Physical Education, Curriculum And Culture

Critical Issues In The Contemporary Crisis

Richard Tinning, David Kirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781850006756
• eBook ISBN: 9781135387464
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collection of studies addresses contemporary issues and problems in the physical education curriculum. While each of the chapters illustrates the diverse range of practical curriculum issues currently facing physical education, the continuities between them also suggest a certain commonality of experience in Britain, North America and Au tralia. In each it is difficult not to detect at least some rumblings of the various crises - environmental, political, economic, social - that are increasingly impacting on everyday lives in the present and shaping thoughts and plans for the future. The editors stress that physical education is a part of social life and is therefore a key site for the production and legitimation of important cultural mores, values and symbols.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Physical Education, Curriculum and Culture

David Kirk and Richard Tinning

All of a sudden, it seems, school and community physical activity programmes are newsworthy items. Research agencies in various countries, some of them government sponsored, are busily engaged in conducting or planning physical fitness surveys of school children and adults, and school physical education is featuring in the pages of the popular press and on serious current affairs television programmes. Meanwhile, the chatter surrounding the fate of international sports performers is ever present, the volume and acrimony rising sharply as the latest failure on the international scene is scrutinized and dissected, and physical educators once again find themselves included in the hunt for scapegoats. Many of these events have been taking place in Britain over the past five years, where a very public debate about school physical education has been conducted, a debate that has been more subdued in other countries, but, as we will see from the contributions to this book, has nevertheless being going on there too. What is clear from the attention that has been directed at physical education is that it has been implicated in wider societal events at a time when we are faced with an ever-growing number of crises. Those of us who read the daily press will be very well aware of the current upheavals in the world economy, with the concomitant instability in political life and chronic largescale unemployment. We are faced regularly with distressing reports of impending environmental catastrophe caused by holes in the ozone layer and the threat of diseases like AIDS reaching epidemic proportions. There can be little doubt that we live in unsettled and unsettling times, where words like ‘crisis’, ‘turmoil’ and ‘unrest’ are certainly not out of place.

In this context, as Evans and Davies (1988) have argued, it is hardly surprising that there is unrest, change and dislocation within education and schools. Education has been a hot political topic since the early 1960s in its function as a major plank in the post- Second World War ‘social reconstruction’ of a number of Western countries. Now, suddenly, physical education and related activities like physical fitness, health, sport and recreation are on stage, and willing or not have become star performers in what Stuart Hall (1983) has called ‘The Great Moving Right Show’. Suddenly, the cultural significance of physical activity, and its symbolic relationship to political ideologies in particular, have been exposed as politicians and other ruling class agents have sought out and found powerful media for their messages (Fitzclarence, 1987). While physical educators within their own professional contexts have been excited by a range of new ideas such as health-based physical education and concepts like ‘lifestyle’, ‘fitness’ and ‘health’, there has been little critical analysis to date of these trends and their relationships to events in wider society. As Tinning (1984) has recently pointed out to Australian physical educators, most of the critique that does appear in the pages of physical education journals is aimed at other physical educators. We lack a critical tradition in our field, and tend to view conflict and criticism as always destructive, intensely personal, rarely objective and never constructive. We seem to be more concerned with following trends, with showing that we can fit whatever role society requires of us, and we take the subservient view that we shouldn’t ‘bite the hand that feeds us’. Social responsiveness is important, but so is social critique, for without it we allow ourselves to be implicated in cultural movements that may not always be for the good of the few or the many, and which may actually undermine some of the things our profession values.

Critical awareness of events in society at large does not mean, as one recent commentator has implied (Saunders, 1985), that we take on political lobbying on environmental issues, the nuclear arms race or some other social issue as a professional function. Our interests instead, as physical educators, must be focused on how these wider movements in society circumscribe and interfuse our work in school physical education. This means that we cannot go on blissfully measuring the happenings inside physical education classes, counting students’ ‘motor-engaged’ time or the amount of time teachers devote to managerial matters, without also taking account of the forces outside schools that are actively shaping the very substance of what we teach and, indeed, why we think such measurements might be important in the first place. If school physical education is such big news, we are not likely to find the answers why in micro-analyses of physical education lessons alone. The studies brought together in this volume attempt to look out and look in at the same time, to note the substantive issues in physical education and at the same time locate these within the ebb and flow of cultural movements and processes. The key focusing concept in each is knowledge, and how it is selected, organized, appropriated, legitimated and evaluated. The rest of this introduction is an attempt to explain why critical studies of curriculum issues in physical education are important, our motivations as editors for putting this book together, and to identify in summary form the issues each chapter addresses.

Physical Activity and Knowledge

Many readers and most of the contributors to this book, who have at some point in their lives undergone a course of teacher training in physical education, will be sympathetic to the idea that there is much to learn and know about physical activity and the body. Most of us will be familar with some of the rudimentary objections to the orthodoxy of mind/body dualism and as physical educators would be likely to reject the notions that engaging in physical activity is in some sense a ‘non-cognitive’ activity, as educational philosophers of the 1960s like Richard Peters (1966) would have it, and that physical education in schools is inferior to other curriculum topics due to its eminently practical nature. Some of us occasionally may have felt a sense of injustice at the emphasis placed on ‘intellectual’ pursuits within Western educational practice and frustration at the persistent denigration of physical education by some of our administrators, policymakers, academics and colleagues.¹

Despite this tradition of dualism within educational practice, however, organized physical education has survived in both public and private school systems.² It has developed in a number of countries from humble beginnings into a fully fledged school subject and increasingly with a cadre of four-year trained graduate teachers. Given the alleged intellectualist bias in educational systems, physical education’s continued existence and in places its expansion are on the face of it a remarkable feat, and suggest at least a paradox. How can a subject that has occupied a ‘marginal’ educational role in the curriculum for so long begin to grow at an unprecedented rate and in such a relatively unfavourable environment?

There are several possible answers to this question. One that may spring most readily to mind for some people is that physical education has finally been able to demonstrate its scientific basis and so its worth as a respectable intellectual pursuit. Indeed, this would seem to constitute the basis of the received or dominant view which presently informs the organization of the study of physical activity in tertiary institutions. However, while it may account for the current growth in tertiary level ‘human movement science’ degree courses and examinable subjects in secondary schools, this response leaves the place of actual physical activity in this context problematic (see e.g. Best, 1978; Arnold, 1979; Kirk, 1988). This trend toward science as a basis for the study of physical activity is also in itself a problematic issue, a matter that is discussed in the chapters by Bain, Kirk, Dewar and Fitzclarence and Tinning in this volume.

Another response may be that the main criteria for the inclusion of a subject in the school curriculum are not necessarily ‘educational’ (in the sense outlined by philosophers such as Peters, 1966), and that schools themselves must now fulfil a complex range of functions (cf. Kemmis, 1983). In this respect physical education’s continuing presence in the school curriculum is to serve purposes other than educational ones, such as maintaining students’ fitness and health, providing them with leisure-time skills for adulthood or with sports skills for elite performance. This is a much more complex position than the ‘evolution to science’ argument since it brings into play the relationship between schools and society, rather than merely considering the place of one subject within the school, college or university as a closed system. There may be other possible explanations of the paradox that physical activity courses in educational institutions represent, but while these are locked within restricted cognitivist views of ‘education’ as an exclusively intellectual activity, it is unlikely that we will achieve any kind of satisfactory resolution to this apparent conundrum. Consideration of the complexity of the relationship between school knowledge and wider societal interests makes any clear and unequivocal explanation of the role of physical activity in the curricula of educational institutions less likely, but it does suggest an important direction in which to focus our attention in search of powerful and more penetrating insights into this apparent paradox. One radical alternative to the orthodox cognitivist view of the role of physical activity in educational contexts is suggested in the work of the French historian of ideas, Michel Foucault.

The Body, Movement and Culture

Foucault (1980) has argued against the widespread notion that Western civilization has neglected the body in preference to the intellect. He suggests, on the contrary, that control and repression of the body have played a fundamental part in the establishment and maintenance of power required for the growth of industrial capitalism since the eighteenth century. In the early days of industrial capitalism, when a vast and dis-ciplined workforce was required as a prerequisite to industrial production, a range of institutions was invented—schools, hospitals, factories, barracks, asylums—where the same regime of physical repression and control was applied. It is no coincidence that the substance and conduct of physical education was framed within repressive, quasi-militaristic forms in the context of compulsory mass education in the late nineteenth century, a legacy that has remained with physical education until as recently as the 1960s. Foucault suggests that since the late 1950s this ‘heavy, ponderous, meticulous and constant’ investment of power through the subjection of the body has undergone dramatic transformation in train with changes in the structure of contemporary capitalism, and that a new, much more individualistic and less obvious regime of corporeal control has begun to develop. Foucault’s central point is that, far from neglecting the body, society has since at least the eighteenth century recognized the crucial significance of the body and movement in relation to the exercise of power.³ The fact that the body has been positioned in particular ways within educational discourse, as irrelevant to intellectual development for example, is not inconsistent with Foucault’s thesis, since the roles allocated to physical activity within schools have served purposes that rarely challenged this logic of corporeal control.

What is important about Foucault’s work in relation to the body and power is that it shows the physical dimension of our beings to be infused with social and cultural significance. This is a difficult notion to come to terms with at first, not least because of the ways in which a variety of discourses in education, the military, work, religion, medicine and science has represented the body as a biophysical object to be manipulated, disciplined, repressed, punished and treated. The recent rise to prominence of scientific functionalism in ‘human movement science’, discussed in the chapters by Kirk, Dewar, Bain and Fitzclarence and Tinning in this volume, has done much to extend this way of looking at the body, leaning heavily as it does on the logic of experimental science and scientific medicine. Within this discourse of scientific functionalism, the moving body is depersonalized, represented as an object which obeys the laws of gravity, which generates force in its own right, and which is made up of ‘systems’ of muscles, bones, nerves, tendons and other specialized tissue which function in many instances independently of what people think and feel. Within this discourse, comparisons of the body’s functioning to that of a computer or some other machine seem to be accurate and apt descriptions, an issue that is elaborated in the chapters by Bain and Colquhoun. Such analogies will be familiar to many readers who have trained as physical educators. However, it is this very familiarity that sometimes makes it difficult for us to think of the body and movement in other terms.

The fact that movement and the body are of crucial social and cultural significance is not so difficult to appreciate, however, when we begin to consider mass culture and the media. Sport, as a major institutionalized form of physical activity, is used regularly by advertisers to sell a diverse range of products. In many advertisements, direct associations are made between the qualities inherent in sports performance and their products, qualities such as excitement, dynamism, just reward for hard work, competitiveness and success. The series of Australia and New Zealand Bank advertisements discussed in the chapter by Fitzclarence and Tinning shows how effectively analogies are being drawn between techniques for successful performance in sport and successful conduct in life. Sport is a pervasive feature of everyday life that appears at many levels of society, albeit in different forms, and so it resonates with many people’s mainly pleasurable experiences. More than this, success in sport is much more easily and unproblematically measured than in other areas of life, and so acts as a simple metaphor for the ‘good life’. The sheer physicality of many sports is a major part of their attraction and power, and it is this power that draws so many advertisers to use sport to sell their messages and products.

In a similar way, the slender body achieved widespread prominence as a metaphor for health, well-being and affluence in the print and electronic media. Fatness, on the other hand, particularly in women, elicits moral reproof. Overweight or obese people are represented as lazy, emotionally weak and sexually unattractive. These representations of the body in advertising and other media forms can have such a powerful impact on people precisely because they go beyond rational descriptions of desirable weight and shape to become moral imperatives. Picking up the thread of Foucault’s analysis, we might suggest that this may be one of the new forms of corporeal control he alludes to, where the locus of control has shifted from the masses and punitive external sanctions and repressions to become internalized within the individual and located within a moral category of guilt and reproof. Certainly, as writers like Crawford (1986) and others such as Colquhoun in this volume have suggested, the widespread occurrence of eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulemia, which are both underwritten by an obsession with weight and body shape, illustrates two contradictory imperatives within contemporary capitalism to consume and abstain. The incoherence of these requirements of capitalism, when worked out in the lives of individuals, is aptly illustrated in the tragedy, waste and misery of the lives of victims of these disorders.

The Interconnectedness of Physical Education and Culture

In this context of the social and cultural significance of movement and the body, physical activity programmes in educational institutions occupy an important position in defining, transmitting and legitimating forms of human movement that are thought to be useful, socially permissible and morally sound.⁴ The kinds of physical activities that make up physical education programmes are the resultants of a number of structural and practical forces, in particular tradition, conscious selection and planning, and a range of pragmatic factors such as facilities, equipment and teacher expertise. However, whether programmes are mainly the outcome of conscious planning or history and tradition, their constitution is in neither case ‘accidental’. Given the interconnectedness of physical activity, the body and culture, the work of physical educators takes on enormous significance as a key moment in the process of cultural production.⁵ Just as movement and the body are socially constructed, so physical education is itself deeply implicated in this process of construction. The forms of human movement that make up physical education programmes exist because they are important to the interests of some groups of people somewhere in society. This is not to suggest a monolithic or deterministic imposition of alien values on the receivers of physical education in schools, but merely to make the point that these activities have not been generated out of nothing. They exist in school programmes because, in some convoluted way or another, they service the interests of some people often at the expense of others. It is, for example, no coincidence that physical educators around the world are currently developing health-based physical education programmes at a time when there is a popular mass cultural movement towards physical fitness and health, environmental sickness that can be linked directly to human illness, and a deepening crisis in Western capitalism signalled by world-wide recession and mass, chronic unemployment.

Political Projects, Cultural Critique and Substantive Concerns

The nature of this interconnectedness, however, between physical education, physical activity and culture, or between fitness, corporeal control and chronic unemployment for that matter, is neither obvious nor straightforward. While we believe it is essential for research to incorporate and utilize a concept of ‘social structure’ in any analysis of physical education policy, programmes and practice, we suggest that it is neither helpful nor accurate to draw simplistic lines of connection between wider social processes and events in schools and classrooms. In their worst form, such analyses engender a ‘radical pessimism’, a sense of hopelessness in the face of overpowering forces and predetermined events. At the same time, micro-analyses of teaching and other educational action that focus exclusively on the minute and idiosyncratic can also be dangerously blind to forces that exist outside the direct control of individuals or groups of people.⁶ In putting together this collection of papers, we have attempted to solicit studies that show a sensitivity to structures in society and at the same time pay close attention to the detail of practice in physical education, and to the interconnections that run between each point of focus. In pursuing this project our activities as editors and contributors have been directed by three major concerns.

Our first concern was to frame the project from the outset within an explicit and coherent political position. It is now commonplace among all but the most petulantly scientistic physical educationists to acknowledge the pervasiveness of values in all of our professional activities as educators. It has been well demonstrated that far from being above values, it would be a strange educator indeed who was not prepared to communicate to students knowledge s/he believed in. This does not mean that we must travel to that other extreme, from a spurious neutrality to irrational prejudice, or that we must politicize education. Education is already ‘political’. As Habermas (1972) has pointed out, all of our knowledge is insolubly linked to the pursuit of particular human interests, whether these be the need to maintain the conditions for our survival, communication with each other, or to move beyond our current circumstances to new understandings. We as researchers are as much caught up in the world of values and beliefs as educationists in other contexts like schools, and so it makes little sense to us to suggest that our research can somehow be above and beyond this world. We also believe, however, that it is a certain kind of dishonesty, a form of self-deception, to refrain from attempting to articulate as coherently as we are able what our leading values and beliefs are, as far as we are conscious of them.

This political position is most appropriately outlined in substantive detail by each of the authors in this volume, in direct reference to particular issues and problems in physical education. Readers will find little discussion of the ideologies and policies of major political parties, of ‘right’, ‘left’ or ‘middle’, except where it is required by the integrity of the analysis to locate issues in physical education within recognizable partypolitical frames. What readers will find instead are explicit discussions of ‘the other politics’, or what Sparkes refers to in his chapter as the ‘micropolitics’ of everyday life, of the concerns and beliefs and values that are expressed in and through our actions. In these terms the political project of this book is to open up to critical scrutiny the things we do, say and think about physical education with the express purpose of doing, thinking and saying those things better, and to create the possibility of changing these practices when the need arises. By opening up our professional practices to scrutiny, by ourselves and our peers, we create the possibility of turning each of these areas of practice into ‘sites of con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• General Editors’ Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Physical Education, Curriculum and Culture
• Chapter 2: A Critical Analysis of the Hidden Curriculum in Physical Education
• Chapter 3: Defining the Subject: Gymnastics and Gender in British Physical Education*
• Chapter 4: Oppression and Privilege in Physical Education: Struggles in the Negotiation of Gender in a University Programme
• Chapter 5: Pedagogy as Text in Physical Education Teacher Education: Beyond the Preferred Reading
• Chapter 6: Ability, Position and Privilege in School Physical Education
• Chapter 7: Challenging Hegemonic Physical Education: Contextualizing Physical Education as an Examinable Subject
• Chapter 8: Winners, Losers and the Myth of Rational Change in Physical Education: Towards an Understanding of Interests and Power in Innovation
• Chapter 9: Images of Healthism in Health-Based Physical Education
• Notes on Contributors