‘I just treat them all the same, really’: teachers, whiteness and (anti) racism in physical education

ABSTRACT

This paper explores physical educators’ perspectives on race and racism as a first step towards disrupting whiteness and supporting the development of antiracist practice. With close links to sport, a practice centrally implicated in the creation and maintenance of racialised bodies and hierarchies, Physical Education (PE) offers an important context for a study of whiteness and racism in education. Using collective biography we examine physical educators’ narrative stories for what they reveal about the operation of whiteness and racism in PE. Teachers draw on narratives from curricula texts which uphold and reinforce notions of the racialised other, thereby reasserting normative, universal white knowledge. Their pedagogy is underpinned by a colour blind approach where race is ‘not seen’, yet essentialist and cultural discourses of race are nevertheless deployed to position particular racialised and gendered bodies as ‘problems’ in PE. Engagement with antiracism is limited to professional rhetoric within pedagogical practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• race
• physical education
• teachers
• antiracism
• collective biography

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the participants for giving up their time and being involved in the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Anne Flintoff http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4384-2000

Notes

1 25% of English pupils attending state funded secondary schools come from a black and minority ethnic (BME) background; (30% at primary level); however schools’ intakes differ significantly and in key conurbations, BME pupils will be in the majority (Burgess, Wilson, & Lupton, 2005). In Norway, similar patterns exist whereby some urban schools have large overrepresentations of ‘immigrant’ students.

2 Race and ethnic difference are addressed differently at institutional and state level. For example, whilst ethnic monitoring in the UK is seen as part of good practice, and by legislation, a requirement of all public bodies in order to help promote positive race relations, in Norway, this is not the case. ‘Norwegians’ are those born in the country, and those who are not, classified as ‘immigrants’ (Gullestad, 2006).

3 Following Levine-Rasky (2002) we use ‘racialised other’ rather than terms such as ‘BME’ to refer to those groups that have been regarded as distinct from white, thus ensuring a link between racialisation and racism. Where citing others’ work, we use their terminology.

4 Space prevents a detailed analysis of our own postionality here, but see (Flintoff & Webb, 2012; Flintoff et al., 2014).

5 Apart from our names as authors, all others are pseudonyms.

6 Significant legal changes in the UK introduced in 2000 recognised the institutionalised nature of racism is explicitly recognised and schools and universities now have a legal requirement to actively promote positive race relations through their policy/practice as well as recording and reporting on racist incidents.

7 To this end, we have drawn on the research to develop some pedagogical materials that might prove useful to others wishing to engage in the task of dismantling whiteness (see Dowling & Flintoff, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by British Academy Leverhulme Small Grant [grant number SG131853].