Pedagogy, Sport Pedagogy, and the Field of Kinesiology

Abstract

The term pedagogy has become ubiquitous in the field of kinesiology, and sport pedagogy is now firmly established as a credible academic subdiscipline. Notwithstanding the fact that our European colleagues had been using the terms pedagogy and sport pedagogy for many years (see Crum, 1986; Haag, 2005), the English-speaking world of kinesiology has only relatively recently embraced the terms. Increased use, however, does not necessarily equate with coherent or shared understandings of what the terms mean. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to do some “languaging” (Kirk, 1991; Postman, 1989) to shed some light on the meanings of pedagogy and sport pedagogy and in so doing perhaps stimulate further consideration of their use in kinesiology. I will argue for a notion of pedagogy that is generative in enabling us to think about the process of knowledge production and reproduction across the many subdisciplines of kinesiology, including, but not limited to, sport pedagogy. Finally I will consider the notion of pedagogical work as providing a useful concept for analyzing the contribution of sport pedagogy to understandings related to how we come to know about physical activity, the body, and health.