Movement, Environment and Community - research group

Our focus

Central issue - A social ecology of sport and outdoor recreation

The promotion of physically active, well-being, healthy and sustainable lifestyles can be advanced by addressing how the interactions of movement experiences, in a range of environments according to changing community contexts shape the potential contribution of sport and outdoor recreation.

Social ecology of sport and outdoor recreation, in particular the inter/trans-disciplinary study of movement, environment and community provides a unique response to epidemics like 'obesity' and crises like 'ecological' and their non-sustainability.

Central educational problem

At stake is the adequacy of educational (pedagogical, curricula, research, policy) responses, particularly in physical education, outdoor education, health education, environmental education, history/geography/SOSE to advance insights into the 'upstream' (social/ecological determinants) potential of trans/inter-disciplinary approach to the promotion of physical activity in appropriate geographical conditions and community circumstances.

Of particular socio-ecological concern are the chronically debilitating binaries in education of mind and body, indoor and outdoor, knowledge and meaning-making, learning and doing, disembodied abstraction and embodied lived experience - epistemology and ontology; binaries that Dewey would argue can be countered by the pedagogical approach known as experimental education.

MEC will develop a "social ecology and experiential education of movement, environment and community"

Central research question

How does the education sector respond more effectively to the quest for healthy, sustainable living that currently is challenging most western, industrial nations?

More specifically, what formations of socio-ecological theory and experiential education pedagogy will furnish keener methodological insights into, and evidence about, the qualities and characteristics, problems and issues about movement and physical activity, in various environments or geographies, and in or through different communities.

This central question can be dis-aggregated into numerous sub-questions:

1. What meaning-making occurs in movement experiences?
2. What spatial, temporal and geographical affordances and constraints influence participation in various movement experiences?
3. What changing forms and practices of physical activity and environmental affordances assist and encourage various communities to engage in healthy, sustainable living?

See also the list of our Current projects.