‘Next generation PE’? A sociomaterial approach to digitised health and physical education

Abstract

ABSTRACT Digital technologies are increasingly used in many areas of sport, exercise and health, including in schools. In this article, I engage with sociomaterial theory, and particularly concepts drawn from feminist new materialism, to address the question of how health and physical education (HPE) teachers in the context of the Australian education system are engaging with digital technologies. A set of six case studies were developed from interviews with a diverse range of Australian HPE teachers to identify how they use digital technologies in their classes. This in-depth approach configured a detailed overview of the contexts in which the teachers were using digital technologies, highlighting the complexity of teachers’ feelings about and embodied experiences of digitised HPE pedagogies. These case studies demonstrate the interplay of materiality, spatiality, affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities in the teachers’ accounts of their digitised HPE practices and experiences. They identify the role played by the colleagues, students and parents with whom the teachers engaged, the socioeconomic attributes and policy settings of the school in which they were working, and the geographical region in which the school was located. In short, the case studies highlight not only the more-than-human elements of these assemblages, but the more-than-digital elements, demonstrating that the incorporation of digital technologies into pedagogical practices – and how they come to matter – always takes place in a broader sociomaterial environment of human and nonhuman relationships.