Past research in Health and Physical Education has repeatedly highlighted that curriculum development is an ongoing, complex and contested process, and that the realisation of progressive intentions embedded in official curriculum texts is far from assured. Drawing on concepts from education policy sociology this paper positions teacher educators as key policy actors in the interpretation and enactment of new official curriculum texts. More specifically, it reports research that has explored four teacher educators’ engagement with a specific feature of the new Australian Curriculum in Health and Physical Education (AC HPE); five interrelated propositions or ‘key ideas’ that underpinned the new curriculum and openly sought to provide direction for progressive pedagogy in Health and Physical Education. The paper provides conceptual and empirical insight into teacher educators consciously positioning themselves as policy actors, motivated to play a role in shaping policy directions and future curriculum practices. As such, the teacher educators in this project are identified as policy entrepreneurs and provocateurs. The paper details a dialogic research process between the researchers that was designed to make curriculum interpretation a more transparent, collaborative and generative process. The data reported illustrates the research process supporting teacher educators to engage in productive debate about the possible meanings and enactment of the five propositions. Analysis reveals differing perspectives on the propositions and a shared investment in efforts to support their progressive intent. Empirically, the paper highlights the critical role that teacher educators will play in the ongoing enactment of a new curriculum that is overtly identified as ‘futures oriented’. Conceptually, the paper adds depth and sophistication to understandings of teacher educators as policy actors. Methodologically, we propose that the research process described can be usefully adopted by other teacher educators and teachers engaged in similar processes of curriculum development, interpretation and enactment.

In this article poetic representation in qualitative research is explored in relation to researching “lesbian” lives. Set within the context of The 2002 Sydney Gay Games the article considers how poetry can bring to light experiences at the intersection of sexuality, sport, and place. The article details three aspects to this process. First, by asking what queer theory could do for particular research subjects, a robust, malleable, and transportable theoretical concept of “queer” is proposed that is responsive to the participants’ lives and experiences. Second, this concept is applied methodologically in order to unsettle more traditional academic modes of representing interview data through the use of poetic forms of representation. Finally, a poem constructed from the Opening Ceremony of The Gay Games is presented and analyzed. Poetic representation is thus offered as a distinct methodology that permits a particular kind of “queer” analysis when researching “lesbian” lives.

Background: Recent critiques of twenty-first century physical education (PE), and by association physical education teacher education (PETE), position the discipline as largely uncontested, unproblematised and uncritical. This critique encourages researchers to re-consider the nature of PE and what it means to move, be moved, value movement or be physically educated. Much literature also supports the claim that young people, especially young women are not as convinced of the value of PE as their teachers are, and hence question the educative or pleasurable value of PE, and the kinds of movement activities it precipitates. As a consequence, prescriptive unimaginative ‘straight’ pedagogies that restrict teacher creativity dominant PE classrooms, giving rise to ongoing exclusions and maintenance of a space where the embodied experience of moving in the world is foreclosed to many young women. This paper engages with the discomfort of change in PE/PETE, alongside the tiresome narrative around the ‘problem’ of/with young women and movement to consider the question, ‘what might an embodied form of pedagogy in PE look like for young women?’ Purpose: To address this question the paper empirically and pedagogically rethinks the educative purpose/potential of the discipline for young women in relation to embodied learning and pleasure. By deploying a reconceptualization of Peter Arnold’s notion of ‘in’ movement, the paper offers PE/PETE practitioners practical examples of embodied pedagogies by way of pre-text vignettes with the potential to elicit movement pleasure and meaning, critique taken-for-granted assumptions, and as such enable the lifelong valuing of movement for and by young women. Methodology: This paper begins with a number of claims about the uncontested, uncritical and unimaginative state of PE/PETE and the pedagogical impact of this on learners and educators. This is then anchored to findings from a set of empirical data that explored the concept of embodied learning in the context of ‘fire-fighting camps for girls’. This anchoring is done by using the work of Arnold and others to support an exploration and subsequent development of embodied pedagogies. As such the paper dwells only briefly on the empirical aspects of the data, preferring instead to focus on putting Arnold to work theoretically and pedagogically, arguably a complex task and yet important as his work forms the underlying assumptions of many PETE courses and international PE curricula. Findings: A number of pre-text vignettes in the form of postcards, photographs, videos, a poem, and a letter are shared as stand-alone pedagogical stimulus material that respond to calls to offer alternative, critical and non-normative choices to PE/PETE practitioners and their students. These pre-text vignettes use themes as their starting point and each is accompanied by a brief analysis as well as suggestions for how they might usefully be used as teaching and learning resources in a classroom. Thus, the vignettes pedagogically engage with the discomfort of change in PE/PETE whilst also disrupting the tiresome narrative around the ‘problem’ of/with young women and movement.

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 c...

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 actions of policy actors simultaneously constrained and inspired by policy. We use the policy actor framework [Ball, S.J., Maguire, M., Braun, A., & Hoskins, K. (2011a). Policy actors: Doing policy work in schools, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(4), 625‐639] to unpack policy meaning‐making within university and faculty climates, teacher education, and curriculum reform in Health and Physical Education (HPE) in Australia. This paper has three tasks. Firstly, we set‐up the conditions of uncertainty and possibility as a ‘policy storm’ and place where four disparate policies converged. Secondly, we provide an empirical and theoretical account of policy interpretation and enactment from the actors perspective. Finally, we test the policy actor framework to determine if it adequately describes our insider policy work. In moving beyond reductionist policy narratives we provide policy possibilities that illustrate enactment, are innovative, and explore the productive potential inside policy reform.