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This event is sponsored by:

The Invisible College remains as one of the highlights of the PESP calendar and colleagues from the world of coaching, physical education, sport and all related disciplines are warmly invited to join this exciting and interesting event.

BERA PESP scholar lecture 2018

Healthying physical education – on the possibility of learning health!

Mikael Quennerstedt,
Professor in Physical Education and Health, Örebro University, Sweden

In the scholar lecture I am going to talk about two concepts that has followed me for the last 15 years – health and learning. I will throughout use the metaphor of the swimmer in the river, as introduced by Antonovsky, in order to go beyond individualistic, dualistic and instrumental notions of health as well as education. I will argue for a move away from a notion of teaching young people how to be healthy through the deployment of ready-made educational packages, towards acknowledging health education as a societal responsibility whereby it is recognised that sociocultural and economic contexts afford diverse opportunities to be healthy and to learn healthy lives, however these are construed (Quennerstedt, Burrows & Maivorsdotter 2010).

Rather than confining health and health education to the prevention of premature death and disease, I will talk about health, in relation to learning, as always in the process of becoming. The health resources for living a good life can then be found both in the ‘river’, with ‘the ‘swimmer’, and in the relation between ‘river’ and ‘the ‘swimmer’. In this way, health can come in many different shapes and sizes. I am going to ask why we even attempt to talk about health in the singular when we talk about so many different diseases. Is health rather a plural? Or is it even a noun? Is it something we do; i.e. a verb? Health education can then be conceived as a practice – ‘healthying’ – and not a fixed, static outcome set up by research and public health policies as something to achieve in education (McCuaig & Quennerstedt 2018, Quennerstedt in press).

Mikael Quennerstedt has worked as a physical education teacher in Swedish compulsory school, and as a physical education teacher educator since 1994. His work focuses on teaching and learning in physical education from a Swedish didactics research tradition, as well as health education from a salutogenic perspective. In recent years he has also been passionate about exploring questions about education, digital technologies and health. Recent publications include themes such as professional development, indigenous knowledges, social media, wearable health technologies, power in group work and teaching dance in physical education using exergames. Mikael is associate editor of Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy and an editorial board member of Sport, Education and Society.

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