Like many people, I got into health and physical education for a combination of factors, including a love for sport, physical activity and being outdoors, experiencing positive changes to my own wellbeing as a result of my own engagement with the subject, and relationships forged with inspiring teachers during my schooling.
Despite this, in my fourth year of university, I still had very little idea about the big picture – I don’t remember having many thoughts about the power of education, or doing any real critical thinking about why health and physical education could be particularly transformative for young people. I certainly didn’t think about, or have any ambition to seek out and work in a rural community like the one I ended up in.
That all changed when I sat in those tutorials about educational philosophy. I started to think more broadly about educational and social equity, and decided to pursue a rural scholarship placement program. I have been living and working on Ngoorabul country in the New England northwest of NSW for a little over 3 years now. I left everything that was familiar and moved to a tiny, old mining town of 500 people, where I now work as a single-person faculty at Emmaville Central School. It is a beautiful region, and the community is full of wonderful people who have welcomed me with open arms. But, it isn’t immune to some common problems that manifest in isolated, rural towns with low socioeconomic status. For example, we have two pubs, but no organised physical activity or sport options – so, you can imagine what common ways to spend your free time are.
When I started out at Emmaville, I was certainly naive. I didn’t really think I had a particularly privileged upbringing. I grew up only about 3 hours from where I teach now, but I had no idea of the difficulties that young people faced – unstable housing, food insecurity, broken homes, mental health illness, physical inactivity, violence and addiction. The unfortunate reality is that, for many of the young people that I teach, or who live in remote areas, these are things that they live with, and are modelled to them, every day.
For some young people, they don’t even know any different, which makes teaching about concepts like nutrition, healthy relationships, and protective factors for wellbeing particularly interesting. I don’t mind saying that when I first started teaching, my goal was to make every lesson interesting and engaging. So much so that, my desire to make the lesson and “fun” detracted from the academic quality. I spent a good 18 months failing the students in front of me. That probably sounds like I’m being a bit harsh on myself, but it took me that long to learn enough about my students and their lives, and to work out the level of responsibility I have, not just as a teacher, but as a health and physical education teacher. It took me that long to work out that just being a teacher in a rural area wasn’t actually enough to contribute to reducing disadvantage.
The journey I have been on, living and working in Emmaville, has changed me as a professional and a person. It has changed the way I look at the world, undoubtedly. In the past 12 months, I have had some experiences that most people would perceive as pretty normal. I’ve been on holiday to a capital city, ate fancy brunches, attended a beautiful awards dinner for a colleague, flown on an aeroplane, and been to
the beach. I can still enjoy these experiences, but I would be lying if I said I don’t think to myself, while I enjoy a spoonful of matcha pancakes, “Will my students ever experience anything like this?”.
There are stories you hear that would genuinely break your heart. Young people who are dealt some really rough hands in life, and experience some awful stuff. For me, this journey has really helped underscore the importance of education as a whole, but particularly health and physical education. So much of what prevents people from living productive and prosperous lives can be attributed to poor social-emotional development, chronic lifestyle illness, or mental health problems; Each of which is a key area of content for health and physical educators.
The significance of education, and a preventative approach, is compounded by the fact that seeing a doctor is virtually impossible, “unless you are pregnant”, and for many people, medical services are simply out of reach. Basically, this is the words from a textbook, about rural and remote inequities, coming to life. Hopefully, this has started to paint a picture. The picture may seem a bit bleak, but what it does make clear is that health and physical education could not be more important for these young people. Realising this fact and embracing this responsibility has helped me learn some valuable lessons in my short career, thus far.
Firstly, the importance context and an action learning mindset. Learn all you can about the context. Every community, and every student, faces different challenges, and understanding these is so important to critically engage with research and make decisions about how to most effectively deliver what your students need. I always come back to the “responsibility” I feel to get those crucial parts of content across. I look for a gap – something that isn’t working – and I consider possible approaches to solve it, implement one, and evaluate. Then, the cycle starts again. Just like I want my students to learn from their mistakes, I try not to take it personally when it’s time to go back to the drawing board. It is an opportunity to find a better approach, and fulfil that responsibility.
Secondly, make it real and make it stick. A good friend of mine, who is a mathematics teacher introduced me to a saying: “If math is the aspirin, how do I give my students a headache?”. This question resonated with me so much. I know that the content I am teaching is important, but how do I sell it to my students? How do I give them that headache, and then present the concepts I am teaching about as the
pain relief? I relate this back to the significance of my lesson.
For every lesson, I try to put myself in my students’ shoes. “Why are we learning this? “I ask myself.” What is the big picture, and why do I feel like the content in this lesson is a non-negotiable, something that my students absolutely need to know to access a higher standard of health and wellbeing in the future? The mantra “why before what” rings true for me here. I try to explicitly address, and reflect on, the why as part of my learning objectives each lesson. On top of this, a couple of other strategies I have found success with include giving real-life, contextually relevant examples as much as possible (something I think PDHPE teachers are inherently good at), and focusing on learning about and applying concepts in the manner I want my students to use them. By this, I mean when I teach about the stages of skill acquisition, I don’t need students to make a colourful poster showing all the stages. Instead, I need them to understand that learning is a process and recognise what a learner needs in each stage to progress and improve, so they can use this knowledge to acquire new skills efficiently themselves.
Thirdly, build your network internally and externally. Learning from your colleagues and growing your relationships within the school, where people know the context of the students inside out, is incredibly valuable for your practice. I have also found it is super important to have people who understand what you see and feel on a daily basis. Working in the wellbeing space, and talking to young people about their health, can bring up some hard to process stories and conversations, particularly if you work in a rural area where unhealthy behaviours or socially exclusive attitudes can be the dominant discourse. You really need to have people around you who get that, and can help you manage that weight. Although it is good to have these relationships within your school and community, I have also found significant enrichment from actively trying to build connections outside the gates of my own school. Meeting other teachers through networking events, professional learning and in online spaces helps stretch my thinking and prevents me working in an echo chamber of my own ideas, or worse still, within the confines of “We have ve always done it this way”.
Finally, being a single-person faculty in a rural area has taught me that health and physical education is super valuable. Young people need what PDHPE teachers are serving up more than ever, especially in rural areas. If you fancy a tree change, go for it. The kids are great, and the community will welcome you with open arms. Education is the key to resolving health inequity in rural areas. We all know that you
can be active with minimal organised options, or without expensive, fancy facilities. We all know that you can eat a healthier diet, without blowing the budget. Rural communities are also tight-knit, socially. In my experience, people will go out of their way to help each other whenever they need it. Most of our recreational hobbies are active, and we have beautiful landscapes to explore and connect with nature.
So, despite the picture I painted earlier, there is the potential for a strong base of protective factors within rural communities, but we need people to take them on and encourage others around them to do the same. I see health and physical education as being the key. By creating strong leaders and passionate health advocates today, we get healthier rural communities, and a more equitable health landscape, tomorrow. If you choose the tree change, and the lifestyle doesn’t hook you in and keep you there, the feeling that you are really making a tangible impact every day, and contributing to a more equitable health landscape, certainly will.
Josh Barden is 2023 Schools Plus ECT Scholarship Award Winner, one of the The Educator’s Rising Stars 2024, and was highly commended by ACHPER in their Early Career Teacher Awards 2024. His workshops at the 2024 PDHPETA Conference received very positive feedback from delegates.
