A physical education/environmental education nexus: Transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum for a sense of belonging

Abstract

Physical education (PE) is a site that brings categories of difference under erasure, presenting a wicked problem for how a sense of belonging is cultivated for all learners to foster physical activity, health and wellbeing across the lifespan. This article explores how, we, as two teachers of PE, turned to postqualitative and ‘new’ materialist inquiry to generate a sense of belonging within a PE/environmental education nexus. Taking up Karen Barad’s agential realism and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome, we conceptualise this PE/environmental education nexus as a transdisciplinary approach to curriculum that enacts a knowing/being/thinking/doing between, and across, borders, boundaries, categories, fields and practices. We then show how this nexus was actualised in our teaching practices through two vignettes. As transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum are grounded in the lived, embodied and embedded (micro) politics of location, individuals are imbued with affective obligation to enact affirmative patterns of relating moment-to-moment. This means that a sense of belonging is always imminent, invented and co-created, bringing attention to situated obligations to enact good relations with ourselves, each other and wider planetary systems.

Interpretation of the Reality in Environmental Education: Identification of Mono-, Multi-, Inter-, Trans-Disciplinary and Inter-Epistemic Experiences

“…Moreover, the students worked on projects in small teams to propose multidimensional solutions. Riley and Proctor (2021) establish a nexus between physical education and environmental education to guide students' learning theorising and living with/through the problem. The researchers problematized the urbanisation process in a forest near the school.…”

The Transdisciplinary Case for Ecohealth Promotion in Outdoor Learning

“…Thus, it is not surprising that there have been critiques and debates in the literature on whether outdoor learning (OL) is a stand-alone discipline or a sub-discipline of other disciplines such as education, psychology or social work (Dyment & Potter, 2015;Potter & Dyment, 2016). There is also a plethora of literature describing OL as interdisciplinary (Bunting, 2006;Pleasants, 2007), and in more recent literature OL has been described as transdisciplinary (Asfeldt et al, 2022;Ma & Jin, 2022;Riley & Proctor, 2022). 'Interdisciplinarity analyzes, synthesizes, and harmonizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole.…”