Social Responsibility’ (TSPR)....when a student breached personal responsibility(e.g. by cheating in a game), the teacher addressed the cheating and asked the students what the class could collectively do to address it in the next game.
Conclusions
These sub-themes provide examples of how playful interactions in HPE are more than just typical adolescent behaviour, and how teachers used structured HPE lessons to improve social cohesion.
The formal setting of the HPE classroom enables the type of intimate meaningful interaction between individuals and groups that is necessary to generate common ties, learn about others (including members of an 'out' group), negotiate the conditions of play and perhaps change behaviours, but most importantly, appraise their own beliefs.
Given the growing challenges of society today, and HPE’s ideal environment which allows the fostering of long-term,meaningful connections, this study reinforces the belief that HPE has a mandate, responsibility and role in educating for social cohesion.
