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.

Education is essential for addressing the global environmental crisis and engaging students through experiential learning is crucial. In physical education, physical literacy offers a holistic approach to sustainable education, with plogging exemplifying this integration. This study investigates the perceptions of Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) students regarding the implementation of plogging in school curricula. Using qualitative interviews with 80 PETE students and analysing responses with NVIVO 12 software, the study reveals mixed feelings about this innovative practice. Participants see plogging as valuable for fostering both physical literacy and environmental awareness. However, concerns about feasibility include the need for institutional support, curriculum flexibility and community involvement. These findings highlight the potential of plogging to enhance educational programmes by combining physical activity with environmental stewardship. The results can inform the development of future educational strategies that integrate plogging to promote sustainability and holistic student development.

Imagine being in a university that functions in a place-based culturally regenerative way. In this concept paper, the authors bring together theory, practice, and experience, in the service of transforming universities towards place-based cultural regeneration. At present, Australian universities operate using an economic philosophy of neoliberal corporatism characterised by hierarchical management strategies, competitive tendencies, patriarchal values, and discourse characterised by bifurcation or binary thinking. These features illustrate a worldview that is entangled with the meta crises of our times such as climate change, species loss, hatred/intolerance, and unfathomable violence. The authors consider ways of moving towards a place-based, Indigenous-informed, practical, relational way of learning, being and knowing differently. The paper tentatively assembles a local, place-based culturally regenerative worldview based on living, vibrant, responsive places that embrace people who collaborate with Country – in the Indigenous sense of deep relationality. Within this worldview, the authors propose collaborative ways of governing, teaching, learning, and leading that is necessary for place-based cultural regeneration. In conclusion, the authors outline a pathway towards universities as places of regenerative cultures, which prioritise the nurturing of learning to live and work beyond the current societal paralysis on the road to collapse.

This paper shares a heuristic to support thinking about meaningful transformative education within the context of the contemporary environmental and social crisis. We describe the context of this work and explore the epistemological foundations for this model, which has been evolving and guiding our research and teaching and which underpins the six qualities of meaningful transformative education. The qualities are being open to alternative visions of the future and alternative approaches to education, accepting and embracing complexity, incorporating multiple types of knowledge, reorienting towards justice, developing ecological worldviews and supporting students to bring about systemic change. We also present a series of illustrative vignettes, informed by real-world practices of schools in England, which bring these qualities to life. The vignettes and subsequent discussion highlight possibilities and challenges for enacting a meaningful transformative education in schools.

Traditionally, physical education has focused on movement competency to develop skills for successful performance in different physical activities. Recently, however, the focus of many physical educators is shifting to notions of physical literacy to promote human flourishing through embodied experiences across multiple and diverse movement contexts well beyond physical education. While this shift is a welcome corrective to more traditional approaches to physical education, mainstream conceptions of physical literacy remain unduly narrow as rooted in colonial logics that continue to separate humans from the Earth while locating dominant categories of the human in hierarchical positions of power. In response, this article is an entanglement of Western and Métis embodiments of physical literacy. Deconstructing universalising models and modes of physical literacy set in dominant Western constructs, we seek to foster culturally relevant and meaningful physical literacy to promote physical activity and the wholistic health and well-being of Indigenous, or specifically, Red River Métis teachers and learners in Winnipeg, Canada. In doing so, we seek to provide a (re)visioning of human/Earth relationships as cultivated through movement-with Land; and thus, strengthen physical educational practices that more adequately attends to social (human) and ecological (Earth) flourishing in the context of global climate change.