Crossing borders for transformative professional learning about health and physical education policy through the Policy Process Case Method

The Policy Process Case Method (PPCM) is a recent innovation for (health and physical) education professionals to transform their complex policy experiences into practical insights. This method engages professionals across roles and geographical borders in sustained reflexive dialogue to collaboratively interrogate their policy experiences through policy theories. In this ∼1.5-year PPCM investigation, our group (i.e. two curriculum officers, one department head, and one researcher, from four nations) engaged in the following process. First, each practitioner shared a policy experience, including advocating for school policy change, developing provincial/state curricula, and implementing provincial/state curricula. The researcher identified relevant policy theories through which the group interrogated those experiences, including Multiple Streams Analysis, Deliberative Policy Analysis, and Enactment Theory. Finally, all members individually coded and collaboratively thematised the meeting transcripts and artefacts (e.g. shared cases) to determine policy lessons learned. A fundamental lesson learned related to the reality of policy processes as messy, unpredictable, and multidirectional rather than idealised depictions of these processes as ordered, rational, and top-down. This broad, perspective-shifting learning served as the foundation for a specific lesson learned about how to better communicate and be understood in complex policy processes; that is, to have a clear and tailored policy problem framing and a well-prepared solution. Lastly, a meta-lesson learned related to how to learn about policy, specifically that engaging in border-crossing forms of policy-focused professional learning, like the PPCM, can build all the competencies of policy preparedness: awareness, knowledge, know-how, as well as motivation and confidence. The geographical, professional, disciplinary, and temporal border-crossings inherent in the PPCM respectively help the process to (a) acknowledge but move beyond local politics; (b) mimic the complex reality of diverse actors in policy processes; (c) challenge assumptions and prompt new ideas; and (d) accommodate the challenging integration of complex policy concepts.