Young people, physical education and physical activity: The ontological shift to complexity

This entry considers how the ontological shift to complexity, currently evident across most disciplines, is creating a context in which school PE has a key role to play in the lifelong and life-wide PE journeys of young people. Focussing on the young person, the entry employs key ideas from complexity thinking to make sense of the unfolding PE journeys of young people as they move through their childhood and adolescent years. Beginning at this micro level of the education system, we take a bottom-up approach to explore how four inter-related complexity commonalities (becoming, lived time, self-organisation and boundaries) shape the emergent, non-linear and differentiated nature of young people’s lifelong and life-wide PE journeys. This bottom-up approach is important because it not only captures the complex nature of young people’s PE journeys but also moves away from the traditional top-down curriculum approach represented by specific activities being delivered in time-constrained units to passive learners (Kirk, 2010). Young people’s PE journeys are an important starting point for the ontological shift towards a complexity-informed PE as they should ultimately be at the heart of the macro level discourse across the political, professional and academic arenas.