The poverty of theory: class configurations in the discourse of Physical Education and Health (PEH)

Abstract

Background: At the heart of this polemic1 lies the view that contemporary research in PE and Health (PEH) has largely overlooked one of the key determinants of social behaviour, social class and its expression in and outside schools; an omission that has quite serious consequences for how we (researchers and teachers) think about and conceptualise the purposes of PE in schools and what it can, and can not, achieve.

Purpose: Class matters we argue, and unless it is returned to centre stage in research and professionals debate in PEH we are unlikely to achieve either balanced or complex understandings of what PEH is for, what achievements and ‘abilities’ are to be valued and what we as researchers and teachers can reasonably be expected to achieve.

Keywords:

• Social class
• Theory
• Physical education
• Health
• Equity
• Social justice

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Michael Gard for drawing our attention to Critser's (2003) book Fat Lands. For those interested, Oliver (2006) provides a nice counterpoint to Critser's thesis. Thanks also to colleagues in the UK and Australia for their invaluable comments on early drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. This is a modified version of a paper presented to the Physical Education UK Special Interest Group, British Educational Research Conference, University of Warwick, 6–9 September 2006. The paper was intended as a provocative challenge to thinking on the practices, purposes and achievements of PE in schools, and as a stimulus to debate on the capacities of research in physical education to help us understand these things.

2. It's not that the media (TV, press, web-pages, written, visual, digital) its simulations and signs aren't powerful agencies of socialisation, or pedagogy. Historically, ‘the word’ has had the capacity to bring down governments, influence opinion, endorse, consolidate, rationalise, contest and change the ways people think and behave. Of course it has a bearing on what and who we think we are. TV, for example, will inform you of the merits of a Jamie Oliver dinner, tell you what to wear while eating it, where your house should be located and how you should care for your garden, dogs and kids, as well as how much to exercise and how thin you should be. What it won't do, however, is determine whether or not you can achieve any of these things, no matter how much you might desire them; or, how much exercise you can do, how long you will live, and the quality of your health care, in a way that the labour process and your experience of school undoubtedly will.

3. This research ethic has influenced policy thinking in education for many years, and is reflected in much of the policy research on sport and PE. The success of PE or sport programmes has been perceived largely in terms of performance and product defined as, for example, how many people by class, race or gender, take part in physical (extra curricular) activity inside, outside, or after school, or in terms of how active they are, or how fit they become. A recent overview by Green et al. (2005), for example, reported that patterns are quite complex, showing some erosion in class differences involving blurring of boundaries as to who does what and when, though patterns tend to be as clear as ever in later life as to who gets involved in physical activity and who enjoys better health. What all these studies show, however, whether in education, sport, PE or health, is that neither targeted nor universal policy initiatives have blunted the close associations between social origin, educational attainment and subsequent employment prospects in a changing labour market and, concomitantly, in leisure and health prospects, despite marginal gender differences in the size of effects on opportunity and attainment in all of these things. The question remains as what would need to be done to achieve such ends.

4. For Bernstein (1996), education was a field with ‘specialised interests’ with a discourse that distinguished it from other fields. It was specialised by virtue of its institutions (schools, colleges, universities), agents (education ministry officials, LEA officers, teachers) and focus on the education and training via formal schooling, further education and university participation of students. As with other fields, it was an arena of struggle between interests competing to define its rules (or ‘device’) as to what was to be counted as legitimate knowledge, identity and practice. Their outcomes mattered because it was only legitimate knowledge that was credentialed via public examination results, vocational qualifications or degrees. Moreover, this knowledge was made available in highly regulated terms of transmission and receipt, more easily recognised and worked with by some rather than others.

5. Pedagogic discourses always embed instructional skills, which create skills of one kind or another, in regulative discourse, rules that create social order, relations and identity. Thus the question might be more aptly framed as, when does socialisation (an inescapable element of pedagogy) become a form of social control?

6. Guilt and anxiety are endemic in contexts defined by ‘performative culture’ (see Ball, 2004) and saturated with policies which heap both responsibility on teachers and pupils, and blame, when expectations can not be attained.

7. Teachers operate in policy frameworks, in conditions which are not always of their own making but are constructed for them before and beyond the context of the school. They are not free to do what they chose. Class is enacted through policy, it frames teachers' thinking and defines, though never determines, precisely what they do. Teachers of PE, perhaps more so than any other, work in a policy saturated environment. They have to deal not only with legislation relating to education but also sport and health, much of it ‘made’ not in the pedagogical recontextualising field but in the official recontextualising field. And, as Ball (2006b) reminded us, policy is peculiarly modernist in its outlook, it offers a representation, a narrative of how the world is and should be. It is inevitably reactive and meant to have immediate impact; its imperative, ‘think later, act now’. And, when it does not work, because it does not or can not connect with local circumstances and conditions of class, the solution is, offer more policy.

8. Like Oliver (2006) we emphasise that even if we do use ‘weight’ as a proxy for other more serious, class based, problems we would still not want to make it the focus of health or education policy and practice either in or out of school. This is largely because the inappropriate use and definition of the terms ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ have such damaging consequences for people's lives, including, for example, their employment opportunities, whether they are considered fit parents, insurance costs, and so on (see Oliver, 2006, 34). Furthermore, as Oliver and others (Gard & Wright, 2005) have pointed out, current ‘weight’ standards (which have dubious scientific rationale) not only damage the self image of the many who can't possibly attain them, particularly if they are poor, female or a minority (see Oliver, 2006, 34), and of those that can, and do so, some to the point of starvation (see Evans et al., 2005); they also have more pernicious and wide reaching effects, for example, compelling doctors to tell their patients they are sick (when they aren't), health workers to tell parents their new born children are too fat when they are not; and convincing millions that they should starve themselves with crash diets and other strategies of weight loss in the pursuit of ‘health’. In essence, ‘current designations of “overweight” and “obese” may cause all sorts of unfair, unhealthy, and unnecessary behaviours on the part of the Americans (and British) who have been led to think they need to be thin in order to be healthy’ (Oliver, 2006, 34).