Thinking about complexity thinking for physical education

In this chapter we attempt to think about complexity thinking with regard to different forms of physical education pedagogy that have captured the attention of physical education teachers and researchers over the years. Specifically, we consider Mosston’s (1966) famous spectrum of teaching styles, Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) (Bunker & Thorpe, 1982, and many after) and sport education (as per Siedentop, 1994). In so doing we are interested to see if complexity thinking can provide a generative way of theorizing pedagogy in physical education in ways that are advantageous over other ways of theorizing physical education pedagogy. We acknowledge that this potentially sets up an unwelcome binary that may be challenged. However, we position ourselves, initially at least, as sceptics with a view not to discard complexity thinking but rather to seek its most viable attributes to help shape pedagogical practice in physical education. We then return to the idea of complexity as a metaphor and finally ask whether the attractiveness (usefulness) of complexity thinking might be understood by considering it as a meme (the cultural equivalent of a gene) that happens to have gained attention at this particular point in time.