Parents’ narratives of physically educating their children at the interplay of home and school

Abstract

Scholars within physical education (PE) have paid relatively little attention to social class. Studies have tended to quantify inequities in participation in leisure activities and overlooked the processes of how social class structures attitudes towards particular forms of physical culture, including PE, and how they are practised. In this context, the paper focuses upon the dynamics between families and schools, and the economics of embodiment. It provides insights from parents/guardians’ narratives of social location and positionality in physical culture and how these stories-as-lived influence their children’s physical identities, whilst socialising them into the rules of a culture and class. Data have been generated from in-depth interviews and have been thematically analysed drawing upon the analytic tools of Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction and narrative inquiry’s concept of plot. The findings reveal that middle class parents/guardians narrated stories about cultivating their children’s physical capital as central to their upbringing. In contrast, working class parents/guardians told tales couched in a laissez faire attitude with regard to their children’s physical literacy and participation in physical culture. Interestingly, neither middle class nor working class parents/guardians talked about the significance of school PE lessons for their children’s physical capital. This seemingly shared ambivalence was, nonetheless, configured in significantly different ways reflecting their differing social locations, lifestyles and narrative repertories. The narrative consequences for the children are arguably great and contribute to the social reproduction of physical capital, rather than social transformation as policy-makers desire.

Keywords:

• parents
• social class
• physical education
• physical capital
• physical culture
• narrative

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the anonymous referees for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. Grades are 1 (very poor) – 6 (excellent).

2. Birken is a 54 km cross-country classic ski marathon.