Pedagogy and Human Movement

Theory, Practice, Research

Richard Tinning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134088867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

Across the full range of human movement studies and their many sub-disciplines, established institutional practices and forms of pedagogy are used to (re)produce valued knowledge about human movement. Pedagogy and Human Movement explores this pedagogy in detail to reveal its applications and meanings within individual fields.

This unique book examines the epistemological assumptions underlying each of these pedagogical systems, and their successes and limitations as ways of (re)producing knowledge related to physical activity, the body, and health. It also considers how the pedagogical discourses and devices employed influence the ways of thinking, practice, dispositions and identities of those who work in the fields of sport, exercise and other human movement fields.

With a scope that includes physical education, exercise and sports science, sports sociology and cultural studies, kinesiology, health promotion, human performance and dance, amongst other subjects, Pedagogy and Human Movement is the most comprehensive study of pedagogical cultures in human movement currently available. It is an invaluable resource for anybody with an interest in human movement studies.

Part I
Introducing pedagogy

1
Languaging pedagogy¹

The term pedagogy (pronounced with a hard “g”, and then a soft “g”) has become ubiquitous in the field of kinesiology and sport pedagogy is now firmly established as a credible academic sub-discipline. Notwithstanding the fact that our European colleagues had been employing the concepts of pedagogy and sport pedagogy for many years (see Crum, 1986; Haag, 2005), the English speaking world of PE has only relatively recently embraced the terms. However, increased usage does not necessarily equate with coherent or shared understandings of what the terms mean. Accordingly, the purpose of this chapter is to do some “languaging” (Postman, 1989; Kirk, 1991) in order to shed some light on the meanings of pedagogy and sport pedagogy and in so doing perhaps stimulate further consideration of their use in HMS. I will argue for a notion of pedagogy that is generative in enabling us to think about the process of knowledge (re)production across the many sub-disciplines of the field of HMS, 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.

Languaging pedagogy: One version

While Kirk (1991) has previously done some languaging of the meaning(s) of PE teaching, this chapter focuses on the terms pedagogy and sport pedagogy. There are multiple ways in which the term pedagogy is used within HMS. Silverman (2007), for example, essentially equates pedagogy with PE while Rink (2007), writing in the same issue of Quest, suggested that the field PE morphed into Kinesiology and now PE is seen as a sub-discipline of kinesiology and as synonymous with pedagogy. In what follows I begin with a brief account of how the term pedagogy is understood generally and then will consider the use of the term specifically within sport pedagogy, a term unique to our field.

Twenty years ago David Lusted (1986, p. 2) claimed that “pedagogy is under-defined, often referring to no more than a teaching style, a matter of personality and temperament, the mechanics of securing classroom control to encourage learning, a cosmetic bandage on the hard body of classroom contact”. Lusted also considered pedagogy to be an ugly term and rarely used by teachers. Buckingham (1998) adds that pedagogy “derives from an academic discourse about education which is largely sustained within the walls of the elite universities and in the pages of obscure academic journals” (p. 3).

Edgar Stones (2000) suggests that pedagogy is ubiquitous and resembles an amoeba (shapeless and perpetually changing). Grossberg (1997) argues that “the very concept of pedagogy has been exploded and multiplied” (p. 12) and we get some sense of this explosion when we see the range of references to pedagogy in the fields of education, cultural studies and feminist studies. We read of:

• Pedagogy of the oppressed (Friere, 1972)

• Pedagogical pleasures (McWilliam, 1999)

• Cultural pedagogy (Trend, 1992)

• Critical pedagogy (Giroux, 1989)

• Visual pedagogy (Goldfarb, 2002)

• Border pedagogy (Giroux, 1992)

• Phenomenological pedagogy (van Manen, 1982)

• Feminist pedagogies (Luke and Gore, 1992; Lather, 1991; Ellsworth, 1989)

In the field of HMS we read of:

• Pedagogical kinesiology (Hoffman, 1983 and many university courses in the USA)

• Sport pedagogy (Haag, 1989; Crum, 1986)

• PE pedagogy (Lee and Solmon, 2005)

• Critical pedagogy (Kirk, 1986)

• Feminist pedagogies (Bain, 1988; Dewar, 1991; Scraton, 1990; Wright, 1990)

• Critical postmodern pedagogy (Fernandez-Balboa, 1997)

• Pedagogy as text in PE (Gore, 1990)

• Performance pedagogy and modest pedagogy (Tinning, 1991c and 2002)

Clearly multiple meanings can be a problem when trying to work with the term. So what are the ways in which pedagogy is understood? What theoretical perspectives underpin the meanings ascribed to pedagogy in different educational “camps”? And why do some resist the term with a passion (see Cannon, 2001)? To my continuing frustration, the word pedagogy is often resisted by HMS or kinesiology students who ironically offer no resistance to learning difficult specialist Latin derived anatomical terms such as cori-cobrachialis or semimembranosis.

The roots of the term are to be found in the ancient Greek word Pedagogue which referred to “a man having the oversight of a child or youth, an attendant who led the boy from home to school, a man whose occupation is the instruction of children or youths, a schoolmaster, teacher, preceptor” (OED, 1989, p. 417). However, as in all languages, the meaning of words seldom remains fixed in perpetuity. How the Greeks used pedagogy is not how the word is typically used today. Moreover, how the term is often understood in Anglophone countries is different to how it is understood in Continental Europe or Scandinavia. For example, to some in the Czech Republic pedagogy is considered a pejorative term connected to the ideological state apparatus of the previous communist state. In Sweden it is common to hear pedagogy in connection with family and child rearing practices. As a Swedish academic outlines, “Pedagogy as a discipline extends to the consideration of the development of health and bodily fitness, social and moral welfare, ethics and aesthetics, as well as to the institutional forms that serve to facilitate society’s and the individual’s pedagogic aims” (cited in Marton and Booth, 1997, p. 178).

Carmen Luke (1996) found that her colleagues in Slovenia also had problems with the word pedagogy since “generations of Slovenians have been subject to pedagoski – a centralised national curriculum and pedagogy of indoctrination, via nineteenth-century Prussian and twentieth-century communist models” (p. 2).

Importantly, the OED (1989) adds that the word pedagogue is “Now usually used in a more or less contemptuous or hostile sense, with implications of pedantry, dogmatism, or severity” (p. 417). So when one of my colleagues (a neuroscientist) loudly greets those of us in my department who self-define as teacher educators with “morning pedagogues” in what sense is he using this term? Is he using the term as one of affection, respect, or of ridicule?

In considering the meaning(s) given to pedagogy in kinesiology it is first necessary to engage some of the literature from the field of education in which the term pedagogy has traditionally had most currency. Although pedagogy as a concept has a long history within European educational discourse up until the early 1960s there was “no obvious English language pedagogic mainstream … with which educationalists could identify” (Gage, 1963, p. 18). In languaging the term I will draw heavily on the American academic literature but will reference the European context where appropriate. I begin by briefly considering the popular synonyms for pedagogy and then will outline three orienting theoretical perspectives that have been prominent in the research and scholarship related to pedagogy. Although I will draw significantly on mainstream education literature, I will also connect with specific PE and kinesiology literature where appropriate.

Pedagogy synonyms

Reading about pedagogy in both the fields of education and kinesiology one often sees pedagogy equated with teaching and instruction equated with didactics. This slippage or lack of conceptual clarity is at times confusing and making definitive distinctions between these terms is difficult.

If we go to a dictionary for a clear and useful definition of pedagogy the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, 1989) offers “the art or science of teaching” (p. 418) and the Encarta® World English Dictionary (1999) provides overlapping meanings:

ped·a·go·gy n	di·dac·tics n
the science or profession of teaching Also called pedagogics	the science or profession of teaching (formal) (takes a singular verb)
teach·ing n	in·struc·tion n
1 the profession or practice of being a teacher	1 teaching in a particular subject or skill, or the facts or skills taught
2 the profession of teaching or the teaching process	2 something that is taught, for example, a point of doctrine (often used in the plural)

Considering the use of the term pedagogy within educational research literature in the USA, it is interesting to note that in the first Handbook of Research on Teaching (Gage, 1963), the Second Handbook of Research on Teaching (Travers, 1973), and the third edition of the Handbook of Research on Teaching (Wittrock, 1986) there was no reference to the term pedagogy. It was all about teaching.

In the widely cited edited book Research on Teaching (Peterson and Walberg 1979) which synthesized much of the then current educational research thinking and evidence on the nature of teaching effectiveness, we find only one oblique mention of the term pedagogy. It seemed that for the leading educational researchers in the USA during the late 1970s the term pedagogy was not part of their lexicon when talking about teaching or research on teaching. This omission of the term pedagogy was not an oversight. Until very recently, within the educational literature of the USA, the word pedagogy was rarely used.

It was not until the publication of the fourth edition of the Handbook of Research on Teaching (Richardson, 2001) that we can find the term pedagogy included in the subject index, although most contributors still avoided the term. In this edition we also see the inclusion of a chapter on research on teaching PE by Kim Graber (2001) in which, with the exception of a brief discussion of Shulman’s (1986) notion of pedagogical content knowledge, there is no reference to the term pedagogy.

Another term that is often used in conjunction with pedagogy is curriculum. It is instructive to note that in the USA in particular there has been a long tradition in distinguishing curriculum from instruction. Indeed, in many American universities this distinction is formally institutionalized in the official naming of the Departments of Curriculum and Instruction. Writing in the Handbook of Research on Curriculum, Walter Doyle (1990), however, suggested that “The meeting point between these two domains [curriculum and instruction] has always been somewhat fuzzy, in part because these terms denote separate but interrelated phenomena” (p. 486). We now often see reference to the terms curriculum and pedagogy as separate but interrelated concepts.

In the introduction to The Handbook of Physical Education (2006), which should have been titled more accurately The Handbook of Research in Physical Education, editors Kirk, Macdonald and O’Sullivan explain that they “have located the term pedagogy at the centre of [the] handbook, as a means of providing an organizing principle for the text. The notion of pedagogy we are working with here can be defined by its three key elements of learning, teaching and curriculum” (p. xi). They explain that they recognize the three “elements” to be interdependent but nonetheless separate them for organizational purposes. Having so defined the focus of the handbook it is interesting that only one of the 65 chapters actually includes the term pedagogy in the title.

As we will see later, the notion of pedagogy which I am advocating tries to avoid artificial distinctions between pedagogy and curriculum and the more reductionist and instrumental logic that underpins frequently held ideas of pedagogy within kinesiology. Moreover, and importantly, I will argue for a broader view of pedagogy than one restricted to the practice of teaching PE or of PETE.

Conceptual orientations in/on pedagogy

The ways in which people think about pedagogy are und...

Table of contents

• International Studies in Physical Education and Youth Sport
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Introducing pedagogy
• Part II Pedagogy for physical activity
• Part III Pedagogy for the body
• Part IV Pedagogy for health
• Part V Researching pedagogy
• References
• Index