Does physical activity mediate the associations between blue space and mental health? : a cross-sectional study in Australia

Background Research has begun to examine whether blue space is beneficial to mental health. While results are promising, it is difficult to know which aspects of mental health or mental ill-health may benefit most. Physical activity has been proposed as one potential mechanism via which blue space may be associated with better mental health. However, very few studies have examined mechanisms. We examined associations between blue space proximity and a range of mental health outcomes and examined which of these associations were mediated by physical activity. Methods 350 participants (M=38.74, SD=14.92, 70% female) self-reported their weekly physical activity and completed measures of depression, anxiety, and psychological wellbeing. We then used GIS software to calculate blue space proximity (i.e., coastal and inland), and structural equation modelling with mediation paths to determine the role of physical activity in the associations between bluespace and mental health. Results Physical activity partially mediated the associations between coastal proximity and depression (β=0.02, 95% CI=0.001, 0.05), anxiety (β=0.03, 95% CI=0.01, 0.06), and wellbeing (β = −0.03, 95% CI=−0.08, −0.01), and fully mediated the associations between inland water proximity and depression (β=0.02, 95% CI=0.003, 0.05), anxiety (β=0.03, 95% CI=0.01, 0.07), and wellbeing (β = −0.03, 95% CI=−0.07, −0.01). Conclusion While physical activity appears to explain associations between inland blue space and mental health outcomes, it only partially explains the association between coastal blue space and mental health, suggesting other mechanisms may play a role and even inactive exposure may be beneficial

Book review : Foundations for Tertiary and Senior Secondary Education (2nd ed.)

Froude, C., & Polley, S. (2011). Outdoor Education, Foundations for Tertiary and Senior Secondary Education (2nd ed.). Cottesloe, WA: Impact Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-921734-42-7, 436 pages

Disrupting the 'business as usual' approach to educating for health and sustainability

The article below is a follow-up to a recent panel discussion held at the 2020 ACNEM online conference - Environmental and Viral Disruptors: Rising to the Challenge, Reducing Risk, Future Proofing Humanity. The panel was convened to discuss the provocation 'Are new models of education needed for human survival? A discussion amongst educators'. The lead author, Leahy, was one of the educators on that panel. The ensuing discussion expands on the various points raised in the panel conversation to argue that we need to disrupt the business as usual approach to education if we are serious about rising to the challenges we currently face with regards to health, sustainability and climate change

Embodied encounters with more-than-human nature in health and physical education

Despite the importance of interactions with natural environments for personal and social well-being, there is only limited evidence of the relationship between the environment and health as an idea or area of study in school education in Australia. Logically, the place for such a study, at least in Australia, would be within the Health & Physical Education (HPE) key learning area. However, in HPE, alternative ways of considering health beyond the dominant ‘healthism’ discourses which privilege physical activity, fitness, food and nutrition struggle for any kind of existence. Gruenewald (2004. A Foucauldian analysis of environmental education: Toward the socioecological challenge of the earth charter. Curriculum Inquiry, 34(1), 71–107) suggests looking to the margins of a field to see what knowledge is silenced or subjugated in order to open up new conditions of possibility. This challenged us to look beyond taken for granted ways of thinking about health to identify other resources, perhaps unrecognised as yet, that teachers might draw on to constitute their knowledge of health. To do this, we look to interview data collected when teachers were asked to talk about their personal experiences of the relationship between the environment and health. The analysis of the interviews demonstrated how the teachers conceptualised the relationship between the environment and health by drawing on embodied experiences and affective encounters with morethan- human nature. By theorising these encounters through a posthuman, new-materialist lens, we demonstrate how their corporeal knowledge, developed through embodied experiences, has the potential to assist teachers in formulating less institutionalised health understandings. We argue that these encounters with more-than-human nature can serve as alternatives to those dominant healthism discourses that invoke problematic risk, fear and crisis responses

Environmental attunement in the health and physical education canon : emplaced connection to embodiment, community and 'nature'

There have been unresolved calls for educators to connect and translate environmental links within health and physical education given the enduring absence, yet overlapping citizen priorities of health. In this Introductory paper to the Special Issue of environmental attunement in the health and/or physical education canon, we question if and how notions of nature and the environment might paradigmatically belong more centrally to the discipline. After some author positioning and situating this work, we draw on theories of attunement to consider what our use of the term ‘environmental attunement’ offers for shaping epistemological habits and ontological work across health studies and physical education. As part of this, we explore the possibilities and challenges for expanding embodied connections to place, space and ‘nature’. We highlight the omnipresence of eco-health, environmentalism, ‘nature’ and Indigenous ways of knowing as central to a pressing socio-cultural context and politics, yet the absence of epistemological habits in health and physical education responding to this need. To conclude we map links and possibilities from the literature to argue for the necessity of ‘environmental attunement’ to more centrally underpin teachers’ ecological identities in learning about health and human movement

Environmental attunement in health, sport and physical education

This Special Issue on environmental attunement introduces seven papers that engage with a range of different insights and practices of nature-culture and embodied connections to place across health, sport and physical education. We have organised the papers into three themes that explore possibilities for: (i) notions of the environment and ‘nature’ in research and practice; (ii) possibilities and challenges of translating environment, sustainability and ‘nature’ from policy and curriculum documents into practice; and (iii) philosophical and theoretical links to emplaced and embodied learning – past-present-future. These are by no means exclusive themes and readers will recognise other patterns of theoretical and empirical possibility as well as important geographical and contextual nuances that need to be explored further. Because of this, we hope that this collection inspires further submissions via an extended call for papers that engage with the challenges and the possibilities of how we might approach the complex environmental, ecological, political and cultural factors that shape health, sport and physical education in current times

HPE teachers' negotiation of environmental health spaces : discursive positions, embodiment and materialism

A National Curriculum in Health and Physical Education (HPE) has recently been developed in Australia. This new curriculum reflects, among other educational priorities, both environmental sensitivities and a commitment to the enhancement of young people’s health and wellbeing. HPE is one of the key sites in the curriculum where a focused consideration of the relationship between the environment and health is possible. However, to date no research has considered the ways that HPE teachers might recognise and negotiate these spaces. The research described in this paper addresses this gap through an analysis of semi-structured interviews with generalist primary and specialist secondary HPE teachers, drawing on a ‘narrative ethnography’ approach derived from cultural geography. This analysis highlights the consequences of the absence of a knowledge tradition that explicitly links the fields of the environment and health in HPE. Participants who were able to conceptualise environmental health almost exclusively drew on dominant neoliberal and risk discourses. At the same time, teachers’ embodied histories and affective encounters with non-human nature helped them to rupture or challenge dominant assumptions about environmental health. We argue that corporeal knowledge developed through embodied experiences has the potential to assist teachers in formulating environmental health in ways that highlight how interactions with the environment might enhance health and wellbeing

An absence of 'the environment' in HPE teachers' meanings of health

There is an emerging body of cross-disciplinary research and public discourse that argues for an increased recognition of the complex connections between the environment and health and wellbeing (Taylor 2017). Disciplines such as human (or cultural) geography and its sub-field of health geography (known variously under other names, such as geography of human well-being, geography of pathology, geomedicine), already consider ‘the environment’ a health space, integrating a holistic perspective of geography and health sciences, with other fields, such as sociology and biology (Mercadal 2016). While other disciplines such as health geography are moving to include new perspectives into how environments and health can be connected, environmental health, or the explicit integration of the two concepts as an area of knowledge in Health and Physical Education (HPE), is still severely underrepresented, both in academic research and practice (Taylor 2017)

Environmental attunement continued : people, place, land and water in health education, sport and physical education

This second collection for the special issue on environmental attunement delves further into the possibilities of reimagining health, sport and physical education in relation to people, place, land and broader policy debates and governance about sustainable development. The collection represents a modest effort over time to sustain and circle back to the initial appeal to how these concepts can come together (Welch et al., 2021). In setting out to establish a cohesive collection that responds to current socio-political objectives of shifting social and environmental priorities in health, and sociohistorical links to the present, the casting of a wide net as guest editors generated a space for a ‘wild’ and varied collection of ideas and research. Some authors explored those embodied and sensorial aspects of being in relation to self and others that have rich potential to connect to the more-than- human realm in health education, sport and physical education. Links to nature and land or Country in the Australian context also surface in this special issue as an important consideration for research that is methodologically attempting to understand and work with children’s perspectives and Indigenous ways of knowing and being. A number of authors explore the potential futures of health, sport and physical education by examining the complexity of sustainability enactment across governmental, social and individual policies and practices. Other papers in this collection, mostly from the European context, engage with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the governance of space, as well as individual and structural factors that shape health education, sport and physical education

Introducing Generation Y to the wilderness

Today's Western culture is characterized by high technology, time compression and a disconnection from the natural world. What happens when a group of young adult students who are firmly embedded within this world, embark on a 6-day unassisted wilderness experience? When divorced from the structural support of the everyday, and placed in an emotionally and physically taxing environment, one would imagine students would retreat to the security of the known world upon return. However, our study sheds new light on this phenomenon by revealing its antithesis. These students manifest a strong desire for a simpler life. What is the nature of the simpler life they envisage? What is its innate appeal? And what are the implications for those involved in Outdoor Education? Even if such a desire for a more primal existence were expressed, is it possible or probable, that this notion can be executed? Our research proposes that a necessary precursor for sustainable living and a deep attachment to the environment is for educators to provide experiences that strip back the superfluity of everyday life and introduce bare subsistence. This facilitates the transition into a heightened and more sensitive environmental ethic