Sport, Education and Society

Sustainable Development and Physical Education: Critical Perspectives on Motor, Social, and Ecological Transformations

Papers in this special issue will critically examine how sustainable development is interpreted, negotiated, and enacted through Physical Education (PE) across diverse contexts. While sustainability has become a defining priority in global education agendas, its integration into PE remains uneven—often sidelined in adjacent debates (e.g., wellbeing, equity, policy) rather than addressed as a transformative, interdisciplinary project. This special issue argues that PE, with its unique focus on embodied practices, affective experiences, and social dynamics, offers a powerful yet underexplored site for advancing Education for Sustainability. However, this potential is not automatic: it requires confronting PE’s historical complicity in reproducing unsustainable norms (e.g., competition, consumption, exclusion) and reimagining its role in fostering ecological consciousness, social justice, and systemic change.

Sport, Education and Society has long provided a platform for scholarship that situates PE within broader societal questions. This collection seeks to consolidate and deepen emerging conversations about sustainability in PE, moving beyond instrumental approaches to interrogate the political, ethical, and pedagogical tensions at the heart of Education for Sustainability. By centering critical, sociological, and pedagogical perspectives, the issue will illuminate how PE can either reinforce or resist dominant paradigms of development, and how its embodied, affective, and communal dimensions might be harnessed for radical transformation.

This special issue will comprise between 10 and 12 papers.

Manuscripts submitted for this Special Issue should respond directly to one or more of the following submission themes:

1. Barriers and Levers for Implementing Education for Sustainable Developpement in Physical Education
2. Critical Perspectives between Education for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development Goals in PE
3. Sustainable Development vs. Motor Learning: Tensions and Synergies
4. The Transformative Potential and Paradoxes of PE’s Embodied, Active, Sensory, and Emotional Dimensions for Education for Sustainable Development 
5. Diverse Perspectives: Political, Curricular, Teacher, and Student Voices
6. Teacher education, professional learning, and pedagogical innovation for education for sustainable development in physical education