Promoting Physical (Ecological) Literacy through Physical Education: Everyone’s Response-ability in a World Gasping for Air

Abstract Braidotti describes the world as gasping for air as collectively we face a range of socioecological challenges. Young people are important actors in these challenges, making schools a critical space for this work. Physical education (PE) can contribute through promoting relevant embodied encounters that develop students’ physical literacies (PL). Noting the recent moves to extend the notion of a physically literate individual to include the ecological, alongside the Australian Curriculum that requires teachers to attend to their learning area, cross-curriculum priorities and general capabilities including sustainability and ethical capabilities, there are exciting possibilities for developing students’ PL to confront these challenges. Despite these opportunities, for PE to contribute meaningfully, teachers must progress from PE represented by sport techniques, linear pedagogies and driven by competition to PE that engages students to think and act differently in the world, ethically, ontologically and epistemologically. Using autoethnography, this paper presents vignettes to outline current issues and possibilities for PE. Through a posthuman lens, positioning teachers and students as learners who are always becoming, with the capacity to affect and be affected, it is possible to achieve the intended curriculum and develop young people’s capacities to make a meaningful contribution to the socioecological challenges we face.