Healthying physical education : on the possibility of learning health

Background: As part of the annual activities at the British Educational Research Association (BERA) conference, the Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy Special Interest Group (SIG) organises a so-called Invisible College, where a Scholar Lecture is delivered by a researcher who has made a significant contribution to the field. This paper is the 2018 Scholar Lecture. Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to discuss two concepts and the relations between them – health and learning. Key concepts: In the paper, the metaphor of the swimmer in the river, as introduced by Antonovsky, is used in order to go beyond individualistic, dualistic and instrumental notions of health and education. I argue for a move away from a notion of teaching young people how to be healthy through the deployment of ready-made educational packages, towards acknowledging health education as a societal responsibility, where it is recognised that sociocultural and economic contexts afford diverse opportunities to be healthy and to learn to live healthy lives, however these are construed. Discussion and conclusion: Rather than confining health and health education to the prevention of premature death and disease, I discuss health, in relation to learning, as always being in the process of becoming. The health resources for living a good life can then be found in the ‘river’, with the ‘swimmer’, and in the relation between the ‘river’ and the ‘swimmer’. In this way, health can manifest itself in many different ways. I ask why we even attempt to talk about health in the singular when talking about different diseases. Is health rather a plural? Is it even a noun? Or is it something we do – a verb? If the latter, health education can be conceived of as a practice – ‘healthying’ – rather than a fixed, static outcome set up by research and public health policies as something to achieve in education