Physical Education as porn!

Abstract

Background: This paper offers critical commentary on the culture of ‘performativity’ that has dominated educational discourse over the last 20 years, affecting the way in which researchers, teachers, pupils and parents think and act toward Physical Education and sport (PESP) in schools. It is a culture that, in the UK, is likely to intensify in the years ahead given Liberal-Conservative (Lib-Con) Government commitments to privatisation of public services, privileging the consumer, fostering greater diversity of provision, and freeing formal education of State and producer regulation.

Purpose: To foster debate and reflection within the profession as to what Physical Education is for, what should be its guiding principles, and who should decide these things.

Design: The paper offers informed polemic grounded in analyses of policy documents and personal research on Physical Education and Health over the last 20 or so years.

Analyses: The paper re-stakes a claim for the importance of sociology in educational analysis and policy development, and the rediscovery of debate around their guiding principles. It was, after all, Durkheim (1956) who regarded as ‘the prime postulate of all pedagogical speculation that education is an eminently social thing in its origins as in its functions, and that, therefore, pedagogy depends on sociology more closely than any other science’ (Durkheim 1971, 91). How ironic, then, that, since the 1980s, the capacity of sociology to influence pedagogy has been so marginal, at a time when it has had so much to say. The paper speculates as to why this dislocation has occurred and with what consequences for what we know about teaching and how children learn and think about their body's value and worth.

Conclusion: If performative culture is allowed to configure and define Physical Education, then it is likely to cultivate principles of thought and action somewhat akin to those defining Porn. If sociology or education research is to guide policy and practice in education away from the ‘pornification of PE’ (sic) it has to consider: what are the new rules of engagement between pedagogy and sociology?; how and where are the voices of sociologists, pedagogues and researchers to be heard? How are closer allegiances between formal Education, Government and Media to be forged?

Keywords:

• porn
• performativity
• physical education
• embodiment

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to Michael Gard and, as ever, to my dear friend and mentor Brian Davies for their invaluable comments on this paper. The faults and limitations of thought that remain in the paper are uniquely mine. I am also very grateful to Dawn Penney and Edith Cowan University for the opportunity to present this paper to staff and students.

Notes

Contrast this with sociological perspectives in which knowledge is seen essentially as ‘a carrier, a relay for ideological messages and for external power relations, or in contrast, as an apparently neutral carrier or relay of skills of various kinds’ (Bernstein 1996, 39). The focus is on how individuals (by their class or culture) are positioned in ‘relation to’ ‘what is being carried or relayed rather than study the constitution of the relay itself, failing to explore the sociological nature either of “body knowledge” or “knowledge of the body’” (Evans, Davies, and Rich 2009, 397).

Michael Gard (personal communication) points out that this analysis does raise questions as to what exactly (if anything) has been lost from the profession and its practices in the shift from ‘controversy’ to ‘crisis’ rhetoric? To be sure, we know that PE pre ‘crises rhetoric’ wasn't always too clever at dealing with issues of elitism, racism, sexism, disability, etc. The analyses here, however, can do no more than invite readers to consider this matter, including whether the profession now (under crisis rhetoric) is any more or less willing or able to address these concerns and draw on alternative educational codes so to do, than they were when ‘controversies’ prevailed? We can, of course, only speculate as to what kind of physical education has been lost or left behind in the discursive shift from controversy to crises; however, Evans et al. (2008), amongst others, have provided some grounds upon which to judge how crisis rhetoric is playing out in schools now.

Michael Gard (personal correspondence) is right to say that the ‘health crisis’ was not, in any straightforward sense, a product of a sensationalist media or part of a broader ideological struggle. Health crisis, he suggests, was ‘actually a bit of a “slow burner” before it became a “crisis” and people who research in the area of obesity and epidemiology would probably say that their concerns were ignored by politicians and the media for a long time and that they really had to work very hard to gain traction for the issue’. While sharing Michael's view on the ‘slow burning’ of health discourse, I would nonetheless still maintain that its evolution (unavoidably) became part of (and contingently refracted) both these things. As Gard and Wright (2005) attest, crisis status was eventually achieved, at least in part, by deploying the rhetoric of ‘crisis’ with attendant effects for how we (individuals, populations, professionals) came to think and talk about health – somewhat reductively so. Michael is also right to observe that, in this sense, ‘health discourse’ cannot be seen as a simple product of Ball's ‘commodification’ thesis or struggles over ‘standards’. The point made here, however, is not that it was ‘product of’, but rather its evolution was framed (shaped, formed and regulated) by the principles of a wider discursive regime. Michael also suggests that perhaps the more important point to consider is about the emergence of a biological – rather than sociological – approach to physical education pedagogy (see Gard 2011a). Again these are matters for further empirical investigation, for to be sure both the biological and sociological (as explanations of and approaches to) are ever present in the politics and pedagogies of PE, though not always in equal (or helpful) measure.

As Becker (1993) argues, in efforts to encourage society to adopt our suggestions we often sprinkle liberal quantities of fear arousal as a kind of motivational seasoning on our messages: this frequently generates considerable concern but little subsequent behaviour change, with the net effect of converting persons at risk into ‘anxious persons at risk’ (Job 1988, quoted in Becker 1993, 3). ‘A very substantial and influential health promotion industry has evolved that both promotes and capitalises on these circumstances … the research community rushes in to print, the media attributes an unjustified degree of certainty to health related findings polarising the debate, emphasising the risks, and the focus of blame is centred on individual you or me’.

The suggestion here is that the physical educational community is, indeed, to a degree, complicit in the shifts we are describing, but understandably so. Our claim is that powerful forces are circulating outside the profession and then infiltrating it. ‘The profession’, however, isn't (and has never been) either homogenous or neutral in its educational, ideological and political interests, and teachers aren't dupes or dopes; so that, of course, not everyone is opposed to the measures/influences we describe. And even those who are, and do try to live and work by alternative or different educational codes, may have felt that they have had little or no choice but to adopt performative tendencies in the interest of securing the status and place of PE in the curriculum. Furthermore, it is to be acknowledged that a performative culture has always been a dominant part of physical education discourse and practice, but never the only or an uncontested one. Michael Gard (in correspondence) is right to point out, for example, that the idea of weighing and classifying children is not new, and nor are the practices of sorting and treating the body as a machine to be ‘worked on’. In this respect, PE perhaps has provided a perfect receptacle for contemporary policies and their performative inclinations. What's changed, however, is that there has been a step change in the ubiquity of these practices (within and across school settings) and in the ‘authority’ given to the principles that underpin them, by the imperatives of Education and Health policy over recent years. Education generally and Physical Education (albeit in its many and varied guises) is now encoded with the principles of performativity. Other (e.g., competency) principles and educational codes may have withered and all but disappeared from professional discourse and practice in this process. Others might argue that physical education practice, in schools at least, has proved immune to the various controversies and crises that have surrounded it. We think (and our research suggests) not. However, the characterisations in this paper require further empirical investigation. In the meantime, if nothing more, we trust they will stimulate further exchange and debate on these matters.