Physical Education Futures

David Kirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135220235
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Can we imagine a future in which physical education in schools no longer exists?

In this controversial and powerful meditation on physical education, David Kirk argues that a number of different futures are possible. Kirk argues that multi-activity, sport-based forms of physical education have been dominant in schools since the mid-twentieth century and that they have been highly resistant to change. The practice of physical education has focused on the transmission of de-contextualised sport-techniques to large classes of children who possess a range of interests and abilities, where learning rarely moves beyond introductory levels. Meanwhile, the academicization of physical education teacher education since the 1970s has left teachers less well prepared to teach this programme than they were previously, suggesting that the futures of school physical education and physical education teacher education are intertwined.

Kirk explores three future scenarios for physical education, arguing that the most likely short-term future is 'more of the same'. He makes an impassioned call for radical reform in the longer-term, arguing that without it physical education faces extinction. No other book makes such bold use of history to interrogate the present and future configurations of the discipline, nor offers such a wide-ranging critique of physical culture and school physical education. This book is essential reading for all serious students and scholars of physical education and the history and theory of education.

1
The social construction of physical education

Present, past and future

Subject fields or disciplines have been invented; they are socially constructed and constituted by humans.

(Lawson, 1991:286)

We will always be in the middle of the story of our society, and thus judgement of the significance and value of what has already happened is inseparable from judgement of the present, and of the feasibility and desirability of possible futures.

(Chanan and Gilchrist, 1974:62)

The act of defining physical education goes somewhat beyond the statement of beliefs, values and aspirations, important though these statements may be. Physical education is defined by what is said, done and written in its name, as are all other school subjects and university disciplines. It is, in the words of Ivor Goodson (1997) and of Hal Lawson (1991), socially constructed. So when some physical educators bemoan a lack of consensus among their peers about the nature of their subject, when a number of apparently competing written definitions of physical education vie for their attention, and when they point to a proliferation of titles for university departments, they overlook the enduring commonalities of physical education practice, particularly in terms of what people say and do in the subject’s name. This practice conforms to a concept of physical education – what I will in this book refer to as ‘the idea of the idea of physical education’¹ or the id² – that has remained more or less intact since around the middle of the last century, transcends the national borders of economically advanced countries and other nations that have had some formal association with these countries, and that has been highly resistant to change.

I use the expressions ‘more or less’ and ‘around’ because each country, each region, each state and each city can demonstrate differences in terms of key events and moments, outstanding leaders, local forces and particular circumstances. For instance, Britain resisted the overt influence of militarism in favour of a more therapeutic form of physical training in the early 1900s when it adopted the Swedish system of gymnastics as its preference for elementary schools while in the same period Australia located its elementary school physical training squarely within a national scheme of compulsory military cadet training. Or, more precisely, and to make my point, the neo-nate Australian states of Victoria and Queensland, the two main sources of evidence for Schooling Bodies (Kirk, 1998a), adopted the cadet scheme, though each in its own, inimitable, way. Regardless of where we look and with only a few exceptions, we will find histories of physical education dating from the late 1800s to the present that show differences in nuanced detail. But the differences are for the most part less significant than the similarities.²

Physical educators, perhaps more than educators in other subjects and disciplines, have a history of passionate advocacy for their specialism. Indeed, this characteristic would be one of the things that they have in common, across nations, cultures, gender and time. Why this is so we can only speculate; perhaps it has been something to do with living in a marginal role, as Leo Hendry (1976) put it, as the pre-eminently most embodied subject of an otherwise mostly cerebral curriculum. Whatever the reason for their passion, physical educators have typically held strong opinions about their subject and have felt compelled to express these, sometimes forcefully, to whomever might listen. This characteristic in itself has been partly responsible for the enduring but misleading idea that physical education is a field riven by difference, where disputatious individuals and groups offer rival philosophies of their subject. At least, the idea has been misleading since around the 1970s onwards, when the current id² of physical education was consolidated in secondary schools and teacher-education colleges. Prior to the 1970s, as a shift from gymnastics to sport-techniques was bedding down, the field was indeed riven by noisy disputes, as I pointed out in Defining Physical Education (Kirk, 1992a). Since that time, a proliferation of definitions of physical education allied to a rapid expansion of programme content and considerable variance between schools in terms of what is offered as physical education have together combined to create the impression of a field that is amorphous (Proctor, 1984), an impression that succeeds in masking the commonality of practice within the id² of physical education-as-sport-techniques. I suggest too that at a more philosophical level, many (though not all) disputatious physical educators have misunderstood the object of their disagreements (Locke, 1998:248); as one example, those physical educators who insist that ‘physical education’ and ‘sport’ are such different phenomena that no definition of physical education should even refer to sport, as is the case with the National Curriculum Physical Education in England and Wales (see Green, 1998; Penney and Chandler, 2000:74), when in fact, as I aim to show, the currently dominant id² of physical education has been grounded in a particular version of sport from at least the 1950s.

So what is the practice of physical education that informs far and wide this id² and that is apparently so enduring and resistant to change?

Penney and Chandler (2000) claim, in their paper ‘Physical education: What future(s)?’, that the enduring and resistant characteristic of physical education is its focus on ‘activities’, by which they mean physical activity. In making this claim they are I think on the right track. But it is not just the fact of its practical nature that constructs and constitutes the id² of physical education. Indeed, I see this fact as far less problematic for physical education futures than they. The nub of the matter is what people do with these physical activities, that is, how they are practised. What teachers and pupils mainly do in the name of physical education is teaching and repetitious practice of the techniques of a wide range of individual and team games, aquatic activities such as swimming, gymnastics, athletics, exercise for fitness, and various forms of dance.³

In games such as basketball, to take a typical case that illustrates the situation in many other games, pupils practice various forms of passing the ball such as chest pass and bounce pass, various forms of shooting such as the set shot and lay up, how to dribble the ball, and perhaps some techniques for guarding players. In swimming, they learn the techniques of the main strokes and water safety. In gymnastics, they practise movements on the floor such as rolls, cartwheels and balances, and possibly some apparatus work. And so on. The key point to note about this teaching and learning of techniques is that these practices are typically abstracted from the whole activity; they are typically decontextualised practices. Indeed, the concept of skill acquisition this approach embodies is sometimes called ‘whole/part/ whole’ learning, although I am suggesting here that the ‘whole’ is often omitted or offered instead in a form similar to Carl Bereiter’s (1990) ‘schoolwork module’, a version that has lost its original authenticity and is imbued with the school’s own institutional imperatives (see Kirk et al., 2000).

For the most part (though there will undoubtedly be exceptions) secondary-school physical education classes, where most of the specialist teaching takes place, may be populated by up to 30 or more pupils, typically taught by one teacher. The larger the class, the more compelling the perceived need to use a teaching style Mosston described as ‘command’ or ‘directive’ (Mosston and Ashworth, 1994), in which the teacher makes the decisions about what is to be taught and learned, in what sequence, provides verbal direction and possible visual demonstration either personally or through a pupil, seeks to ensure all pupils engage in the set tasks as required, and provides feedback on behaviour and performance. Lessons are rarely timetabled for longer than 40 or 50 minutes, and this includes changing time and, where appropriate, either setting out equipment or walking or running to the playing field. Occasionally, pupils might actually play a game of basketball in a physical education lesson, though often only towards the end of a unit of work and for only part of a lesson.⁴ Similarly, a sequence of gymnastics movements on the floor might form the basis for an end-of-unit assessment task. Again, typically, there is little vertical progression in the development of these techniques; in other words, it would be unusual to see pupils year after year being introduced to progressively more advanced techniques in each of these categories of activities, although this is, I would agree with Underwood (1983:11) among many others, the intention. As Daryl Siedentop (2002a: 372) put it, the same introductory unit gets taught ‘again, and again and again’.

If this seems like a gross caricature then so much the worse for physical education. Because I am convinced after more than 30 years work in the field that this is the unfortunate reality of much of what is practised in the name of the subject, a claim that I will evidence in the course of this book. Yes, there is also evidence of innovative teachers in schools who teach games, for example, using a ‘teaching games for understanding’ (TGfU) approach. There are teachers who use reciprocal, guided-discovery and problem-solving teaching styles to good effect. There are very sophisticated forms of physical education in the senior high school curriculum of regions such as Queensland, Australia. There are teachers who do genuinely manage to progress some of their pupils’ learning. There are others who, despite this caricatured practice of physical education, still manage to inspire love of physical activity in some of their pupils because of the qualities they themselves possess.

Indeed, it could be argued that many physical education teachers perform beyond all reasonable expectation, given the dominance of this form of practice and the very limited educational benefits that can be derived from it (see Hoffman 1987:128 and in Chapter 3). Many become skilful operators of a hidden curriculum that uses the technique practices merely as a vehicle to communicate the values and joys of physical activity, or to facilitate for students the practice of responsibility for self and respect for others. And this is not to say, in any case, that physical educators have been somehow unaware of this practice I am calling here the id² of physical education-as-sport-techniques. How could they not have been aware, given the unquestionable intellectual quality of many recruits into physical education teaching? Many have attempted resistance. Some have failed and left teaching. Some have found a vocation in a related field such as sports coaching. A few may have simply submitted to the regime and sought to make the best of a bad lot, or resigned themselves to the inevitable and retired on the job.

There have, of course, also been reformers, some of whom we will meet later in the pages of this book, who have championed new pedagogical models such as TGfU, Sport education, personal and social responsibility, sport for peace, girl-friendly physical education, health-related exercise, outdoor adventure activities and so on, and alternative notions of physical education requiring study and integration of theoretical subject matter with practical physical activities in courses that lead to high-stakes examinations, such Queensland’s Senior Physical Education, and Advanced (‘A’) Level Physical Education in England and Wales. There are other reformers who have presented visions for particular futures for physical education where they have dreamed im/possible dreams of decline or triumph of physical education. But there have also been advocates for this technique-based approach, in one form or another, such as those who claim, as we will see in Chapter 4, that there are ‘fundamental motor skills’ that must be acquired before children can engage in the fully fledged form of a game or athletic activity.

The id² of physical education that is generated from, and then in circular fashion informs and legitimates, this practice, I will, as I have already indicated, call ‘physical education-as-sport-techniques’. My words are chosen carefully. Prior to the 1950s (in Britain and Australia, earlier in the USA and later, for example, in Sweden), the practice of physical education had also been largely concerned with learning and performing techniques, but almost exclusively in relation to one or other system of gymnastics. Even though sport in the modern form with which we are familiar had been by then in existence for around 100 years, generated initially in the private schools of Britain’s social elites and spreading rapidly through class structures and nation-states and regions from that time forward, it played very little part in either the professional preparation of teachers of physical education or in the physical education provided in state elementary schools. So the inclusion of sport-techniques into the core of the practice of physical education was in its time a revolution for the subject.

Indeed, we could argue, and in fact I will in the course of this book, that the introduction of sport-techniques into the practice of physical education was the outcome of a momentous reorientation of the id² from its original modern form, which we will name ‘physical education-as-gymnastics’.It is noteworthy that the shift was not to an id² of physical education-as-sport, although this might seem to be an altogether more obvious descriptor. But the nuance here is important, and this is a point that some physical educators in Britain in particular seem consistently to misunderstand. If the practice of physical education had been to play sport, that is, to form teams, to arrange competition and participation around seasons, to coach players in training sessions, to develop fitness to improve performance, to study and practise tactics, to learn about and practice the etiquette of sport including fair play, to include roles additional to player such as captain, equipment officer, statistician and referee, to celebrate the climaxes of sporting achievements through festivity, then we might more accurately have described the shift from an id² of physical education-as-gymnastics to physical education-as-sport. But, in fact, for the majority of everyday physical education lessons, few if any of these features apply.⁵

The practice of extra-curricular sport is a separate matter. There is no question that since the beginning of the twentieth century in countries such as Australia, Britain and the United States, school sport has been highly organised, mimicking the adult structures of leagues, cup competitions and championship events. There are some physical educators and others who would argue that extra-curricular sport, which has many of the features listed in the previous paragraph, is an extension of curricular physical education. Indeed, the Munn Report on years three and four of the secondary school in Scotland did exactly that (Scottish Education Department/Consultative Committee on the Curriculum, 1977). Others still might point out that extracurricular sport in Australia and Britain is run mainly by physical education teachers, many of whom consider coaching school sports teams to be more enjoyable and fulfilling than teaching curricular physical education. Be that as it may, I suggest that it is not particularly persuasive to argue that extracurricular sport could be considered as an extension of or even as a part of physical education. For one thing, as I noted in Defining Physical Education (Kirk, 1992a), the uproar around teachers’ pay in mid-1980s Britain caused considerable and lasting damage to their willingness to work beyond the formal school day, in evenings and on weekends. That local circumstance aside, extra-curricular sport is in most cases exclusive to a relatively small minority of pupils whom teachers consider excel in particular sports. So not only are the majority of pupils excluded, but the range of sports offered by any one school is usually far from comprehensive, depending heavily on teacher interest and the availability of facilities. If extra-curricular sport was a requirement of pupils, as it is in some private schools, the argument that it could be a form of practice best described by the id² of physical education-as-sport would perhaps have some validity.

The issue of extra-curricular sport a...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The social construction of physical education
• 2 Defining physical education and the possibility of the id2
• 3 Futures talk in physical education
• 4 The id2 of physical education-as-sport-techniques
• 5 Continuity and discontinuity
• 6 Four relational issues and the bigger picture
• 7 Physical education futures?
• 8 Securing the conditions for radical reform
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index