In defence of white privilege: physical education teachers’ understandings of their work in culturally diverse schools

ABSTRACT

Research suggests that physical education (PE) in Western countries is not providing equitable experiences for non-white students. Responsibility for shortcomings has often been ascribed to white PE teachers. Scholars have claimed that teachers lack cultural competence and know little about how physical cultures or health are understood by the young people with whom they work. The objective of this investigation was to investigate this claim and generate an understanding of how white PE teachers in a culturally diverse high school make sense of their work with non-white students. Data with three Swedish teachers of varying experience were produced using semi-structured interviewing. A series of school visits provided a complementary line of data. Four themes emerged from the data. These related to: (1) differences between white and non-white values; (2) the knowledge and dispositions necessary for success in PE; (3) the broad purpose of PE, and; (4) the differences between boys’ and girls’ experiences of PE. Data were interpreted using a Critical Race Theory (CRT) perspective, with the notion of ‘whiteness’ providing a specific analytic concept. The general thesis developed in the second part of the paper is that problems result not from insensitivity or incompetence but from discourses of whiteness in which many teachers live and work. By building on critical research both in general education and physical education literature and by utilizing whiteness as an analytical concept, the investigation shows how three PE teachers draw extensively on the racial discourse of whiteness and how this disadvantages non-white students. The paper is concluded with a consideration of how racial disadvantage could be challenged or disrupted.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• ethnicity
• cultural diversity
• critical race theory
• whiteness
• equity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the interviewees for agreeing to take part in this research. I would also like to thank Johannes Lunneblad for valuable assistance during the revision phase of preparing this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

D. Barker http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4162-9844

Notes

1 See Fitzpatrick and Santamaría (2015) for an example of an analysis of race in the context of PE using the concept of habitus.

2 Bonilla-Silva and Forman (2000) noted that most of the college students who they surveyed feared the effects of affirmative action programs on their life chances, despite the fact that these students had middle-class backgrounds and were not in vulnerable positions.

3 In general, foreign born persons can become Swedish nationals if they have lived in Sweden for five years, have demonstrated ‘good conduct’, and can prove their identity (SMA, 2017).

4 The teachers’ real names have been replaced with pseudonyms. The research adheres to the ethical guidelines set out by Swedish law as well as the Swedish Research Council. Details that could render teacher or students identifiable have been omitted from the descriptions below.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Centrum for Idrottsforskning [grant number P2015-0061].