Abstract
Introduction
The conceptualisation of rurality is complex and multifaceted, with current characterisations varying greatly. The World Urbanisation Prospectus (the Prospectus) (United Nations Department of Economics and Social Affairs [UNDESA], 2019: 81–99), for example, delineates what is urban and rural by population size, population density, physical characteristics of the area, the extent of infrastructure evident, relative access to facilities and services, type of economic activity within the area, or a combination of these factors. Despite the variety of factors proposed to distinguish urban and rural contexts, the majority of countries rely on minimum population size to determine rural areas in their census. For example, areas with population sizes of up to 1500 (Ireland), 2000 (France, Israel, Kenya, and Norway), 10,000 (Malaysia and Spain), and 100,000 (China) have all been classified as rural in their countries’ respective census procedures (UNDESA, 2019). The significant variation in population size in rural areas between countries makes such a classification system problematic.
The significant diversity in the levels of rurality between the Global North and the Global South also presents unique challenges when defining rurality, with the Global North considered to be more urbanised. As highlighted in the Prospectus (UNDESA, 2019), there has been an evident shift in people moving from rural areas to more densely populated urbanised centres in the Global North, with recent statistics indicating that between 68% and 82% of people in the Global North live in urban areas (e.g. North America, Europe, Oceania) (UNDESA, 2019). In contrast, the Global South has between 57% and 80% of people living in rural areas (e.g. Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, South Sudan, Rwanda, and Samoa) (UNDESA, 2019).
Though providing an overall definition of rurality is fraught with several limitations stemming from multiple and differing sociopolitical, economic, and instrumentalist viewpoints (Cloke, 2006; Walker-Gibbs et al., 2018), it is commonly defined in terms of having lower population density and lower relative access to goods and services in comparison to urban areas (Klar and Huggins, 2020). Based on this characterisation, rural areas have consistently been found to have greater difficulty accessing schools and substandard facilities relative to urban areas (Bantwini and Feza, 2017). Subsequently, it is a global challenge to get adequately trained teachers to work in more isolated rural areas, resulting in substantially higher staffing challenges than in urban schools (Gallo and Beckman, 2016). As such, scholars have documented a widening education achievement gap between students educated in rural areas and those educated in urban areas, both in the Global North and the Global South (Echazarra and Radinge, 2019; Roberts, 2017; Sullivan et al., 2018). However, for countries where the rural–urban divide is not so large, such as in Belgium, Finland, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, these same issues are not as prominent, and neither is the education achievement gap; evidence suggests that rural students in these countries tend to perform the same or better than urban students on standardised academic tests (Echazarra and Radinge, 2019). As such, associating rurality with low student outcomes is a problematic generalisation because there are some rural areas that benefit from close proximity to larger towns and urban centres with more resources, while others do not (Hudson, 2024, 2025; Hudson and Gurr, 2025; Roberts and Green, 2013).
Though an extensive body of literature exists on rural education in general, limited research has focused on physical education (PE) within rural settings (Högman et al., 2024; Matthews-Ewald et al., 2014). Carlman and Högman (2024) noted that the limited research that does exist on PE in rural schools has predominantly marginalised rural youth as having, or achieving, less than urban youth, positing that this is not an adequate representation of how they perceive their situation. Indeed, ‘many young individuals take pride in their hometowns and value rural characteristics, such as nature, social cohesion and safety’ (Carlman and Högman, 2024: 3). We contend that this marginalisation is not surprising given that much of the research on rural schooling has been fused with research on urban schooling, meaning that there is limited research that focuses specifically on the experiences that emanate in and from the rural (Roberts and Green, 2013; Walker-Gibbs et al., 2018). As such, knowledge of PE in rural schools remains somewhat of a mystery (Högman et al., 2024).
It has been acknowledged that due to the often-limited range of organised sports activities in some rural areas, rural PE represents an important space for young people to learn about movement and health (Button et al., 2020; Kellstedt et al., 2021). Carlman and Högman (2024), for example, suggested that this limited range of sporting activities forces rural youth into specific sports-related identities as a means for social integration into their rural community. This is generally through participation in team sports through rural sporting clubs as opposed to individual sports. As Carlman and Högman (2024: 222) noted, the rural youth in their study described how they would need to move to the city to participate in the sports they wanted to. The reason given for this was that ‘many of the sports they wished to engage in were not provided locally (e.g. dance and fitness centres) or that the local sports clubs were not at the level they required’. While rural sporting clubs are considered to be positive conduits for social cohesion and networking purposes (McCreery et al., 2024), this benefits only those young people who find value and purpose in participating in the often limited options available to them (Spaaij, 2009). For example, a participant in Högman et al. (2024) explained that the sports on offer in her rural town were not tailored towards her interests, as she preferred to engage in solitary, rather than team-based, activities. Another participant in this same study made it clear that football, a popular activity in other communities, did not interest them and they would rather spend time on the farm than participate in organised sports. Thus, rural PE is an important facilitator for those rural youth who choose not to, or are unable to, participate in organised sports.
Engagement with PE has also been shown to enable rural youth to participate in learning experiences that assist them in better understanding the relationship they have with their bodies. In their rural-focused case study that investigated how rurality shaped and informed students’ views of PE, Smyth et al. (2014) found that students mostly connected their participation in PE with their social class. The authors noted that students from traditional working-class rural backgrounds had an instrumental orientation towards the functional utility of their bodies, while the more advantaged students saw PE as a desirable activity that enhanced their socialisation with others. Considering this, rural PE teachers might look to work with rural youth with lower socioeducational advantage to challenge and overcome the instrumentality views of their bodies. Unfortunately, the scarcity of research on rural PE makes it difficult to ascertain how and if such pedagogy is enacted, or indeed valued, in rural schools.
Rossi and Sirna (2008: 4) lamented that rural PE as a field of research ‘attracts almost no interest, and this might reflect political indifference to remote community issues such as education’. In addition to this proposed paucity of research on rural PE, there is yet to be a review on what research does exist in the field. The purpose of the present review was to explore the broad question:
Methods
This review was conducted according to PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews) guidelines (Page et al., 2021). The study's literature search strategy, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and study selection process are discussed next.
Literature search strategy
Literature searches of ERIC (EBSCO), SPORTDiscus, Education Source, SCOPUS, and ProQuest were conducted from February to June 2024. The search was not restricted by the year of publication, and variations of the following keywords and controlled vocabulary were searched using each database: (‘physical education’ OR ‘PE’ AND ‘rural*’) AND (‘school*’ OR ‘class*’ OR ‘teach*’ OR ‘student’). The reference lists of included papers, relevant reviews and books were also screened to identify other possible inclusions.
Inclusion/exclusion criteria
The appraisal that guided the literature search process and subsequent study selection embraced both inclusion and exclusion criteria (Page et al., 2021). Each author individually surveyed relevant literature, and the final inclusion criteria for the study were drafted and revised by all members of the authorship group over the course of two meetings. The first of these meetings involved the authors conversing about their literature scan and forming initial parameters for inclusion and exclusion, based upon the study's overarching research question. In the second meeting, the authors used Aromataris and Munn's (2020) participants, concept, and context framework for conducting scoping reviews to revise these initial parameters and form the final inclusion and exclusion criteria, which were:
Participants: papers focused on students (≤18 years) and teachers involved in PE in a rural school setting were included. Papers that did not include a focus on students or were conducted in settings outside of schools were excluded. Concept: papers that focused on the factors and outcomes related to the delivery and/or experiences of PE within rural schools were included. Papers that focused on factors and outcomes related to the delivery and/or experience of sport development programmes and recreational programmes were excluded. Context: papers that mentioned ‘rural’ in the title, abstract, or keywords were included. Papers that did not mention rural in these three areas were excluded.
As the focus of this review was on PE, papers that focused only on physical activity (PA) outside of PE classes were excluded. To reduce the risk of introducing bias from unpublished studies (Higgins and Green, 2008), papers were also excluded if they were not empirical, peer-reviewed papers (e.g. opinion pieces). Papers that were not originally published in English were also not considered for analysis. We also acknowledge that a limitation of our criteria is that it is possible that some studies conducted in rural settings might not have been captured by this review if rural was not mentioned in the title, abstract or keywords.
Study selection
A total of 281 unique papers were returned from the searches after duplicates were removed. Details of these papers (e.g. author, title, abstract) were then exported into a customised screening and data extraction Excel spreadsheet. Papers were screened against the inclusion and exclusion criteria in three stages: title screening, abstract screening, and full-text screening. First, two authors (Christopher and Riki) independently screened titles to assess article suitability, with all papers not meeting the pre-defined eligibility criteria being excluded. Papers were flagged for inclusion, exclusion or as ‘unsure’ where insufficient information was available to inform a decision. If either author flagged a paper as ‘unsure’, the article was carried forward to the next screening stage. A total of 45 of the 281 papers in the title screen phase made it through to the abstract screen phase. These same two authors then conducted the abstract screening phase. Again, papers were flagged as ‘include’, ‘exclude’ or ‘unsure’, and only those that clearly fell into the ‘exclude’ category were removed. This left 42 papers which progressed to the next stage.
The third and last phase of study selection involved full-text screening. Two authors (Christopher and Josh) independently read and reviewed the 42 full-text papers in their entirety. Reference lists of all included papers were also checked, with three further full-text papers included for consideration. These two authors cross-checked their selections and met twice to discuss the papers that had been included and omitted based upon the appraisal criteria. Any discrepancies between them were resolved by group consensus through the opinions of the second (Riki) and third (Luiza) authors. Of the 45 papers, 24 were deemed to meet the appraisal criteria and were included for review (see Figure 1).
PRISMA flowchart of study selection.
Data analysis
The 24 papers that were included in the review were analysed systematically by inputting data extracted from the papers into an Excel spreadsheet matrix. The matrix included 12 descriptor variables: author(s), year of publication, title, purpose of study, country, type of research, definition of rurality (if at all), methodology, data collected, sample size, main findings, and limitations. The interested reader can access the descriptive information of these 24 papers via a supplementary data set. We have also asterisked these papers in the reference list.
Prior to analysis, three of the authors (Christopher, Luiza and Elizabeth) collectively provided response categories for each of the 12 variables. This process has been used as an analytical technique by others in their reviews related to PE to assist with the ensuing coding process (see Hudson et al., 2023; Lambert et al., 2024). For example, in this study, the descriptor variable of ‘country’ had the response category of ‘country where the data were collected’, and the responses here were in relation to the country of the research site (as opposed to the listed researchers’ affiliations), which helped build consistency in the data analysis. In this study, predetermined response categories (as opposed to open responses) were used for only two of the 12 descriptor variables – methodology and data collected. Coding then proceeded in two phases. In phase one, the matrix was analysed inductively to identify characteristics of the papers that were included for analysis. In phase two, these same three authors developed a ‘living codebook’ (Reyes et al., 2024: 91) to ‘track the process by which analytic codes [were] created, refined, and debated’. For the eight open variable categories in the analysis (title and author were excluded from this), the three authors met three times over the 3-week analysis period to iterate upon the preliminary codebook before a consensus was reached on the final version for theme development (Roberts et al., 2019). This included an exemplar list of typical response codes for each specific category. For example, for the category of ‘main findings’, the authors’ final codebook included a generated list of response codes related to students (e.g. increase or decrease in participation), teachers (e.g. pedagogical approaches) and schools (e.g. number and experience of PE staff). The ensuing thematic analysis of the codebook utilised the interactive reduction/reflection model of Miles et al. (2020), with each author moving from initial coding to pattern analysis, and then to thematic development. The three coding authors (Christopher, Luiza and Elizabeth) met a fourth time to reflect on and discuss the individual themes developed, ensuring that the final themes agreed upon were robust and representative of the research question in the study.
The living codebook aided consistency and transparency in the data analysis and allowed for a systematic approach to comparing information across the papers. Inter-coder reliability was safeguarded by having the three coding authors continuously meet to compare and reflect upon their individual coding of the 24 papers. Generally, these three authors were consistent in their coding across the 24 papers and were able to reach consensus between themselves, but where there was disagreement, authors two (Riki) and five (Josh) provided feedback until final consensus was reached. This ensured that the coded data and ensuing theme development were meaningful to the purpose of this review. Indeed, the themes developed best represent the entirety of the data set and are relevant to answering the research question:
Results
To answer our research question, we report on the findings across two separate but related sub-sections: (1) the characteristics of the papers and (2) PE within rural schools.
Characteristics of the papers
The characteristics of the papers included in the review are described across four subcategories: (1) population, (2) study design, (3) geographical location, and (4) the (in)visibility of the rural context.
The papers analysed in this study reflect an emphasis on investigating PE in rural areas of Australia and the United States, whereby the resources – both physical and non-physical – needed to deliver a purposeful and viable PE curriculum are considered to be scarcer than they are in urban schools. For us, this represents a byproduct of the classificatory schemas that position a rural–urban binary view in the extant literature (Cloke, 2006). However, a vast majority of the research on PE in Australia and the United States has been conducted in urban settings, and research on rural PE remains relatively scarce in both countries. It was surprising to us that there exists a minimal focus on investigating rural PE in European countries and in Canada, especially given how much of the latter is classified as rural. It is important to note that only papers in English were considered for this review, which might have impacted the distribution of papers in the analysis and is a limitation of our study.
PE within rural schools
This section offers an overview of what the papers discussed in terms of the delivery and/or experiences of PE within rural schools. We believe it important to reiterate that, given the heavy weighting of the papers towards the contexts of Australia and the United States (79%), this section provides a detailed overview of rural PE predominantly in two very large countries, but these findings may not be generalisable to all rural settings across the world. Three separate but interrelated themes were developed from the papers analysed in this review: (1) a deficit narrative of rural PE, (2) rural schools as sites of PE intervention, and (3) rural schools leverage partnerships to enhance their capacity to deliver PE. While the three themes are presented individually, we contend that there is much crossover between them.
rural school primary PE teachers’ content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and professional knowledge competence were very low due to the engagement of novice teachers and high turnover of experienced teachers; the lack of school resources and sport facilities; and the lack of supervisory and support services due to the inaccessibility of rural schools.
Rossi and Sirna (2008: 8) explained that, in their study, some parents had ‘concerns that their children would not develop certain important skills that might exclude them from future opportunities in physical or social activities, particularly upon transition to boarding school [in the city]’. This concern about a lack of FMS development and motor competence in primary school shifted to a concern about the hypermasculine environment of PE in rural secondary schools, emerging prominently in five of the 24 papers (Casey et al., 2009, 2016; Fisette, 2013; Lee and Macdonald, 2010; Smyth et al., 2014). Fisette (2013) explored how rural adolescent girls in the United States identified and critiqued their self-identified barriers to their engagement in and enjoyment of PE in rural schools. The female students in this study explained that a major barrier to their participation was the dominant patriarchal environment in their PE classes, whereby the dominance of male students was both actively and tacitly fostered by the teachers, leaving them ‘feeling ignored and invisible’ (Fisette, 2013: 193). Fisette (2013) noted this aligned with the gendered perceptions and stereotypes associated with the purpose and value of PE in the rural context in which the study was located (i.e. boys are physical and girls are not, boys play football and girls play netball, etc.). However, the female students were also found to resist these unequal power relations and displayed counter-conduct, establishing their identities in rural PE settings by formulating strategies to enhance their participation (e.g. making themselves more visible and displaying skill during a game).
This prevalence of hypermasculine spaces in rural PE was echoed in two Australian studies, Casey et al. (2009) and Casey et al. (2016), both of which focused on the PE experiences of rural adolescent girls. Casey et al. (2009) showed that female students valued fun and supportive rural PE environments but were negatively influenced by a lack of motor competence – teasing from the male students was common, and they felt that the male students excluded them from activities. Casey et al. (2009) also explained that there was a perception that girls in rural communities were limited in their PA options, which meant that they felt pressured to choose certain sports in PE that were available to them in the community (e.g. netball as opposed to the more ‘masculine’ option of soccer). Similar findings were reported in Casey et al. (2016), but there was more emphasis on the surveillance of young female bodies in rural PE than in Casey et al. (2009). The female students in Casey et al. (2016: 116–117) ‘talked about “everyone watching” and “judging” their physical performance and especially feared taunts from their peers when they did not display an acquired level of competence’, which (re)produced dominant discourses in ways that shaped the female students’ identities and experiences in PE. The findings of the papers discussed demonstrate that rural PE, especially in secondary schools in Australia, is largely positioned as a masculine endeavour, and female students are forced to navigate and/or overcome that framing.
What was most noticeable across the seven papers was the focus on improving students’ PA levels in and through PE (Belansky et al., 2016; Hortz and Petosa, 2006; van Beurden et al., 2003) and remediating a lack of age-appropriate FMS development (Miller et al., 2015; van Beurden et al., 2003). This connects strongly with the deficit theme discussed above, with rural PE being viewed as an opportunity to ‘fix’ rural students and lift them towards the ‘norm’ of urban students. For example, Belansky et al. (2016) implemented the 2-year SPARK programme in response to what they viewed as a lack of intentional effort to maximise moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) in rural PE settings. The study reported increased MVPA levels in PE classes from baseline levels, with similar increases also found in the intervention by Hortz and Petosa (2006). In this view, rural PE was seen as an important setting for helping students to achieve national PA recommendations, particularly given that it is often the only ‘structured opportunity in which rural children get physical activity’ (Belansky et al., 2016: 1002).
Specialised FMS interventions were implemented by Miller et al. (2015) and van Beurden et al. (2003). The findings of van Beurden et al. (2003) demonstrated that, prior to their intervention, the rural PE lessons they observed were mainly focused on improving the fitness of students as opposed to enhancing their FMS mastery; that is, a focus largely on PA as opposed to PE. Through the
While the intervention programmes discussed were said to have been implemented to improve the health and wellbeing deficits of rural youth (as identified from trends derived from large-scale government health data), the majority of them were externally delivered and featured instructional materials that were created without input from rural teachers and students (e.g. the
Spittle et al. (2022) compared the needs and characteristics of partnerships between schools and external providers in urban, regional, and rural schools in Australia. Findings from the study showed that schools looked to outsource PE because they lacked PE expertise in their schools, they wanted to access the external providers’ equipment and facilities, or they wanted to provide different PE experiences for the students. This reasoning was consistent across all three school contexts covered in the study. However, availability of and access to external providers were larger problems for rural schools, and this influenced their ability to outsource. Additionally, Spittle et al. (2022) noted that rural schools faced barriers to outsourcing due to a small number of students and geographic location (e.g. geographical isolation, cost of transportation), as well as lower numbers of PE staff in comparison to both urban and regional schools.
The papers on school–university partnerships demonstrated varied foci. Miller et al. (2015) described a 10-year-long partnership between one boarding school and the PE team at one rural university in Australia. This partnership was focused on assisting the rural school to develop units of work in motor development, health, and nutrition and included PE teachers, pre-service teachers (PSTs), and the university team. Similarly, and in response to a lack of PE resources (e.g. lack of specialised PE teachers, facilities and equipment), Lynch (2013) reinforced school–university partnerships as a possible way to improve rural PE. He described his efforts in offering a Friday PE programme to primary schools that surrounded his rural university. Lynch (2013) noted that in five of the six schools he and his team worked with, the implementation of the PE curriculum was conducted by general classroom teachers who were not PE trained. The last of these six schools did have a designated PE teacher on staff, but they, too, were not specifically PE trained. Resultantly, the majority of the schools in the study sought to outsource the PE learning area to external providers, and so one of the partnership aims was to strengthen existing teachers’ professional capacity through the provision of PE-based professional development. Similar to Miller et al. (2015), this programme was aligned to an elective unit in a teacher education programme, meaning that PSTs were also offered the opportunity to engage with rural PE in practice. Both Miller et al. (2015) and Lynch (2013) stressed the importance of school–university partnerships for enhancing rural students’ learning outcomes in PE. These two papers also reported many challenges when developing and sustaining school–university partnerships. The desire of the school and/or university leadership team to engage in the partnership and securing funding for equipment, facilities, and transport were noted as the biggest challenges to sustaining positive school–university partnerships in rural areas (Lynch, 2013; Miller et al., 2015), and this is especially true as the distance between the school and university increases.
Tsuda et al. (2019) focused on the challenges associated with teaching PE in rural districts of Japan, illustrating a need to focus on building the professional capacity and domain-specific pedagogical knowledge of rural PE teachers through effective professional development. Tsuda et al. (2019) recommended partnerships be forged between neighbouring rural school districts in Japan to create place-based learning communities. For Tsuda et al. (2019), the purpose of this is to leverage collective expertise to overcome the professional isolation that occurs when teaching PE in rural districts of Japan. This, too, was a recommendation echoed in Rossi and Sirna (2008), albeit located in Queensland, Australia. Rossi and Sirna (2008) reported on a case study of three primary schools that came together to form a learning community to overcome the problems of teaching PE in isolated settings. Rossi and Sirna (2008) explained that the PE teachers in their study felt that the realities of rural teaching was not understood by their education department, which meant that they saw the professional development opportunities offered by the department as not suited to them and their context. Through the formation of a learning community between schools, Rossi and Sirna (2008) showed how such arrangements can support the development of rural PE teachers’ professional capacity to deliver quality PE and improve student outcomes, as well as provide a means to overcome the ‘tyranny of distance’ when working in isolated schools.
This theme has demonstrated that rural schools leverage partnerships to enhance their capacity to deliver quality PE. However, the three papers that focused on partnerships between rural schools and universities or external providers (Lynch, 2013; Miller et al., 2015; Spittle et al., 2022) mostly emphasised how these partnerships benefit rural schools. There was a lack of emphasis placed on how forging a partnership with a rural school benefits the university or external provider – a rather top-down approach to thinking about these partnerships. Indeed, these papers position, perhaps inadvertently, rural PE as a site of knowledge consumption as opposed to a source of rich knowledge production. The papers do not emphasise in detail the development of horizontal partnerships; that is, partnerships that benefit not only rural teachers and students, but also university personnel, external providers, and, to some extent, the wider rural community.
Discussion and implications for future research
This scoping review has offered an overview of the research on PE in rural schools, detailing the key themes within this body of research. After analysing the 24 papers that were included for review, it is evident that rural PE is still an incipient area of research. Importantly, we have demonstrated that current knowledge in the field of rural PE is (a) anchored in a geographical understanding of rurality and (b) lacks detail about the rural context and the uniqueness of PE in specific rural areas. Most of the papers focused on the large, English-speaking countries of Australia and the United States. This result was not surprising because our review was constrained to include only papers in English, which we acknowledged as a limitation in our analysis. Interestingly, though, our analysis represents the scarcity of papers that have invested in rural PE in Canada and in European, English-speaking countries. Our review signifies the need to investigate rural PE more broadly, fostering international dialogue concerned with the different conceptualisations of rurality and the successes and challenges of rural PE in different cultures. Indeed, if we are to further advance knowledge of rural PE, we contend that future research must focus on investigating how PE is enacted in more and different rural schools, especially across a broader selection of international contexts.
More than being an incipient area of research, our analysis has identified the lack of details often provided about the rural context when scholars have investigated PE in rural areas. While three papers richly described the rural context as part of their investigation (Lee and Macdonald, 2010; Rossi and Sirna, 2008; Smyth et al., 2014), 12 of the 24 papers (50%) did not describe the research context – rural was simply listed as the site of inquiry. We believe that the invisibility of the rural context in the existing research poses a significant problem, not least of which is related to the omission of the contextual nuances and intricacies of different rural places across both space and time (Roberts and Green, 2013). We know that rural in one place is not the same as rural in another (Carlman and Högman, 2024; Hudson, 2024, 2025; Hudson and Gurr, 2025; Roberts, 2017), and so it is important for researchers to richly describe the rural context in future investigations. In practical terms, researchers might consider explicitly denoting a ‘rural standpoint’ (Roberts, 2014: 135) as part of their investigations, which sees rurality as ‘generative for, or pertinent to, the purpose of the research, and more than a category of description … [and places importance] upon the particularities and subjectivities of places’. The documentation of a rural standpoint, regardless of whether the rural context is of interest to the researcher, ensures that place is valued while also offering the field of rural PE a way to develop its knowledge base further and allowing an avenue for more apt place-based comparisons between studies.
The majority of papers in this review adopted a deficit view of rural PE, which included a lack of PE teachers or a shortfall in their pedagogical expertise, insufficient PE facilities, a lack of resources required to teach quality PE, and rural students’ lack of health and wellbeing. Concomitantly, there also existed the positionality of rural PE in a binary view against the ‘norm’ of the urban (Carlman and Högman, 2024; Roberts, 2017). In this view, rural PE is often seen as less than urban PE and needing intervention, which was the second theme in our analysis. These interventions were mostly top-down research agendas, delivering pre/post-test interventions to heroically ‘fix’ rural PE, teachers and students through the guise of a ‘healthism discourse’ (Lee and Macdonald, 2010). Placing research efforts predominantly on intervention-based studies ‘does little to add to an understanding of the rural or how issues uniquely play out in the rural’ (Roberts, 2014: 280). For us, the majority of the interventions failed to consider the specific needs of the rural teachers and students they were investigating. It is important to note, however, that interventions may inherently be geared toward fixing perceived deficits, and viewed this way, the ‘deficit view’ identified within the present review may not be unique to rural contexts. Therefore, further research should consider examining such themes across urban and rural settings to extend our findings and develop a deeper understanding of the issues faced within both urban and rural PE contexts.
While our analysis revealed that teachers’ lack of pedagogical skills was a major reason for outsourcing rural PE, it also revealed that school–school communities of practice and school–university partnerships were used to enhance rural PE teachers’ practice as opposed to a reliance on activity delivery through external providers. This coincides with Spittle et al.'s (2022) conclusion that in comparison to urban schools, rural schools may have less access to a broad range of external providers to choose from and so need to think divergently when looking to outsource, with partnerships with regional universities being one means to do so. Relating to school–university partnerships, two papers highlighted how they contributed to the enhancement of both opportunities for rural students and rural PE teachers’ practice (Lynch, 2013; Miller et al., 2015), aligning with McEvilly's (2022) comments that outsourcing can be a constructive way to counteract a lack of expertise and to extend PE departments’ capabilities. However, we believe it is important to note that these two papers were constrained to the Australian context only, and so more research needs to be done across different international contexts to ascertain if this occurs in different rural contexts in other countries. Indeed, school–university partnerships may not be a universal consideration for rural schools outside of Australia, and so future investigations might focus on whether rural schools in other international contexts place value on these partnerships and for what reasons. In addition, only one of these papers (Miller et al., 2015) featured a longitudinal research design, and so we do not know much about the longevity and success of school–university partnerships. Future investigations might focus on how the challenges faced with forging and sustaining these university partnerships are successfully navigated over time. What is largely missing in the existing research, we believe, are studies that adopt a strengths-based view of rural PE. We contend that future research would benefit from providing a more nuanced account of the positive student, teacher, and community outcomes and experiences that do emanate in and from different and unique rural places (Walker-Gibbs et al., 2018) – we need to know what
Finally, our analysis revealed that rural PE is a conspicuously gendered space in the contexts of Australia and the United States, and this can negatively contribute to shaping and limiting rural students’ understandings of health, fitness, their bodies and the movement (im)possibilities for them (Smyth et al., 2014). What was especially salient in our review was that three papers (Casey et al., 2009, 2016; Fisette, 2013) demonstrated how hypermasculinity can materialise through rural PE in secondary schools in Australia and the United States. While this hypermasculinity is certainly not constrained to rural areas and is also evident in urban PE (Stride et al., 2020), it would be remiss of us to conclude this paper and gloss over this finding, especially given the importance of the PE environment in fostering girls’ participation in PE (Cowley et al., 2021). As Spaaij (2009: 1136) remarked, sport in countries like Australia is traditionally used as a site for the construction and reproduction of social capital and arguably provides ‘the strongest marker of masculinity in country towns’. While some have argued that rural PE is an important space for young people to learn about movement and health (Button et al., 2020), we believe that, pedagogically, the net must be cast wider. There is a great need to use rural PE as a conduit to educate rural adolescents about the (re)production of dominant gender positions in rural communities and how such ideology can marginalise, oppress, and disengage girls from participating in rural PE, especially in Australia and the United States. Congruent with the view from others (Smyth et al., 2014; Tonts, 2005; McCreery et al., 2024), we believe the benefits of participating in rural PE far outweigh the negatives, but there must be a concerted effort to foster positive place-based social dynamics in and through rural PE; that is, using PE as a means to foster supportive social connections between students, while also drawing together an awareness of how these interactions shape other students’ experiences of PE within their unique rural communities.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-epe-10.1177_1356336X251334547 - Supplemental material for Physical education in rural schools: A scoping review
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-epe-10.1177_1356336X251334547 for Physical education in rural schools: A scoping review by Christopher Hudson, Riki Lindsay, Luiza Goncalves, Elizabeth McNeil and Josh Ambrosy in European Physical Education Review
Footnotes
Data availability statement
Declaration of conflicting interests
Ethical approval and informed consent statements
Funding
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Author biographies
References
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