Theorising ‘creativity’ in Health and Physical Education

Notions of creativity are increasingly central to educational scholarship and policy moves, but little research attends to the intersection between Health and Physical Education (HPE) and ‘creativity’. This paper is an exploration of the present, in which we discuss some of the historical and contemporary manifestations of creativity in HPE. We highlight how the five Key Ideas or Propositions of the Australian Curriculum for Health and Physical Education (AC:HPE) (ACARA, 2015) and the Critical and Creative Thinking (CCT) capability raise timely questions regarding educative purposes. We argue that these governing documents have potential to energise conversations amongst academics and practitioners in relation to what HPE is and can be. There are, however, few resources to assist educators imagine and theorise how creativity might be enacted and assessed in HPE teaching and learning.

In this paper we bring Harris’ (2014) creative ecologies framework to HPE via a review of the literature and an analysis of two selected resources to demonstrate an educational approach to creativity in HPE. The first resource, Phenomenom! is funded by the Australian Horticultural Foundation to develop food literacy and has been explicitly mapped to cross- curriculum learning. The second educational resource is Fitter. Faster. Better., a St Martin’s Youth drama-arts performance where students are prompted to design and enact a fitness program for adults. While we demonstrate how these examples are closely related to a contemporary HPE context, they are both created outside of the HPE field (i.e. the curriculum, teachers, resources and assessment). In analysing these two resources, we highlight contemporary educative purposes and discuss the complexities of educators’ capacity for implementing quality HPE curricular within a broader creative ecology.