It is only an intervention, but it can sow very fertile seeds: graduate physical education teachers’ interpretations of critical pedagogy

ABSTRACT

The role that school health and physical education (HPE) plays in the making of physically active and healthy citizens continues to be rearticulated within the field of HPE practice. In Australasia, for example, this is evident in HPE curricula changes that now span almost two decades with ongoing advocacy for greater recognition of socially critical perspectives of physical activity and health. This paper reports on one part of a larger collaborative project that focused on how HPE teachers understand and enact socially critical perspectives in their practice. The paper draws on interview data obtained from 20 secondary school HPE teachers, all of whom graduated from the same physical education teacher education (PETE) programme in New Zealand, a programme that espouses a socially critical orientation. The teaching experience of the study participants ranged from 1 to 22 years of service. The preliminary analysis involved deduction of common themes in relation to the research questions and then, drawing on the theoretical framework of Bourdieu [1990. The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press], these themes were analysed in more detail to gain insight into how and why the graduate teachers’ expressed their particular understanding of HPE and critical pedagogy. The findings suggested that this PETE programme did have some impact on the participant teachers’ perceptions of physical activity and health, and the role of socially critical thinking. However, there was also evidence to suggest that many of them did not have a clear understanding of the transformative agenda of critical pedagogy. We conclude by suggesting that although this PETE programme did plant ‘seeds’ that had an impact on the graduate teachers’ awareness and thinking about socially critical issues in relation to physical activity and health, it did not necessarily turn them into critical pedagogues.

KEYWORDS:

• Health
• physical education
• PETE
• critical pedagogy
• social justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In 1999, New Zealand introduced a new curriculum document ‘Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum’ (Ministry of Education, 1999) that combined the previously separate subjects of health, physical education, and aspects of home economics.

2. The ‘PETE’ programme is better described as an ‘HPETE’ programme as it prepares teachers for teaching HPE. With an international audience in mind, the more familiar acronym ‘PETE’ will be used throughout the paper.

3. Pseudonym used for the participating university.

4. In New Zealand, students who graduate from an initial teacher education programme begin teaching as ‘provisionally registered’ teachers. ‘Full registration’ requires two years consecutive teaching practice and the successful demonstration of meeting practising teacher criteria.

5. Differentiated funding of New Zealand schools is based on a 1–10 ‘decile’ rating which uses census data to measure socio-economic difference between school communities. Schools in wealthier communities, defined as ‘high decile’ schools, receive incrementally less funding.

6. For further evidence of how this critical pedagogy is enacted by various lecturers in the PETE programme, see Philpot (2015a) who examined the socially critical claims of the programme providers.

7. A marae is a meeting area on the tribal land of a Māori tribe. Māori are the indigenous people of New Zealand.

8. Bourdieu (1990) stated that beliefs are ‘an inherent part of belonging to a field’ (p. 67).