Justen O'Connor

Monash University (Australia) · Faculty of Education

Community sports coaches and leaders can have an important role to play as informal resources for sporting adolescents and adults at risk of mental ill-health. Supporting coach mental health literacy using programs has potential to enhance opportunities for coach-player support. This study aimed to evaluate a community sport mental health literacy...

Background Interest in and debates around meaningful movement and embodiment in physical education (EPE) have grown over the last ten years. The quality of these discussions centre on a degree of conceptual clarity for talking pedagogically about embodiment, and consideration of ways of applying it in practice in meaningful ways. The aim of this st...

Effective interventions are needed to stop homophobic behaviours in sport settings as these behaviours are associated with negative health and social outcomes for individuals who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or other diverse genders and sexualities. This paper reports the results of a quasi-experimental study commissioned...

This paper explores how various ideological positions or ‘cosmoses’ associated with physical literacy (PL) have come to be and, in doing so, extends scholarship by examining and presenting PL as a multiplicity of physical literacies. Drawing on Stengers’ notion of ‘cosmopolitics’ and Venturini's ‘cartography of controversies’ method, 167 scholarly...

Participation in Australian club-based sport has either plateaued or declined across a broad array of sports over the last 20 years. In contrast, participation in informal forms of sport has increased across the time. Despite the increasing popularity of informal sport, this form of participation continues to lack recognition as a legitimate and va...

You can retrieve this OPEN ACCESS article here for free. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2022.2061938 Background: Through changing the way games are represented, classification systems have increased possibilities for teaching game forms beyond structured adult and singular official versions of popular sports. At the time of inception, the fo...

Background: This paper presents a counter-narrative to the long-held belief that Physical Education (PE) is impermeable to change. Transforming and enacting curriculum is incredibly challenging and sometimes impossible but if teachers have particular resources available to them over time, this makes ‘radical reform more, rather than less likely’ [K...

How physical literacy (PL) is presented on ‘the web’ (i.e. Google) has implications for how health and/ physical education (H/PE) teachers and coaches engage with and understand the concept, and ultimately how it is made to act in practice. This research sheds light on the type of PL content they are likely to encounter in their search via the web....

Background: Physical Literacy (PL) is a concept enduring controversy. Based on Actor-Network Theory and Venturini’s definition, PL is considered a controversy because it is a ‘situation’ in which actors disagree and there is ‘shared uncertainty’ around what it is and is not. Given the increasing expectation, in some countries, that PL becomes a fea...

Community health is defined as ‘a multi-sector and multi-disciplinary collaborative enterprise that uses public health science, evidence-based strategies, and other approaches to engage and work with communities, in a culturally appropriate manner, to optimise the health and quality of life of all persons who live, work, or are otherwise active in...

Community health focuses on strategies to maintain, protect and improve the health of population groups and communities. The ways environmental, social and economic resources are deployed to sustain and enhance individual wellbeing has been a growing concern for a number of years. Because individual behaviours are transactional in nature with the e...

This article explores how the Museum, Art and Wellbeing project brought primary school children and seniors from the same local community together to engage in explorative activities designed to reveal individual and mutual assets for wellbeing. The Museum, Art and Wellbeing project undertook a participatory arts‐based approach to investigate how t...

This research critically examines Sport for Development (SFD) policies targeting Indigenous Australians. While previous studies have sought to compare the impact of SFD policies on First Nations people in Canada and Australia, no research to date has provided a detailed investigation of the specific policy approaches underpinning SFD programmes, th...

A significant goal of teacher education is to support the development of reflective practitioners. This intention, however, is not easily achieved when after-the-fact recall and reporting are key features of pre-service teacher learning rather than critique and contemplation. This research reports on a small-scale pilot study evaluating a novel app...

This paper shares a unique approach to primary Health and Physical Education (HPE) whereby students learn about personal, social and community health through intergenerational arts-led pedagogies. Drawing on socio-critical, socio-cultural and salutongenic perspectives, the unit of work that the students engaged with was underpinned by an assumption...

This paper utilises Bernstein's theorising of curriculum and pedagogical relations to analyse Physical Literacy (PL) assessment with implications for the field of Health and/Physical Education (H/PE). It acknowledges the significance of assessment for what knowledge and skills are valued in PL and in turn, H/PE. PL takes different forms and is asse...

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 producti...

Internationally, patterns of participation in sport are changing, with so-called ‘informal’ participation displacing club-based and other formally structured involvement in sport. This paper reports research that is investigating changing forms of participation from an educational perspective. It directs attention to what physical education can lea...

Background: Contemporary scholarship calls for the Health and Physical Education (HPE) profession to pay attention to the practical translation of the critical agenda. Whilst invitations to criticality have featured in HPE scholarship for decades, there have been limited attempts to explore how the critical agenda translates into practice in HPE. P...

This paper presents an evolutionary concept analysis of Physical Literacy (PL) in order to shed some clarity within the uncertainty surrounding this highly adopted yet widely adapted concept. Inevitably, concepts like PL become re-interpreted as they gain popularity and get redeployed to serve an increasingly diverse range of purposes in varied con...

The idea for this Special Issue, ‘Creating thriving and sustainable futures in physical education, health and sport’ arose from the Association Internationale des Écoles Supérieures d’Éducation Physique (AIESEP) World Congress in Edinburgh, 25–28 July, 2018. The quadrennial World Congress welcomed an international audience of over 400 delegates fro...

Connecting local citizens of different ages in productive social activity is considered a pathway towards greater health. This research explores how older adults and young people interpret and access assets from their geographical community in relation to their well-being and the extent to which a process of intergenerational bridging contributes t...

Physical education has become more than a superficial exposure to a range of motor skills and movement challenges through the emergence of a myriad of educationally-focused initiatives, models and theoretical approaches. Such proliferation of ideas has been positioned within the literature as both a strength and a weakness. While ideas can be stren...

This paper responds to calls for an exploration into pedagogies of meaning within physical education. Developing meaningful educational experiences in physical education for lifelong movement involves supporting students to explore their personal experiences in movement and to use these to derive a greater understanding of themselves and the world...

This article critically examines the role of informal sport within attempts to increase sport participation. Informal sport is a contested concept that government and non-government agencies are grappling with. In this article, the focus is on participation that is self-organised and not club based. The research reported reflects that at present, p...

How teacher educators respond as policy actors from inside spaces where multiple policies and discourses collide provides insights into the ways in which policy plays out in educational contexts. By engaging and working within the uncertain space of our own contextual ‘policy storm’ we provide a narrative of enactment highlighting the roles and act...

Inclusion remains a key political agenda for education internationally and is a matter that teachers across subject communities and phases of education are challenged to respond to. In physical education specifically, research continues to highlight that current practice often reaffirms rather than challenges established inequities. This paper crit...

Healthism is both an ideological and a regulative discourse that manifests as a tendency to conceive health as a product of individual choice. Healthism represents a collection of taken-for-granted assumptions, positioned at the intersection of morality, blame and health, that can lead to a privileging of ‘healthy’ and ‘productive’ individuals. It...

The theory-practice gap has long been recognized as a point of contention in teacher education. Bridging that gap has often been seen as difficult almost regardless of contextual perspective—i.e., from both the world of academia and that of schools. Recognizing and responding to the oft’ bemoaned theory-practice gap demands a rethink of the ways in...

Objective: A validated measure of daytime sleepiness for adolescents is needed to better explore emerging relationships between sleepiness and the mental and physical health of adolescents. The Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) is a widely used scale for daytime sleepiness in adults but contains references to alcohol and driving. The Epworth Sleepine...

This study reflects that teacher education in Health and Physical Education (HPE) has long grappled with the challenge of how to disrupt pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) established attitudes about HPE that may limit their capacity to positively engage with a diverse student population. This paper describes the development, validation and interpretatio...

doi: 10.1080/17408989.2015.1123237

Background: Greater understandings about how progressive pedagogies are interpreted and practiced within schools will be required if international calls to enhance relevance and meaning in Health and Physical Education (HPE) are to be realised. Little is understood about how inquiry-based units of work connected to real-life issues are enacted, eng...

Within recent years, policy makers and practitioners have increasingly drawn on sport as a vehicle to assist with the resettlement of young people from refugee backgrounds. This article presents the views of sport development and resettlement service staff responsible for supporting the participation of young refugees within sport. Our data suggest...

This chapter will focus on the challenge of connecting students' classroom experiences to their communities and their day-to-day physically active lives. Throughout the chapter we build upon the concept that a school curriculum that is situated (place-based) and responsive to student and community needs, can result in a range of benefits for learne...

In this first chapter we felt it important to introduce the editors of the book via a series of short autobiographical stories. In each case the author has chosen a few influential experiences that they believe have been crucial in shaping the development of their socio-ecological outlook as educators and researchers. In other words, in this first...

At the heart of this book has been the acknowledgment that there exist different ways of seeing and, consequently, different ways of knowing the world. The rich and diverse case studies that make up Part II of the book have seen respected authors from the varied disciplines of physical, sport and health education, outdoor and environmental educatio...

The purpose of this chapter is to critically examine contemporary sports coaching, and to consider how social ecology might provide a valuable framework for critiquing current expectations placed on coaches, and how a socio-ecological approach may improve coaching practice. There are significant and diverse demands now being placed on the 'grassroo...

This volume offers an alternative vision for education and has been written for those who are passionate about teaching and learning, in schools, universities and in the community, and providing people with the values, knowledge and skills needed to face complex social and environmental challenges. Working across boundaries the socio-ecological edu...

Acknowledging the multi-layered nature of a socio-ecological frame, this chapter highlights explicitly how to develop socio-ecological understandings and practices in educational contexts. We begin by providing a series of vignettes based on practice. These vignettes serve to disturb assumptions that researchers and practitioners bring to physical,...

The health and physical education (HPE) profession needs to find alternatives to its individualistic and performative focus if it is to remain relevant and meaningful for all learners. This paper presents a way of framing HPE that helps to shift the focus from the individual as autonomous decision-maker, and goes beyond sport and fitness testing as...

Acknowledging the performative sporting discourses which continue to dominate physical education, and the emerging focus on disease prevention within this context, this paper presents a socio-ecological framework for physical education that aims to shift the focus towards more multidimensional understandings of what it means to be ‘physically educa...

'Serious leisure' cycling has developed as a reinterpretation of the traditional form of the sport. This short term, informal, unstructured and unconventional conceptualisation represents a challenge to participant numbers in the mainstream sport. The purpose of this study was twofold: (i) to ascertain the cultural, subcultural and ecological facto...

As serious leisure cyclists increase their presence on Australian public roads, there have been reports within the popular and mainstream literature of a growing tension between these cyclists and other road users. Until now, there has been limited research exploring the relationship between serious leisure cyclists and other road users as it perta...

Serious leisure' cycling has developed as a reinterpretation of the traditional form of the sport. This short term, informal, unstructured and unconventional conceptualisation represents a challenge to participant numbers in the mainstream sport. The purpose of this study was twofold: (i) to ascertain the cultural, subcultural and ecological factor...

This study examines participation in an emerging, non-conventional sporting form that retains a self generated and mediated structure, providing an attractive alternative not fully explained by a shift to individualism. Based on ethnography and interviews, the study presents a cohort of capable sporting cyclists who develop a sense of belonging and...

Movement-seeking behaviours should be fostered in young children to maximise their potential to adopt and maintain a physically active lifestyle. This study examined the constraints and facilitators to meaningful movement for children in family day care. The views of key stakeholders (caregivers, parents, and coordination unit staff) were examined...

Early childhood lays the foundation for physical activity in later life, therefore movement experiences should foster enjoyment of physical activity and help young children become confident and competent movers. This study examined the opportunities and constraints to physical activity for 3 to 5 year-old children in family day care environments. E...

This paper argues for an inclusive and socio-ecological approach to health, physical education, outdoor and environmental education curriculum and pedagogy. Recent changes to school Health and Physical Education (Australia), and Health, Physical Education and Home Economics (New Zealand) curricula has created new possibilities and challenges for ed...

The silences in pedagogical development and absences in research about the potential of transdiscplinary studies in education require a climate change of (educational) revolutionary proportions, as promised by the now Prime Minister in the 2007 lead up into the Federal Election. In this symposium, we outline how each of the concepts of Movement,...

The teaching of skills for use in a variety of sports, games and recreational activities has historically formed an integral part of a comprehensive physical education program. Whilst there has been a push towards lifetime fitness and physical activities that require minimal skill development, different ways of thinking about teaching related skill...