Diversity, Difference and Social Justice in Physical Education

Challenges and Strategies in a Translocated World

Bonnie Pang, Tony Rossi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000467000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

This book presents a detailed analysis of the experiences of (minority ethnic) physical education (PE) teachers in both schools and higher education contexts. It examines and questions the lack of ethnic diversity in PE teacher education in high-income developed countries and suggests important new directions for transformative pedagogy to address the 'whiteness' of PE.

The book draws on auto-ethnographical research conducted in Sydney, Australia—one of the world's most culturally diverse cities—and in cities of the United Kingdom. The study is rooted in the concept of 'trans-locality', the networks that extend beyond the immediate community. It explores the challenges faced by PE teachers in culturally diverse workplaces, and the interconnections between place, institutions, and the parallel processes of mobility and globalisation. To understand and theorise the myriad of interactions and practice around diversity, differences, and social justice among lecturers, teachers, and students across the two locations, the book offers an emerging area of scholarship that focuses on a trans-local perspective in diversity and inclusion in Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE).

Diversity, Difference and Social Justice in Physical Education will be of significance to those who manage, teach, and research issues associated with diversity and advocate for diversifying the teaching workforce in PETE.

1 Introduction

Current trends, debates, and discussion in physical education teacher education

DOI: 10.4324/9780429325137-1

What’s in a word: diversity

Popular vernacular surrounding diversity, inclusion, exclusion, equity, and so on can be fraught with challenges, not least of which is how such words are adopted to suit particular ends. For example, as we started to write this book, we undertook a series of simple Google searches just to see what would happen. Interestingly using a combination of words aligned with ‘diversity’ and using the word itself for the most part yielded hits associated with cultural diversity in the workplace and how, when this is established, productivity improves. We fully appreciate that algorithms used to generate such searches will be oriented in particular ways. Nonetheless, it is of interest that cultural diversity is immediately associated with improved productivity rather than viewed as a moral imperative, first.

To take a slightly different route, when one talks about diversity, what does it mean? We have colleagues who work in the scholarly spaces of LGBTIQ+ and use the word diversity, but those for whom the word is meant to be representative are different, say, from those in spaces of ability/disability. This is quite apparent from a brief look at the contents page of the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, where scholarly papers on LGBTIQ+, race, culture, and disability can be found in the same edition. Our point here, that does not have to be laboured, is that diversity is now such a widely used (and sometimes, misused) term that it necessitates the use of qualifiers to ensure audiences can identify the focus of the conversation. Diversity in a social context, for example, might mean that a successfully diverse community is one where individuals no matter how they are differentiated and how similar they are can come together in a way that the whole community benefits.

We are called upon to be as precise as possible when using linguistic devices that can quickly be altered to serve as both nouns and adjectives. Therefore, what do we mean by diversity within the context of this book? We have taken diversity as the appreciation of one’s cultural and ethnic identities and how these play out within the field (as described by Bourdieu, 1977) of physical education (PE) and health and physical education (HPE), as it is known in some jurisdictions, and more specifically within the field of PETE.¹ This is an area that warrants further examination as schools have become more culturally diverse, and the wide acknowledement of the importance of teacher diversity for engaging ethnically diverse students in education comes to the fore. Given that the higher education sector would appear to have the vocational obligation to transform countries via workforce training (setting aside for a moment the difference between training and education) (Harrison, 2017), it stands to reason that if schools are becoming more culturally diverse then one might expect the higher education sector (and fields within the sector responsible for teacher education) to follow suit. Abdul Rahman and Alwi (2018) highlight that universities play pertinent roles in “producing competent individuals, shaping the values and norms of the society” (p. 87). Among such values, the authors argue, are being culturally ready for the world of work. Scholars in PETE may well be doing this; however, it is highly likely that this is predominantly coming from a culturally dominant discourse that in the developed world at least will be white or of the coloniser. In this book, we mainly draw upon literatures coming from a ‘western’ perspective. Knowing clearly that separating knowledge and people into ‘western’ or ‘not-western’ is not helpful enough to examine diversity issues as it will create a ‘residual population’ effect that puts white or western as the standard and all the others in negative terms and making the term ‘white’ and ‘non-western’ conclusively ethnocentric (Aspinall, 2002). Nonetheless, this book uses non-western, non-white, developing, minority, and so on to describe people, knowledge and places in order to carve out a position for their visibility in a context of normative whiteness.

Emerging trans-local pedagogical work in PETE

Modest increases in numbers of ‘minority’ ethnic teachers may be able to respond to calls for teacher cultural diversity. However, this idea seems to have gained little traction in the field of PETE. Concomitantly, little attention appears to have been given to ethnically and culturally diverse teachers and students in PETE. Yet, issues of globalisation, ethnic diversity, and social justice are core elements in a large number of undergraduate and post-graduate programmes in PETE, youth sport, and health. So even when these key organisational elements are in place within the context of curricula, there are very few academic texts (as distinct from textbooks) that have even broached the question of this disparity. Consequently, there tends to be a lack of understanding and support for those academics who within their day-to-day work deal with, teach, and in some cases, research issues associated with diversity and advocate for diversifying the teaching workforce. In PETE, we face the challenges of working with trainee teachers who are likely to enter increasingly diverse physical education environments but are often underprepared to do so.

The last decade of academic research that centers on the nexus of PETE, equity, and diversity for the most part dealt with student diversity. Teacher diversity seems to have attracted much less attention (Flintoff, Chappell, Gower et al., 2008; Flintoff, Dowling & Fitzgerald, 2015). With increasing numbers of minority ethnic students in programmes in westernised and developed countries, there have been calls to radically and rapidly diversify the teaching profession. Such a call is based on assumptions that teachers of minority ethnic backgrounds are likely to be better placed to teach minority ethnic students as a consequence of a better understanding of their needs and cultural practices. In addition, teachers of minority ethnic backgrounds are better positioned to promote the educational and career aspirations of these students. Research further suggests that PE in westernised countries is not providing inclusive experiences for students of colour. This shortcoming is often ascribed to white PE teachers’ lack of cultural competency (Azzarito & Solomon, 2005; Pang & Soong, 2016) and even a whitewashing of the field (Dowling & Flintoff, 2018).

The point of departure of this book is that diversity in the macrocosms of economy, polity, and power nationally and globally translate into dynamics of the microcosms of teaching and learning locally; and translate further into individual dispositions and social positions in everyday life. To understand and theorise the myriad interactions and practices around diversity, differences, and social justice among academics, teachers, and students in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK), this book centers on the explanatory promise of the conceptual framework of trans-locality. Trans-locality has been defined by a number of researchers as “relations that extend beyond the village community” (Tenhunen, 2011, p. 416), “a space in which new forms of (post)national identity are constituted” (Mandaville, 2002, p. 204), and “being identified with more than one location” (Oakes & Schein, 2006, p. xiii). As such, a trans-local perspective enables us to explore the experiences of PETE academics from the UK and Australia, PE teachers and their undergraduate students, and teachers at schools in Greater Western Sydney² (GWS) in a multifaceted way which highlights the diverse and contradictory effects of interconnectedness between places, institutions, and agents. We explore the ideas of trans-locality in Chapter Two.

The context from which we speak is GWS. To the world at large Sydney is identifiable through its harbour (and its bridge, affectionately known as the ‘Coathanger’) and its unique quayside Opera House. These two symbols went global as the logo of the Sydney Olympics. However, Sydney is a vast sprawling city that stretches for at least 50 kilometres in all directions (bar eastwards where the city literally meets the surf) from the city centre. In fact, so spread out is Sydney that Parramatta, some 28 kilometres from what might euphemistically be referred to as ‘downtown’ is now considered to be the centre of the city. What the popular visage of Sydney conceals is a city made up of vibrant and different ethnicities and cultures. As a consequence, we identify GWS in Australia as one such environment where PETE is facing increasingly diverse student cohorts. Sydney is among the world’s most culturally diverse cities and sits alongside London, Tokyo, New York City, Sao Paulo, and San Francisco (City of Sydney, 2020) for the diverse nature of its citizens. Much of Sydney’s diversity can be found in the western and south western parts of the city; the parts of the city growing most rapidly both economically and in terms of population growth. This book is of global relevance and offers an emerging area of scholarship that focuses on a trans-local perspective in diversity and inclusion in PETE.

Critical pedagogy in PETE in a trans-located world

The idea of critical pedagogy in PETE is well established, notably in Australia, New Zealand (NZ), the UK, and the United States (US). There exists a historical critical mass of research and a current critical mass of researchers. The literature associated with critical pedagogy in physical education has grown exponentially over at least 30 years (e.g. see Routledge Studies in Physical Education and Youth Sport, and Critical Studies in Health and Education Series) and could now be considered substantial. More recently, PE research underpinned by a critical perspective has emerged from Sweden (e.g. Barker, 2019; Quennerstedt, 2008), Norway (Aasland, Walseth & Engelsrud, 2019; Walseth, 2015), and the Netherlands (e.g. van Amsterdam, Knoppers, Claringbould & Jongmans, 2012). Hill, Philpot, Fisette et al. (2018) gave an account of the historical development of critical pedagogy in PETE, and a comprehensive examination of how academics in PETE conceptualise social justice from an international perspective. As Hill et al. (2018) note, social justice issues in PE started to germinate in the mid-1980s (e.g. Evans, 1986; Kirk, 1986; Tinning, 1985) and have been a strong feature of this scholarly work ever since.

Development in social justice research in PE

Whilst the history of critical scholarship in PE is well accounted for (Kirk, 2001; Tinning, 2010), one way to account for its development over time would be to categorise the work into two inter-related areas: theoretical positioning and research topics or ideas. For example, as Hill et al. (2018) note, the theoretical positions for conceptualising social justice range from humanism, critical theory, ‘post’ theories, and neoliberal ideology. The emphasis of these positions is loosely distributed geographically. The terms ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’, framed in neoliberal and humanist discourses, tend to be most prevalent within the US, while critical pedagogy and alignment with critical and ‘post’ theories are more apparent in Australia and NZ. Additionally, sociological discourses of diversity and inclusion appear to be less commonly used by academics in the US. For many European and Australasian PE academics, perhaps more embodied within the traditions of critical theory, concepts for creating transformative working environments (see Enright, Coll, Chróinín & Fitzpatrick, 2017; Lynch & Curtner-Smith, 2019; Luguetti, Kirk & Oliver, 2019) are more common. These theoretical underpinnings provide the contextual background for where and how critical pedagogy is taken up as an explanatory and practical tool and is an important thread to connect how the empirical data collected from the participants is interpreted, by whom, with whom, and raising our awareness of what is said as well as not said in the course of examination.

In this book, we have talked to higher educati...