Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Education (Routledge Studies in Physical Education and Youth Sport) [1 ed.] 0367345129, 9780367345129

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Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Education; by David Kirk Format: Royal (156 × 234 mm); Style: B; Font: Goudy; Dir: T:/2-Pagination/PCPP_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780367345129_text.3d; Created: 23/07/2019 @ 20:23:33

Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Education

This unflinching analysis explains the nature of precarity and its detrimental effects on the health and wellbeing of young people. It exposes physical educators’ unpreparedness to provide inclusive, fair, and equitable forms of physical education that might empower young people to overcome the mal effects of precarity. Following a thorough analysis and critique of critical pedagogy, David Kirk advocates for critical pedagogies of affect as physical education’s response to precarity, providing detailed outlines of these pedagogies and their grounding in research. He argues that now more than ever physical educators need to be alive to the serious social and economic challenges that shape young people’s health, happiness and life chances. This bold and provocative book is essential reading for all researchers in the field of physical education and health education pedagogy, as well as teacher educators, curriculum policy makers, and other professionals who work with young people living in precarity. David Kirk is Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde, UK, and Honorary Professor of Human Movement Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is also Editor of the journal, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy.

Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Education; by David Kirk Format: Royal (156 × 234 mm); Style: B; Font: Goudy; Dir: T:/2-Pagination/PCPP_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780367345129_text.3d; Created: 23/07/2019 @ 20:23:33

Routledge Studies in Physical Education and Youth Sport Series Editor: David Kirk, University of Strathclyde, UK

The Routledge Studies in Physical Education and Youth Sport series is a forum for the discussion of the latest and most important ideas and issues in physical education, sport, and active leisure for young people across school, club and recreational settings. The series presents the work of the best wellestablished and emerging scholars from around the world, offering a truly international perspective on policy and practice. It aims to enhance our understanding of key challenges, to inform academic debate, and to have a high impact on both policy and practice, and is thus an essential resource for all serious students of physical education and youth sport. Also available in this series Redesigning Physical Education An Equity Agenda in Which Every Child Matters Edited by Hal A. Lawson Play, Physical Activity and Public Health The Reframing of Children's Leisure Lives Stephanie A. Alexander, Katherine L. Frohlich and Caroline Fusco Young People, Social Media and Health Victoria A. Goodyear and Kathleen M. Armour Physical Literacy across the World Margaret Whitehead Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Education David Kirk For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ sport/series/RSPEYS

Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Education; by David Kirk Format: Royal (156 × 234 mm); Style: B; Font: Goudy; Dir: T:/2-Pagination/PCPP_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780367345129_text.3d; Created: 23/07/2019 @ 20:23:33

Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Education

David Kirk

Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Education; by David Kirk Format: Royal (156 × 234 mm); Style: B; Font: Goudy; Dir: T:/2-Pagination/PCPP_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780367345129_text.3d; Created: 23/07/2019 @ 20:23:34

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 David Kirk The right of David Kirk to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-34512-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32630-1 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Taylor & Francis Books

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This book is dedicated to my grandson, Finlay David Kirk, born on 29th December 2018. My wish for you, Finlay, and all of the children of your generation, is that the physical education you experience is inclusive, fair, equitable, and empowering.

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Contents

Preface

viii

1 Introduction

1

2 Social turbulence, precarity, education

8

3 Precarity, young people, and health and wellbeing

32

4 The occupational socialization of physical education teachers, stress and burnout, and precarity

56

5 Physical education-as-health promotion in precarity

82

6 Advocacy, critique and educational action: Critical pedagogies of physical education as a response to precarity

103

7 Critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education and school physical education

124

8 Critical pedagogies of affect for physical education: A response to precarity

151

9 A note on teacher professional learning for precarity

182

Index

188

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Preface

This book has taken longer than usual to write. Part of the reason for this is the subject matter. I spent a lot of time reading out of the field of education, which presented a challenge enough. I wanted to take the time to cover the ground carefully, in detail. Even so, there will be important material that I have missed. In the Preface to his book Stress, Health and Coping, Aaron Antonovsky, apologizing for omitting work he ‘should be familiar with but was not’, wrote in his defence that he wasn’t an ‘encyclopedist’. I would like to claim the same, though in this day and age, with electronic libraries and sophisticated search engines literally at my fingertips, perhaps his omissions were more justified than mine. Nevertheless, I apologize for any oversights on my part. Another reason why the book took longer than usual to write is that I took opportunities to test out ideas at various seminars and conferences over a two year period from early in 2017 until late 2018. The idea for the book came to me when I was in the final year of my term as Head of the School of Education at the University of Strathclyde. The university generously gave me a sabbatical to recover from the trials and tribulations of this leadership role, for which I am profoundly grateful. It was in anticipation of this sabbatical that I decided writing a book on the topic of precarity and physical education might make an interesting project. The first paper I gave on the topic was to the CRIFPE conference in Montreal in May 2017 (thanks to François Vandercleyen and Sylvain Turcotte). Another opportunity to address precarity and physical education came in Oslo, in August 2017 (thanks to Kristin Walseth and Oyvind Standal). I had the chance to talk about pedagogies of affect at the AERA conference in New York in April 2018, and again at the AIESEP conference in Edinburgh in July 2018. In between, in June 2018, I was able to attend the CONIPE conference in Campinas, Brazil, and to discuss precarity from a South American perspective (thank you Larissa Galatti). Most recently, I was able to present the development of these ideas to students at the GIH in Stockholm (thanks to Håkan Larsson) and to the Expomotricidad Conference in Medellin, Colombia, in October and November 2018 (thank you William Moreno).

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Preface

ix

While this process added to my writing time, these were wonderful and valuable opportunities to discuss ideas with colleagues. These opportunities to share and to converse highlight an important aspect of the academic writing process. Even though this is a ‘single authored’ book, there has never been such a thing. This book is the outcome of all of the conversations I have had over the past two years and beyond on this topic of precarity. To everyone who has generously listened and responded with their own views I owe a huge debt of gratitude. There are too many people, indeed, to name everyone. However, I wish to thank the following people who have been of assistance to me in the specific task of putting words on paper for this book. To Eishin Teraoka my PhD student who is studying pedagogies of affect in Scottish schools, and his co-supervisor Farid Bardid, thank you for our many conversations around this topic. Thanks are due to Alan Ovens for his hospitality and discussions about critical pedagogy during a visit to Auckland in April 2018. I am grateful too to Eimear Enright and Richard Tinning for conversations around critical pedagogy. Shirley Gray, Katie Fitzpatrick, Hal Lawson, Cara Lamb, Carla Luguetti, Kim Oliver, Heidi Ferreira, and Oyvind Standal read drafts of chapters and offered invaluable advice. I have learned a lot about critical pedagogy and physical education in Brazil from conversations with Felipe Quintão de Almeida during his sabbatical in Scotland, and at various times with Valter Bracht, Eloisa Lorente Catalan, Lucio Martinez Alvarez, and Louise McCuaig. My wife Susan I thank sincerely for her patience and support, particularly over the final hectic few months of finishing this book. I also thank my children, Murray, Annie and Calum, for opportunities to explain to them what I was writing about (at their requests I should add!). Many of the people I have just named, not to mention the many others who have shared their wisdom and learning with me, will I am sure want to argue over and contest at least some of what I have written here, though invariably disagreeing with me agreeably. While they have shaped my thinking on this topic in countless ways, responsibility for its final form in this book is mine alone. David Kirk Glasgow April 2019

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Precarity may be an unfamiliar concept to scholars of physical education and sport pedagogy. It is being used with increasing frequency in the social sciences and humanities to refer to an effect of neoliberal practices, particularly in relation to work that is temporary, insecure, poorly paid, and sporadic. One effect of such work practices is poverty, to which precarity is strongly related. But precarity refers to more than the economic relationship of people to work. When work is temporary, insecure, poorly paid, and sporadic, it has a knock-on effect to workers’ everyday lives, which become insecure, unstable, and uncertain. The word precarity connects these work practices and their effects to health and wellbeing. Precarious work, with its inherent uncertainty and instability, makes workers and their families ill. It is this relationship that the word precarity seeks to capture. The prevalence of precarity has been rising over the past two decades. This rise has coincided with instability and crises within global financial markets and government programs of austerity across the post-industrial countries of the Global North. How rapid has been the rise is hard to say. Since it is a concept that seeks to capture a relationship between work practices, ways of life, and health, precarity is not easy to count. Consequently, it does not tend to appear in government policy reports or newspaper headlines. But we do not need to look far to see referents of precarity in such reports and headlines. In one week alone in March 2019 the Guardian newspaper in Britain ran the following headlines: ‘Poverty increases among children and pensioners in the UK’; ‘Antidepressant prescriptions in England double in a decade’; ‘Women earn 50p for £1 made by men in some multi-academy trusts’; ‘Graduate gender pay gap widening, official figures reveal’; ‘Number of primary children in referral units soars’; ‘Knife crime prevention plan unfair on teachers, says unions’. Poverty, mental health, gender inequality and discrimination, disruptive pupil behaviour, knife crime: these are each referents of precarity. And they are empirical referents that can be counted. Childhood poverty in Scotland provides just one example. In 2017, the Scottish Government made a commitment to reduce the proportion of children living in poverty from 23%

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2 Introduction

(230,000 children) to below 18% by 2023. Because the Scottish Government has devolved powers from Westminster for education, health, finance, and the law, the five million or so people living in Scotland have been spared some of the worst excesses of neoliberalism that have been visited upon people living in England. Even so, according to a briefing note published by the Resolution Foundation, the proportion of children living in poverty in Scotland was heading in the wrong direction and was likely, if nothing changed, to be closer to 29% by 2023 (Corlett, 2019). While it may be impossible to measure directly, there can be no question that precarity is now a significant issue in countries of the Global North. Such is its rise to prominence, Guy Standing (2016) has argued that a new social class has been born out of precarity, which he calls the precariat. Mike Savage et al. (2015) estimated that in 2010 the precariat accounted for 15% of the population in Britain. The British have experienced nine further years of austerity since then, so we can assume that this proportion of people living in precarity has risen. The existence and prevalence of precarity is not just a tragedy for the people who experience it, though this is bad enough. Standing argues that the precariat is a source of instability in itself, and its existence feeds populist extremism. Since it impacts children as well as adults, its effects could be long term. At this moment in time, we can only guess at its future consequences; if the newspaper headlines quoted above are any guide, the prospects are frightening. What has precarity to do with school physical education? One answer is that since precarity is becoming increasingly prevalent, physical education teachers are likely to be teaching children who are suffering its ill effects. These range from anger, anxiety, alienation, and depression to disruptive and sometimes violent behaviour. There are questions about how well teachers are prepared for such work. There is also evidence from other caring professions such as social work that daily contact with traumatized children and adolescents is likely to be a source of stress for teachers. Moreover, there is the possibility that teachers may themselves experience precarity. As neoliberal practices have steadily wormed their way into state education, security of employment, wages and conditions of work are being adversely affected. Beyond these issues of self-interest, physical educators may have some benefits to offer young people living in precarity. My position in this book is that participation in regular physical activity and all this entails in terms of becoming physically competent and literate – indeed, physically educated – is hugely valuable and important for all young people. Being physically active is not, in my view, a form of medicine that reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and obesity. This view of physical education’s contribution to health can so easily lead to a bottom line that physical activity as an unpleasant necessity of life. Rather, from a salutogenic perspective (Antonovsky, 1979), the physically active life is instead a resource that assists us to

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Introduction

3

remain healthy, rather than preventing us from becoming sick. From the perspective of how physical education responds to precarity, this distinction is crucial. Moreover, Don Hellison among others recognized physical activity is a very good medium for young people to learn a range of life skills: “youngsters needed more than motor skills, games, and fitness education; they need personal and social values and skills that will help them navigate through the myriad of social problems that infuse their lives” (Hellison, 1991, p.308). Hellison was, of course, drawing on his experience of working with alienated youth. This statement provides a clue to the kind of response physical education, in my view, might make to precarity, in ways that offer positive benefits for all young people. We might consider, in addition, the opportunities available to physical educators to guide young people’s initiation into the physical cultures of their societies, in order to make sense of their embodiment (Standal, 2015). Such a process of initiation offers possibilities for empowerment, as well as for challenging the normative order of physical culture and both its liberating and oppressive tendencies. For young people living in precarity, embodied learning could be a powerful means of tackling anger, anxiety, anomie, and alienation and challenging the social problems and injustices that produce these effects of precarity. But, as I will argue in this book, these benefits to young people may only be possible if we are prepared to re-invent ourselves as a profession. Increasingly, curriculum policies in many countries are reframing physical education as health-related, and have awarded physical education teachers a remit to contribute to the health and wellbeing of young people. These policies may well be resisted on the ground due to the embeddedness of physical education-as-sport techniques and the multi-activity curriculum (Kirk, 2010). But the trend is nevertheless clear. Physical educators would do well, from the point of view of self-interest if nothing else, to pay heed to these policies. The amount of recurrent government funding, raised from taxes, paid to support school physical education programs is considerable when we consider teachers’ salaries, their professional preparation, and their specialist facilities and equipment. Even in a small country such as Scotland, the recurrent annual cost of salaries alone is in the region £80 million per year. This is a considerable investment of public funds year-on-year that suggests, in Scotland at least, school physical education is valued. But what do taxpayers get in return? Responding to this question and, just as significant, evidencing that response, has been a chronic challenge for physical education. As austerity bites even deeper and accountability regimes harden, how long can we continue to fly under the radar? The shift in curriculum policy to health and wellbeing may well offer an opportunity for rethinking physical education’s mission in schools. The growing prevalence and malign effects of precarity may provide a powerful rationale for doing so.

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4 Introduction

Critical pedagogy is a term that is well known in physical education pedagogy scholarship, but much tarnished also. It is along with physical education a contested concept, within the physical education field and beyond. One of my tasks in this book is to consider this term and explore whether it is at all useful in formulating physical education’s response to precarity. The suitability of critical pedagogies of physical education to respond to precarity rests on the extent to which they are pedagogies of social justice. Social justice I understand to be fundamentally concerned with inclusion, fairness, and equity in all of the transactions between and among individuals and communities. Applied to physical education, a concern for social justice includes the following actions: “concern for the welfare, rights and dignity of all people; understanding how structures and practices affect equity at personal, local and international levels; and, recognizing the disadvantages experienced by some individuals or groups and actions that can redress them” (McCuaig, Atkin & Macdonald, 2019, p.120). The challenge in this task is to articulate how critical pedagogies of physical education can embed in school programs practices that are inclusive, fair, and equitable in ways that empower young people living in precarity. In approaching these questions and tasks, I have been guided by the strategy of ‘small wins’. Weick (1984) argues that the sheer scale and enormity of social problems prevents people from taking action because the limits to which we can imagine solutions is exceeded and the level of emotion and sentiment raised to an extent that is disabling. People simply become overwhelmed and paralysed as a result. He suggests thus that: Social problems seldom get solved, because people define these problems in ways that overwhelm their ability to do anything about them. Changing the scale of a problem can change the quality of resources that are directed at it. Calling a situation a mere problem that necessitates a small win moderates arousal, improves diagnosis, preserves gains, and encourages innovation. Calling a situation a serious problem that necessitates a larger win may be when the problem starts. (Weick, 1984, p.48) A series of wins on a smaller scale can, in addition to encouraging belief that change is possible, begin to develop a pattern that attracts support and lowers resistance to subsequent small scale tasks. Weick (1984, p.46) suggests that small wins “build order into unpredictable environments, which should reduce agitation and improve performance”. This strategy seems to be well-suited to the unpredictability and uncertainty that is at the heart of precarity. At the same time, there will always be some degree of uncertainty about how young people receive messages from their teachers, even when critical pedagogies begin from where the young people are (Oliver & Kirk, 2015). So the extent to which small wins can be accumulated incrementally, as Weick seems to suggest, may be limited in an

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Introduction

5

educational context, particularly in the challenging circumstances of precarity. On the other hand, this uncertainty that educational intentions will be realized suggests that critical pedagogies in physical education need to be long term commitments, since it takes time to build the pattern of small wins when working with young people, particularly young people who feel alienated, angry, and anxious. Indeed, as we will see as the analysis in the book proceeds, this strategy of small wins is discernible in some of the exemplary critical pedagogies of physical education that have been developed in work with underserved and disadvantaged young people. In writing about precarity and who it affects most directly, I am aware that language itself has political significance, and so I have been careful to use language that is sensitive to this point. That said, it is not always obvious when a word or concept might cause offence or be misunderstood. On the language used to describe the people most directly affected by precarity, I have been informed by a paper on ‘Race Names’ by Pamela Oliver (2017). Following her advice, all such descriptors will be capitalized, for example, Black and Hispanic. I considered Varea’s (2019) argument that reference to white people should not be capitalized since we are the most privileged people in countries of the Global North. While I am sympathetic to this argument, I followed Oliver’s (2017, p.21) advice to use White because “in choosing to capitalize, I am essentially asserting in English that both Black and White people are named groups. If you think about it, this is a pretty deep political claim”. This said, when referring to specific pieces of published research, I have stuck with the terminology used by authors, eg. African-American and Caucasian. I have taken a similar position on terminology to describe referents of precarity. Even though I consider a new schema for social class developed by Savage et al. (2015) in Chapter 2, where authors have used terms such as ‘middle class’, I have followed them when discussing their work. The same applies to use of concepts like socio-economic status, social and economic position, and related terms. While I understand some descriptors such as deprivation and disadvantage have been criticized by some scholars, I have used these when I have felt the contexts suggested they were appropriate; for example, multiple-deprivation when referring to and discussing issues arising from indices such as the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. The next chapter sets out to explain precarity and to locate it both within the social turbulence of the times, of which it is an effect, and in relation to education and physical education. I then seek to evidence the claims made about precarity in Chapter 3, specifically in relation to young people and their health and wellbeing. In Chapter 4 I explore the occupational socialization and stress and burnout literature to assess the preparedness of physical education teachers to work with young people experiencing precarity and, indeed, teachers’ vulnerability to precarity themselves. Chapter 5 investigates the curriculum policy trend towards physical education-as-health

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6 Introduction

promotion, which I set in its historical context, and which I consider as an opportunity to apply a salutogenic perspective to our understanding of health and wellbeing. The next three Chapters 6 to 8, are an extended exploration of the possibility of critical pedagogy as one response of physical education to precarity, what critical pedagogy might be, the forms it has taken in schools and universities until now, and some examples of its practice as what I characterize as ‘critical pedagogies of affect’. The final chapter, Chapter 9, is a short note on teachers and their professional learning to take forward this response to precarity. In an era when new crises – political, financial, climatic, migration – seem to be around every corner, it is easy to descend into cynicism and despair. There is no question in my mind that precarity signals huge challenges and dangers for societies where it is becoming prevalent. In this context, education has a crucial role to play in assisting young people affected by precarity to overcome anger, anxiety, alienation, and anomie and to work towards the elimination of precarity. I believe there are ways available to physical educators to make a contribution to this hugely important task. As lisahunter (2019) among many other scholars has noted, physical education has been ‘late to the party’ in so many ways. It really is now time for us to dress up, show up, and be counted.

References Antonovsky, A. (1979) Health, Stress and Coping, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Corlett, A. (2019) Wrong Direction: Can Scotland hit its child poverty targets?, Resolution Foundation, March. Hellison, D. (1991) The whole person in physical education scholarship: Toward integration, Quest, 43(3), 307–318, doi:10.1080/00336297.1991.10484033. Kirk, D. (2010) Physical Education Futures, London: Routledge. lisahunter (2019) What a queer space is HPE, or is it yet? Queer theory, sexualities and pedagogy, Sport, Education and Society, 24(1), 1–12, doi:10.1080/ 13573322.2017.1302416. McCuaig, L., Atkin, J. and Macdonald, D. (2019) In pursuit of a critically oriented Physical Education: Curriculum contests and troublesome knowledge, pp. 119–133, in R. Pringle, H. Larsson and G. Gerdin (eds) Critical Research in Sport, Health and Physical Education: How to make a difference, London: Routledge. Oliver, K. L. and Kirk, D. (2015) Girls, Gender and Physical Education: An activist approach, London: Routledge. Oliver, P. (2017) Race names, https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/racepoliticsjustice/2017/ 09/16/race-names/. Savage, M., Cunningham, N., Devine, F., Friedman, S., Laurison, D., McKenzie, L., Miles, A., Snee, H. and Wakeling, P. (2015) Social Class in the 21st Century, London: Pelican. Standal, O. F. (2015) Phenomenology and Pedagogy in Physical Education, London: Routledge.

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Introduction

7

Standing, G. (2016) The Precariat: The new dangerous class, London: Bloomsbury. Varea, V. (2019) On being a non-white academic in physical education and sport pedagogy, Sport, Education and Society, 24(4), 325–337, doi:10.1080/13573322.2017.1385451 Weick, K. E. (1984) Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems, American Psychologist, 39(1), 40–49.

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Chapter 2

Social turbulence, precarity, education

Introduction When we describe a situation as ‘precarious’, we mean that it is uncertain or unstable. To be in a precarious situation is risky and hazardous. We have a wide range of expressions in the English language to describe precarious situations. We say something is ‘hanging by a thread’, or that it is ‘on the slippery slope’, or someone is ‘skating on thin ice’, or ‘teetering on the brink’. Each of these expressions conveys the delicate tension that is at the heart of precariousness. When a situation is precarious, it might ‘go either way’. One way is clearly undesirable, possibly disastrous: we can imagine a vase perched precariously on a shelf. If it topples over it may be smashed to pieces on the floor. Another possibility is that the status quo prevails. The vase doesn’t topple, it remains on the shelf, teetering perhaps, but intact. Or perhaps we take action to secure it, to make its situation more stable and certain, and less precarious, by moving it back from the edge. While this notion of precariousness may be familiar to us, the idea of precarity may be less so. We will be examining this concept in detail in this chapter. For now, we can note that precarity is widely used in the social sciences and humanities to refer to life situations or indeed lifestyles that are precarious: uncertain, unstable, risky and hazardous. To say that someone lives in precarity is to say that they live with uncertainty and instability. Unlike the vase teetering on the edge of a shelf, however, to live in precarity is in itself an undesirable situation. Even if an individual doesn’t succumb to disaster, to live teetering on the edge of something risky and hazardous is far from an ideal way to live. To live in precarity is by definition to live in a situation that does not promote wellbeing. As such, to live in precarity is in all probability not good for our health. Precarity is a concept that should be of interest to physical educators. While the ways in which physical educators have thought about their contribution to health have changed over the years, something we will look at in detail in Chapter 5, health has always been an important part of the rationale for school physical education. Wellbeing may be a new and less

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familiar concept when we talk about schooling and health (Thorburn, 2018), but it too has been implicit in much of the talk about physical education as an area of the school curriculum, not least in terms of contributing to the ‘education of the whole person’. If living in precarity is by definition to live a life in which health is in jeopardy, in which being well is unlikely, then this is a situation physical educators need to know about and understand. As it happens, recent research we will consider in Chapter 3 reveals that increasing numbers of children and young people are living in precarity. This is a relatively new phenomenon in the Global North of post-industrial nations. There have always been children and young people living in poverty, who are multiply-deprived, though they have seldom been well-served by school physical education. Precarity describes an acceleration and accentuation of the detrimental effects of living in poverty, particularly in relation to mental health and wellbeing, as well as the increasing prevalence of these effects among the population. Such is the extent of the growth of the numbers of people living in precarity, social scientist Guy Standing (2016) has suggested that a new social class is emerging which he calls the ‘precariat’. It is highly likely that many physical educators will, in the course of the next 20 years of their careers, encounter increasing numbers children and young people living in precarity. Teachers themselves may experience precarity directly as teaching increasingly is a stressful occupation, as employment conditions for teachers change, or as their jobs disappear due to advances in digital technology (Gard, 2014), with consequent effects on their own health and wellbeing, something we will consider in Chapter 4. For many social scientists, precarity is an outcome of neoliberal labour markets, of the ‘flexible’, temporary, short-term, insecure, and indeterminate employment that characterizes neoliberal, free-market capitalism. Springer, Birch, and MacLeavy (2016) caution against viewing neoliberalism as a shorthand reference for exploitative and oppressive practices, as an essentially negative influence on society, preferring instead to acknowledge and scrutinize the wide range of meanings of this notion over the course of the last century. In this chapter, we will consider a number of phenomena many researchers associate with neoliberalism, such as privatization, the shrinking of government, outsourcing, austerity, disaster capitalism and shock politics that have contributed to the social turbulence of recent times. Whether or not we choose to characterize neoliberalism in a wholly pejorative light, there is no question that precarity’s referents are primarily undesirable and to be avoided. As we will see when we come to a discussion of changing notions of social class in the 21st century, precarity is unmistakably an outcome of economic policies in the labour market that assume greater economic efficiency requires flexible labour, frequently manifest in zero-hours, short-term, and temporary contracts and consequent periods of unemployment.

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Before we can consider the nature of precarity in detail, we first need to map briefly the contours of the social turbulence of the past two decades of which precarity and the emergence of a precariat are part. If indeed the precariat has emerged as a new social class, this suggests we need to spend some time rethinking the nature and continuing relevance of class as a concept, in order to better understand the nature of precarity. A discussion of precarity and the precariat seeks to reveal that we can no longer continue to use notions of social class in the straightforward way that Paul Willis could in his 1977 classic Learning to Labour: how working class kids get working class jobs. Towards the end of this chapter, we consider the dangers of education’s capture by neoliberal practices such as marketization, and to the possibility of schooling for precarity.

Social turbulence “We live in turbulent times.” (Rafael Behr, The Guardian, 05.04.17)

The journalist Behr is surely correct in this observation. We can cite a long list of phenomena that both construct and constitute social turbulence. We might include climate change and extreme weather events, financial crises, populist politics, terrorism, new technologies and digitisation, mental health crises, homelessness, the growing gap between the ultra-rich and the rest, the ‘gig economy’, migration from the Global South to North, #MeToo, gun and knife violence, and Brexit. Each of these phenomena and others contribute to a social world that seems unpredictable, out of control, irregular, chaotic, and uncomfortable. People are unsettled, shocked and surprised, disappointed that old assumptions no longer hold, and expectations about the future are not met. This is particularly so when political systems themselves become part of, contribute to, and exacerbate social turbulence. Within the broad contours of trends over the past 20 years towards economic crises and austerity (Clark & Heath, 2014), small government (Judt, 2010), the privatization of public resources (Meek, 2014), and growing social inequality (Atkinson, 2015) and injustice (Dorling, 2010), we will consider here issues that have had a particularly notable impact on political systems: privatization of the economy, shrinking the state, and shock politics and disaster capitalism. Meek (2014) in his book Private Island provides some insights into the process of privatizing the UK economy over a 35 years period from when Conservative Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. In the late 1970s, Meek relates, much of the economy in Britain was under state control, including schools, the National Health Service, prisons, the armed services, railways, electricity, the postal system, and a host of other services and business such as British Steel, British Airways, oil companies, ship and aircraft building, and other manufacturers. Beginning in the late 1970s, this

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‘commonly owned economy’ was privatized. Moreover, foreign businesses and governments came to own many parts of this privatized economy. Meek explains that there were many players in this game of privatization, but that nevertheless Prime Minister Thatcher’s contribution was decisive in initiating and sustaining the process. Inspired by the writings of Friedrich Hayek, economist, philosopher, and Austrian-Hungarian WW2 refugee, she embarked on a crusade to crush left-wing politics, with the miners’ union as her first and most desired target. In place of the social democratic state, Thatcher and her allies sought to open a free-market to the economy, which was intended to survive without state assistance. The mantra of the times was that state ownership led to inefficiency and protectionism, while private business would through competition be incentivized to generate profit while cutting costs. Just how badly awry this process of privatization turned out is evidenced in two examples of the many Meek provides. The first is Thatcher’s and her Chancellor Nigel Lawson’s vision that Britain would become a nation of small shareholders of these many newly privatized businesses and services. In 1979 when Thatcher became Prime Minister, individual citizens held 40 percent of the shares in British companies. Only two years later this figure was down to 30 percent. By the time Thatcher died, in 2013, individual ownership of shares was less than 12 percent. A second example is the demise of progressive taxation. In 1979 the upper rate of income tax for the ultra-rich was 83% and the basic rate 33%. According to neoliberal orthodoxy, a privatized economy would reduce personal taxation because of the shrinkage of the state and so there would be less need to tax citizens. Thatcher and Labour Prime Minister Blair after her did indeed reduce personal tax, to around 40% for the top rate and 20% for the basic rate. But, as Meek points out, they also raised sales tax, or Value Added Tax (VAT) as it is known in Britain, from 8% to the current 20%. This is effectively a flat tax, which means everyone pays the same rate regardless of income, thereby impacting to the greater detriment of the poor. Shrinking the state is one of the main topics of debate in historian Judt’s (2010) extended essay Ill Fares the Land. Judt argued that people living in Britain face a question last addressed by Victorian reformers in the 19th century, which was how to respond to the ‘social question’. The social question was how society might meet the challenge of “poverty, overcrowding, dirt, malnutrition and ill health in the new industrial cities?” (Judt, 2010, p.174). For much of the 20th century efforts to address these and a range of other challenges about education, citizenship, and social cohesion were, claimed Judt, “spectacularly successful”, integrating the industrial masses into productive citizenship while avoiding revolution. With the shrinking of the state over the past 30 years, however, inequalities have grown exponentially and the social question needs to be reopened. Judt’s answer to the question, ‘What is to be done?’ in the face of growing inequity is to rethink the state and its functions. He argued, “only a government can

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respond on the requisite scale to the dilemmas posed by globalized competition. These are not challenges that can be grasped, much less addressed and resolved, by any one private employer or industry” (Judt, 2010, p.198). Judt notes the irony of a situation where, despite the reduction of public ownership of the economy, such have been the excesses of unrestrained financial markets that the state has been required to step in time and again to rescue failing businesses. The banking crisis of 2008 is just one of many examples. In the process of rethinking the state, Judt cautions against seeing its role merely as a ‘welfare floor’ or safety net, and argues that the broader consideration is, instead, what communities need in order to live well. In a series of books published since the late 1990s, Canadian author and activist Klein has offered important and outspoken critiques of globalization and branding (Klein, 2010), the rise of disaster capitalism (Klein, 2007), the ticking time bomb of climate change (Klein, 2015), and the shock politics of Donald Trump (Klein, 2017). Each of these studies has identified and dissected key features of neoliberalism and its consequent effects beyond economics on many other spheres of life. Her account of the rise of what she calls disaster capitalism around the world is both sobering and frightening. She summarizes the ‘playbook’ of how to exploit disasters in order to generate and sequester massive profits thus: Wait for a crisis (or even, in some instances, as in Chile or Russia, help foment one), declare a moment of what is sometimes called ‘extraordinary politics’, suspend some or all democratic norms – and then ram the corporate wish list through as quickly as possible. (Klein, 2017, p.134) A prime example of this tactic was Hurricane Katrina and the opportunism to cash in on the devastation it wrecked on New Orleans (Klein, 2007, p.4). For New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, property developers saw opportunities in the devastation and death to ‘start from a clean sheet’ and to replace public housing projects with private condominiums. In order to realize these opportunities, they lobbied state and national governments tirelessly for lower taxes, fewer regulations and cheaper workers. Lincove, Barrett, and Strunk (2018) show that this opportunism also impacted education, where the Orleans Parish school district sacked over 4,000 teachers as it transitioned to a market-based system of charter schools. The charter schools re-employed some teachers, though on less favourable contracts, and a majority of those affected detrimentally were Black. We return to this example in Chapter 4. In Shock Doctrine, Klein (2007) draws an analogy between shock therapy and other forms of torture, officially sanctioned by arms of government, and the ‘shock and awe’ tactics of the Iraq war and other crises, either natural or manufactured. Klein’s analogy and her use of the term ‘shock’ is intended to convey the violence that lies at the heart of disaster capitalism, where a mind

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or a place can be erased and rebuilt, but rebuilt to suit the interests of dictators and neoliberal capitalists. She explores the many and varied attempts in South America, central Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere, to enforce the application of the neoliberal ideals of economist Milton Friedman. Friedman, late of the Chicago School of Economics, trained many economists in this doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism and was himself mentored by Thatcher’s guiding light Friedrich Hayek. The social turbulence wrought by these and other forces over the past two decades, many associated with neoliberalism, requires educational researchers, particularly those committed to education for social justice, to rethink many of our most basic assumptions about the nature of society, of equity, and of human wellbeing and happiness (Apple, 2013). The rise of precarity out of this turbulence, and the emergence of the precariat, “the new dangerous class” (Standing, 2016), also requires us to rethink the concept of social class.

Rethinking social class Evans and Davies (2006) have argued that social class has received limited attention from scholars of physical education over the past 30 years. This is somewhat surprising, on the one side, since the roots of contemporary school physical education lie in what historian Peter McIntosh (1968) called the ‘Two Traditions’, of games playing among the socially aspiring classes and militaristic drilling and exercising among the labouring classes. These two class-based approaches to physical education were brought together in distinctly gendered forms in the post WW2 period to form the sport-technique based version that currently dominates in state schools across Britain and elsewhere (Kirk, 2010; Kirk, 1992). On the other side, this neglect is no doubt due to difficulties surrounding the notion itself, of what class is or is not, and whether indeed it has any relevance in a society in which traditional manual labour occupations, such as those associated with heavy industry, mining, and so on have all but disappeared. The close association of occupation (and thus income) and social class has been a feature of various social class schema since the early 20th century, from the Registrar General’s class system which appeared before WW1 up to the Office of National Statistics’ approach informed by the work of John Goldthorpe and others in the 1960s (Savage et al., 2015). The Registrar General approach featured classes such as ‘professional’, ‘skilled manual’, and ‘unskilled’, while later The National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification, 2014 included a ‘Higher managerial, administrative and professional’ class through ‘small employers and account workers’ to ‘routine occupations’. And overlying these schemata was the less detailed but probably more popularly known and used notions of ‘working’, ‘middle’, and ‘upper’ classes.

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While it may retain some popularity even today, most people now acknowledge this three-tiered notion of working, middle, and upper classes is somewhat outdated. Just as the stock working class occupations in heavy industry have mostly disappeared, it is difficult to place contemporary superrich entrepreneurs in the same upper class category once reserved for the landed aristocracy. So too is the link between class and occupation somewhat limited and archaic. Economic factors are undoubtedly important, as we shall see, but they are limited markers of class, as scholars in physical education have recognized for some time. Evans and Davies (2006, p.800) suggested “we might productively consider ‘class’ as signalling not only an embodied relationship to the means of economic production (…) but also a cultural identity and a lifestyle, a set of perspectives on the world and relationships in it”. Green et al. (2005, p.182) recognized that “the concept of class revolves around work and market situations” but that there are also “social, cultural and physical dimensions to class”. Adding to this complexity is the volatility of social class as an embodied, lived experience. Evans and Davies (2006, p.800) noted that class is not so much or merely an abstract academic ‘variable’ to be fed into sociological analysis alongside other such ‘variables’ of race and gender. Instead, it is “a set of constitutive practices (…) that are struggled over in the daily lives of families and individuals”. Savage et al. (2015) worked with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) from 2011 to 2013 to create and analyse data from the ‘Great British Class Survey’ (GBCS). The GBCS, supplemented by additional research Savage and his team conducted themselves, provided data that formed the basis for their rethinking of social class in 21st century Britain. Savage et al. argue that class is fundamentally about inequality. Drawing on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, they argue that social classes are formed around the accumulation of resources and advantages over time. Economic resources are important, but so too are social and cultural recourses. Within Bourdieu’s perspective, these accumulated advantages can be expressed as ‘capital’. According to Bourdieu, capital is not produced in and through a series of instantaneous transactions in the present. It is instead the expression of inherited, acquired, and accumulated capabilities and advantages, fostered within particular collective groupings, most obviously extended families, but also other social formations. The accumulation of these forms of capital over time together construct and constitute social class. Social classes and the inequalities that differentiate them are a result of the complex interactions of economic, cultural, and social capital. A shortcoming of previous attempts to produce social class categories was their grounding in occupations and thus in economic capital-as-income. But, as Savage et al. explain, income is only one aspect of economic capital. When we understand capital to involve the acquisition and accumulation of resources over time, the concept of wealth better captures the nature of

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economic capital. Wealth includes income from work, but also takes in assets such as investments in stocks and shares, property, and pensions, as just three examples. They explain that part of the complexity of understanding how economic capital works to construct and constitute social class is how these different economic factors interact. When we add to economic capital cultural and social capital, the complexity multiplies. Savage et al. take a strict Bourdieuian view of culture centred on people’s tastes and interests, such as Opera versus Soaps and Show Jumping versus BMX racing. Williams (1977) adds to this High versus Low view of culture another perspective informed by anthropology. Here, culture relates to learning how to engage more or less successfully in particular ways of life. In studies informed by this anthropological view of culture, researchers go undercover to investigate the ways of life of for example Hells Angels, organ-traffickers, and undergraduate ‘freshmen’. To have cultural capital in these contexts is to be able to pass as an authentic member of the group in question. The same notion of cultural capital operates in all aspects of everyday life for all individuals in terms of having the cultural recourses to operate more or less successfully in particular ways of life, such as in school, or in a sports club, or in an occupation. Social capital relates closely to this anthropological notion of cultural capital and refers to who we know, the relationships we cultivate and the networks we construct over time. These networks can sometimes be crucial to an individual’s success, for example, in gaining access to a particular career or to other opportunities in life. As an example from education, arguably, one of the major benefits of being able to access private schooling is that it provides both the cultural capital and social networks that ease an individual’s passage into elite universities and prosperous careers. When various forms of economic, cultural, and social capital interact they produce inequitable experiences between individuals and groups. Savage et al. argue that when we add gender, age, race and ethnicity, geographic location, and a host of other factors, these inequities are further exacerbated. In the data collected for the GBCS, Savage et al. reveal time and again important and nuanced differences, among the experiences of the individuals they interviewed, of the interactions of economic, cultural, and social capital. They provide as an example three individuals whose economic positions differed fundamentally, but who nevertheless each placed themselves in the middle of the spectrum when asked where they would be located on a scale of one to ten in financial terms (Savage et al., 2015, p.59). Savage et al. make the point that although economic, cultural, and social capital are each key components of social class, economic capital accumulates in ways that are quite different from the other two and, moreover, the accumulation of economic resources has accelerated in the past decade for those in the upper reaches of the social class structure. As they put this differential relationship between the three types of capital:

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Economic capital is remorseless, in that a thousand pounds can pretty much buy the same amount of something, regardless of whether it is your first thousand or your hundredth thousand that you spend. This is not true in relation to cultural and social capital: your tenth favourite leisure interest can rarely be pursued as vigorously as your first. (Savage et al. 2015, p.165) These differences between the ways in which capital is accumulated raise the question of how closely they are aligned or coincide. Is it the case for example that each accumulates relatively independently, so it is possible to have low levels of economic capital but high levels of cultural or social capital? Savage et al. along with Bourdieu propose that while alignment is not always perfect, there is indeed a ‘homology’ between the three types of capital, so that individuals with high economic capital are more likely to also have more cultural and social capital, although there will always be exceptions to this rule. There is nevertheless a hierarchical relationship between the types of capital given their different modes of accumulation, and this hierarchy is reflected in the social class structure of society that their analysis produces. The central argument in Savage et al.’s rethinking of social class is, then, that when class is viewed from the perspective of the accumulation over time of economic, cultural, and social capital, in contrast to former systems based solely or mainly on occupation: We can detect a very different structure, one in which a small wealthy elite class is pitted against a precariat with few resources, and between these two extremes there exist a patchwork of several other classes, all of which have their own distinctive mixes of capital. (Savage et al., 2015, p.53) This analysis produces seven social class groups or categories: Elite (around 6% of the population); Established middle class (25%); Technical middle class (6%); New affluent workers (15%); Traditional working class (14%); Emerging service workers (19%); Precariat (15%). Savage et al. arrive at these groupings using data from their study to make calculations based on: household income, household savings, and house value (economic capital); social contact score and social contact number (social capital); and highbrow cultural capital and emergent cultural capital (cultural capital) (Savage et al. 2015, p.170). While this is a somewhat formulaic approach, and given the caveat we noted earlier about their restriction of cultural capital to engagement in High and Low culture, they argue that their schema nevertheless is ‘intuitively attractive’ and ‘made sense’ to journalists who broke the story (remembering that the GBCS was a BBC sponsored initiative). There are technical and methodological issues to debate about Savage et al.’s approach to be sure (Mills, 2014). Notwithstanding these issues, for our

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purposes here their analysis is helpful in a number of ways. The first is in terms of their multi-dimensional approach, recognizing that three types of capital construct and constitute social class. While economic capital may be the more powerful determinant of an individual’s social class position, we can see that its interaction with cultural and social capital reveals a complex mix of factors and the likelihood of nuanced experiences of class for individuals and groups, even for those individuals within the same class. Another is the importance of accumulation of resources over time. In this respect they note the powerful association of age with social class grouping, with the average age among the elite group currently 57 years of age compared with age 32 for emerging service workers. There are important implications in recognition of the interconnection of age and class for social mobility between class groupings and in particular for the widespread anxiety they note about “declining social mobility” (Savage et al., 2015, p.175). We can also note an important finding of their study, which is the considerable gap between an elite class and an emerging precariat. While the other five class groups between them reflect nuanced combinations of economic, cultural, and social capital, these two class groups reveal the extent of the inequality within British society, and the fact that it is accelerating. We noted earlier Savage et al.’s comment that the accumulation of economic resources has accelerated in the past decade for those in the upper reaches of the social class structure. Other social groups have been unable to match this accelerated accumulation of resources. This is emphatically the case for members of the precariat, who have been massively dis-benefitted as others, in particular the six percent, have prospered. As we will see shortly, this growing gap within the social class structure, and the growth of the precariat in itself, is a cause for considerable concern. Savage et al. (2015) conclude their rethinking of social class by making five points, recognizing that there is a politics of social classification (p.401) and a cultural politics of class (p.403). Their first point is that their schema provides an opportunity to question social stereotyping, particularly of individuals at the lowest rank of the social class hierarchy, since the combination of economic, cultural, and social capital undermines any easy or lazy equation of social class positioning and moral worth. A second point is that this analysis brings those at the top more directly into view, the super-rich, and the increasing concentration of capital accumulation and its consequences for social cohesion. A third point is that their approach makes the accumulation of economic, cultural, and social capital more central to class analysis, and thus highlights the significance of age, intergenerational wealth, and possibilities for social mobility between class groups. Fourth, they propose that their schema unravels ways that inequalities link to the interaction of the three kinds of capital, providing researchers and policy makers with much more sophisticated and nuanced tools for investigating and constructing solutions to inequality. Finally, they claim their analysis allows us to

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question the legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism as in any way consistent with freedom and equity, opening the door to alternative economic approaches. It is important to note that people’s subjective experience of class did not align neatly with the categories Savage and his colleagues produced. Membership of the precariat is a case in point. Savage et al. report that few respondents to the GBCS identified themselves as members of the precariat. Indeed, some of the people his team interviewed to generate supplementary data for the study were ambivalent and sometimes resistant to the idea they belonged to any particular social class grouping. With employment rates high in many countries of the Global North, it is possible to see where such ambivalence or reluctance may come from. However, even though there are few unemployed, the nature of the employment is the issue in question. Insecure and unstable work has increased significantly since the 1970s, and as Savage et al.’s study reveals, disproportionately affects individuals according to age, locale, sex, and race. The precariat, in particular, is a new social class that lacks uniformity among its members, thus making identification even more challenging. In addition, as we will see below, identification with or rejection of membership of the precariat is not uniform across countries and cultures. It is important to bear these points in mind when we come to consider the nature of precarity in more detail, in the next section, and then in the other chapters of this book when we explore precarity and young people, teachers, and physical education.

Precarity and the precariat It became clear that precarity is everywhere today. In the private sector, but also in the public sector, which has multiplied temporary and indeterminent positions, in industrial enterprises, but also in the institutions of production and cultural diffusion, education, journalism, media, etc., where it produces effects which are always more or less identical, which become particularly visible in the extreme case of the unemployed: the deconstruction of existence, deprived among other things of its temporal structures, and the degradation of the whole relation to the world, time, space, which ensues. Precarity deeply affects those who suffer it; by making the future uncertain, it forbids any rational anticipation and, in particular, that minimum of belief and hope in the future that must be had to revolt, especially collectively, against the present, even the most intolerable. (Bourdieu, 1997)

Bourdieu’s description of précarité highlights the relationship between unstable work and the wellbeing of individuals who experience it. For most research on precarity, this relationship is the common denominator, particularly in countries of the Global North. Precarity ties closely to neoliberalism. While clearly the concept existed in the work of French academics in the 1990s, it emerged into public view “as the central organising platform for a series of social struggles” in the early 2000s in Italy (Neilson & Rossiter,

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2008, p. 51), spreading soon after as part of traditional May Day events across Europe and then to Japan (Standing, 2016). Young people drove the early phase of these social protest movements, demanding free migration and universal basic income, and impatient with traditional trade unionism. Although the social movements faltered before the end of the decade, this notion of precarity, of describing not only temporary and indeterminate work, but also the detrimental psychological effects of insecure employment, had become more visible beyond political science and protest movements. For example, Swedish political scientists Näsström and Kalm (2015, p.563) argued that the effects of precarity are felt far beyond the workplace, noting that “precarious work not only affects the material side of life; it also affects the soul (…) and character (…) of workers, including one’s sense of happiness, meaning and ability to develop long-term relationships”. Recently published research demonstrates the heterogeneity of those affected by precarity, with populations that “veer wildly” (Berlant, 2011, p.192) across occupations, age groups and societies. Precarity is a referent for the labour casualization of youth in Japan (Smith, 2018), of school to work transition in Sweden (Dovemark & Beach, 2016), Germany (Eckelt, 2015) and Japan (Inui, 2015) and young knowledge workers in Italy (Armano, 2016). While precarity is widely held to affect young people in particular, it also features for some in later life as new forms of risk and insecurity (Grenier et al., 2017). Additionally, researchers find precarity among asylum seekers in Australia (van Kooy & Bowman, 2018), guest workers in US tourism (Terry, 2018), market vendors in Ottawa (Kovesi & Kern, 2018), immigrant men and women in Toronto (Premji, 2018), highly educated migrants in Bejing (Wang, Li & Deng, 2017), and among workers in the manufacturing and high tech strongholds of the Netherlands (Ballafkih, Zinsmeister & Meerman, 2017) and Germany (Brady & Biegert, 2017). Anthropologist Thorkelson (2016, p.476) suggests this mainly Anglophone research has sought to specify, “precarity’s referent, aiming to clarify which things in the world the concept designates”. While Thorkelson acknowledges and accepts the association of precarity with indeterminate work and its detrimental effects on health and wellbeing, he cautions against accepting universalizing claims about precarity. He points out that in France and in the context of struggles around higher education in 2009, précarité also served several covert political functions for some of its users, one of which was to differentiate self from others, to distinguish ‘them’ that experience précarité from ‘us’ who don’t. He points out, too, echoing fellow anthropologist Millar, that precarity can only refer to “states of anxiety, desperation, unbelonging, and risk experienced by temporary and irregularly employed workers” (Millar, 2014, p.34) where a post-Fordist or Keynsian norm of stable employment and expectation of a ‘good life’ survives. According to Molé (2010), in Italy, individual workers’ explicit identification with being a precariat, a precarious worker, rested on a critical view of neoliberal

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capitalism and its effects as in process and unfinished. Identification with precarious employment and its ill effects was for these Italian workers a form of resistance to the erosion of traditional, stable employment and state-provided services. On the other hand, in places where this notion of stability and expectation of a good life no longer apply, such as among the wageless catadores who recycled waste material from Rio de Janeiro’s dump, the notion of precarity has little purchase (Millar, 2014, p.49). Berlant (2011) has advanced the notion of ‘cruel optimism’ as a means of making clearer the effects of precarity on the individuals who experience it. Berlant explains that in the Global North, there is a widespread belief that hard work and good behaviour will be duly rewarded, and that the ‘good life’ of economic and emotional security is as a result attainable. Echoing Thorkelson’s scepticism about the universality of precarity as an empirical referent, Berlant (2011, p.192) nevertheless accepts that “capitalist activity always induces destabilizing scenes of productive destruction – of resources and lives being made and unmade according to the dictates and whims of the market. But (…) neoliberal economic practices mobilize this instability in unprecedented ways”. In such circumstances, precarity is a condition of dependency, where our fate is in someone else’s hands. She notes the widespread expectation of the good life began to be undermined in the Global North from the 1980s. Indeed, in the face of repeating and increasingly regular social and economic crises over the past 40 years, these expectations become a form of cruel optimism because they create the desire for ways of life that, she claims, are no longer possible. Moreover, this desire at the same time becomes an obstacle to other possible forms of human flourishing because it gets in the way of imagining alternatives. Millar provides an example from her case study in the Global South, of catadores in Rio’s dump, where hope of the good life is already unsustainable, and thus precarity in the Anglophone sense has little traction. In the moment that Rose leaves her job to go back to the dump, she lets go of the employment contract and of the organization, subjectivities, and relations of work that it entails. I see in this act of release a politics of detachment that is quite different from the politics of precarity inspired by what Guy Standing (…) has called the precariat’s “four A’s – anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation.” Especially in post-Fordist contexts of the Global North, these affective states and the politics (or antipolitics) of hopelessness that they activate emerge from the continued attachment to an imagined good life (…) In contrast, Rose’s act of quitting her job entails a rupture with normative forms of capitalist labor that opens up the possibility of other ways of fashioning work and life. (Millar, 2014, p.49)

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These are important qualifications of the notion of precarity and the temptation to universalize its application to all of neoliberalism’s nefarious workings wherever we find them. We need to understand the situations and experiences in the world that precarity describes and those it does not. The notion that hard work and good behaviour should be rewarded by career progression, economic security and emotional intimacy and stability may be, as Berlant argues, increasingly difficult to sustain in countries that make up the Global North. But this ‘fantasy’, as she describes it, retains much of its traction still, and no-where more so that in education (Apple, 2013; Ball, 2017; Standing, 2016, pp.78–85). It is primarily through schooling and within the family that this desire for and expectation of the good life is created and sustained. This is why it is a matter of such importance that physical educators understand what precarity might usefully refer to and its significance to the work they do with young people on a day-to-day basis. Guy Standing (2016) has argued that out of the Anglophone notion of precarity has emerged a new social class, the precariat, which he describes as ‘the new dangerous class’. The term precariat for Standing combines the notion of an underclass, a proletariat, with the situation of living precariously and close to necessity. If such a class does indeed exist, it is, according to Standing and to the many other researchers who have been studying precarity, like no other class before it. Savage and his colleagues discovered, as we already noted, few people in Britain seem to want to admit they belong to the precariat. The rate of response to the GBCS from individuals who identified with this class was negligible, though we also noted earlier Molé’s research in Italy where to identify with the precariat is viewed as an act of resistance to neoliberal work practices. The precariat in Standing’s view is a class whose members share only a few characteristics. One is that they live precariously, in particular in terms of insecure employment, and other factors affecting the accumulation of economic capital. Other shared characteristics are a sense of alienation and anomie, of unfulfilled expectations, and of hopelessness. It is the increasing prevalence of insecure employment and detrimental psycho-social effects since the 1980s in the post-industrial societies of the Global North that suggests to Standing, Savage, and others that a new social class has emerged. As the recent research we noted earlier demonstrates, and with Thorkelson’s and Miller’s caveats in mind, the precariat can be thought of as highly heterogeneous, consisting not only of those who might traditionally be associated with an underclass such as unskilled workers, undocumented migrant labourers, and so on. It contains young and old, men and women, skilled and unskilled, in many countries, across a range of occupations including academe and the cultural industries. Standing comments that “the precariat could be described as a neologism that combines an adjective ‘precarious’ and a related noun ‘proletariat’ … We may claim that the precariat is a

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class-in-the-making, if not yet a class-for-itself, in the Marxian sense of that term” (Standing, 2016, p.8). He, like Bourdieu, and Näsström and Kalm, highlights the effects of insecure employment, such as ongoing temporary contracts and so-called ‘zero hours’ contracts, as well as chronic episodes of unemployment, on self-identity and wellbeing. He writes: Another way of looking at the precariat is in terms of the process, the way in which people are ‘precariatised’ … To be precariatised is to be subject to pressures and experiences that lead to a precariat existence, of living in the present, without a secure identity or sense of development achieved though work and lifestyle. (Standing, 2016, p.19) Living in precarity may be a temporary state of affairs for some people, like the young French academic in Thorkelson’s (2016) study who stepped back from the precarious brink by finding a tenured university post. For many others, however, the ‘precarity trap’ is not easy to escape. Standing explains: A person living on a stream of temporary jobs has a risk-strewn existence. Consider a woman who has a temporary job and adjusts her living expenses to equal the wage she earns. Then the job ends. She has minimal savings. She has to wait for several weeks – it may be much more – before she can obtain any state benefits. In that time, she adjusts her living standards downwards, but she may have to borrow or go into debt by delaying payment for rent and so on. There may be an additional factor. People doing temporary jobs typically do not rush to apply for benefits. It is often done reluctantly, after hardships have set in. So, debts and obligations to relatives, friends and neighbours mount, and the loan shark lurks. The precariat trap becomes more formidable. (Standing, 2016, p.57) People caught in the precarity trap live an in-between existence. In Britain, access to state benefits (such as the so-called ‘job-seeker’ allowance) requires individuals to make a minimum number of job applications per week in order to continue to qualify for the benefit. There is, as Standing (2016, p.57) notes, “the stress of insecurity and the indignity of constantly having to try to sell oneself to agencies and potential employers”. The time lag between applying for benefit and receiving it may mean the woman in Standing’s example could, in the meantime, have been offered another temporary job. Does she take this, thereby setting back the benefits process, knowing too that she will have to repeat the process again when the new temporary job finishes? Or does she turn it down, and thereby risk losing the benefit anyway? More often, the job is ‘temporary’ only in so far as an individual can be sacked without warning and with no protection, in jobs ranging from the construction industry to parcel deliveries, from telephone sales to waiting table.

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The precarity trap is made worse by what Standing sees as the erosion of collective support, beyond immediate family and friends. Since so few people see themselves as members of the precariat, there is little possibility of organized, collective action to protect one another from, for example, summary dismissal or penalties for becoming ill and missing work. In this respect, the precariat, as a class-in-itself, is not capable of taking collective action as a class-for-itself against the ill-effects of precarity. Näsström and Kalm (2015) suggest that precarity and its ill-effects are at odds with democratic forms of government, which rest on the principle of shared responsibility, and the conditions it creates corrupt democracy (Runciman, 2018). This is in part why Standing describes the precariat as ‘the dangerous new class’, because its existence suggests an erosion of the responsibilities that Judt (2010) argued can only be provided by the state.

The marketization and privatization of education Stephen Ball (2017) argues that the direction of educational policy-making in England since the mid-1970s, irrespective of the political affiliation of governments, has been away from local control and decision-making. Even where governments have appeared to create policy to enable local people to run their own schools, Ball argues that the Secretary of State has accrued powers centrally to the extent that ‘local control’ can take only particular forms consistent with the marketization of school education. An outcome of over 30 years of neoliberalism in education has been to impoverish schools that serve children and young people who are multiply-disadvantaged, and so to widen the gap in the quality of educational provision. Even though ‘state funded’, academy schools have access to funding that is denied to schools that remain in local government control (Ball, 2017). As Ball (2017, pp.206–208) explains, this marketization of education is not simply a matter of creating ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, though this is certainly an outcome. It also creates a complex mix of public and private provision from which discerning parents are required to choose the right services for their child, whether this is a school, forms of educational technology, such as ipads and software, or specialist tutors. Strategic and navigational skills are required of parents that reflect particular kinds of cultural and social capital, thus reproducing and extending both privilege and precarity. Effectively, this process of the selective redistribution of public funding within an educational marketplace in England creates for some young people a schooling for precarity, contradicting the notion that state-provided education can be a key contributor to social mobility (Ball, 2017, p.194) and a ‘good life’ (Berlant, 2011). For those young people whose families have the right mix of economic, cultural, and social capital, there will be resources at home and in their social networks that may help develop resilience to setbacks and unanticipated events. For those living in precarity, there may be

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no such resources beyond the school. If the school itself is implicated in the neoliberal project then the outcome may be similar to Dovemark and Beach’s (2016) account of special programs for ‘manual’ pupils in Swedish high schools: What we (…) describe is a process of abandonment of a genuinely educational contract with these young people. Instead of being educated so they may develop mentally, morally, or aesthetically, they become educationally neglected, hidden, overlooked, dismissed, pitied, and quite literally de-valued. (…) School has perhaps become a site of precaritisation for all individuals through its increasingly emphasised bonds to an unstable labour market, but for the students at the centre of the present investigation this is beyond question. (p.175) […] These kinds of students used to be able to learn for labour (…) But what are they to learn for when there is no sustainable and sufficiently well-paid commodified labour left? Is it learning for marginality? (Dovemark & Beach, 2016, p.187) Neoliberalism, privatization, and physical education Privatization of education is not confined to systems level policy but also impacts on specific areas of the curriculum. McCuaig et al. (2016) highlight the rise of what they call the physical and health ‘edu-business’ and the consequent erosion of the school’s social justice mission. Macdonald (2014) and Evans (2014) have framed these developments within the broad context of neoliberalism, both arguing that its rise and pervasive influence challenge health and physical educators to think radically differently about their field. Evans and Davies (2014) argue for more research to study relations between physical education and new forms of educational governance in the face of what they call ‘Physical Education PLC’. They also warn about the ways in which privatization constructs forms of ‘neoliberal freedoms’ that radically reduce current educational entitlements of pupils (Evans & Davies, 2015). Williams et al. (2011) and Williams and Macdonald’s (2015) empirical work has shown the extent of outsourcing and its establishment as an institutionalized, widespread and accepted practice in health and physical education in the Australian State of Queensland, while Sperka and Enright’s (2017) review suggests this is now a global phenomenon. This recent conceptual and empirical research on neoliberal practices such as privatization has injected a new urgency into debates about current and future practices in health and physical education (Penney & Mitchell, 2017). At the same time, as Williams et al. (2011) note, in both thought and practice, outsourcing of physical education as a particular neoliberal

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practice has been around for some time. Hoffman’s (1987) satirical ‘dreaming the impossible dream’ imagined a future for physical education run by a company called Pedasport with its P3 or ‘Pay-to-Play Program’. Hoffman’s chapter inspired Tinning (2001, 1992) similarly to imagine futures for physical education that involved commercialization and outsourcing, only for him to realize in his later paper that this had already become a reality in Australia in the form of Tri-Skills, which in 2017 celebrated its 25th anniversary. One of the earliest analyses of a commercialized curriculum package in physical education was Daily Physical Education which was created and marketed as a fitness and skill-based program to schools across Australia in the early 1980s (Kirk & Colquhoun, 1989). Fitnessgram, developed by the Cooper Institute in the 1980s, probably has the most reach of any outsourced program in health and physical education with its claim to be operating in tens of thousands of schools in the United States (Gard & Pluim, 2017). In the 1980s and 1990s, outsourcing of services in health and physical education was unusual. In the early decades of the 21st century this is no longer the case as governments in some countries have sought to shrink the state and to apply bighting cuts to public services in the name of austerity (Evans, 2014). Markets have grown rapidly in a wide range of health and physical education services featuring programs that schools can access, if they have the funding. This growth has also been fuelled by the so-called obesity crisis and more recently by concern over adolescent mental health, and the notion that schools are well-placed to ‘fix’ these problems (McCuaig et al., 2016). The recent critiques of neoliberal practices in health and physical education among the scholarly community is both appropriate and timely since the risks and dangers of privatizing education are real and potentially far-reaching. But this literature uniformly argues that practices such as outsourcing are far from simple commercial transactions in an educational marketplace. Evans (2014) has warned of the dangers of ‘intrusive pedagogies’ sold to schools in the name of individual freedom. Despite its claim to providing new ‘freedoms’, neoliberalism presaged (…) increasingly intrusive pedagogies, involving, for example, centrally regulated self-monitoring and management of one’s own and others’ behaviour in respect of health. Indeed (…) the most fateful change unfolded in the past three decades has not been increased greed, but the expansion of neoliberal markets and market values into spheres of life where they do not belong. One has been repeatedly and relentlessly impelled to do for oneself what others (e.g. the WHO or private health industries) want, without being obviously coerced or told so to do. (Evans, 2014, p.549)

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Conclusion In this chapter I have introduced the concept of precarity as an effect of the social turbulence experienced in countries of the Global North since at least the late 1970s. A prime factor behind much of this turbulence has been the neoliberal so-called free-market economy. Contributing to this social turbulence are the privatization of what were formally ‘public goods’, as a corollary of the shrinking state, and the rise of disaster capitalism and shock politics. Reflecting on this situation in the US, Anyon (2014) makes the crucial point that despite governments’ across the Global North professed faith in the market to balance itself, regular and expensive government interventions have been necessary to salvage one financial crisis after another. As she points out for the US, Federal policies that promoted the free-market, deregulation, and a low tax economic model are also policies that have maintained poverty. A direct consequence of the growth in poverty since the 1980s and at the heart of social turbulence has been an unrelenting assault on public education. I suggested that the growth of poverty and the emergence of a precariat, a ‘new dangerous social class’, requires us to rethink the notion of social class. The three tiered and popular concept of working, middle, and upper classes bears little resemblance to the actual class structure of the post-industrial societies of the Global North. Moreover, previous class schema have been too reliant on occupation and wage income as their bases. The work of Savage and others has developed an alternative schema since it takes into account economic, cultural, and social capital, and also emphasizes the importance of the accumulation of economic capital as wealth. This rethinking of social class is important to understanding the nature of precarity and of the precariat. Drawing on data collected since 2010, Savage et al. (2015) estimated that the precariat represented up to 15% of the population in Britain. The austerity of the past decade will have done nothing to reduce this proportion of the population in precarity and much to increase it. We can conclude from this analysis that the likelihood of s child growing up in precarity has increased since 2010 and is only likely to increase further as Brexit continues to wreak havoc on the UK economy. Notwithstanding this reconsideration of class, it will be important throughout this book to take seriously two points. The first is that people’s experience of class may be very different from a ‘class position’ resulting from a socioeconomic analysis. The second is the reluctance people have shown in most countries of the Global North to be identified with the precariat. These two points are important because they provided spaces for education to work through determinism and the inevitability of economic, cultural, and social reproduction, and to insist on the possibility of a good life in the sense that all might flourish.

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I have also in this chapter identified some key features of precarity. The link between precarious employment, health and wellbeing is widely accepted, though with the caveat that this connection only has traction in societies where belief in the possibility of a good life continues to exist. At the same time, we noted too that when this expectation is promoted unreflectively and naively, a ‘cruel optimism’ results. The particular damage insecure and uncertain employment does to health and wellbeing are summed up in the four A’s of anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation. The precarity trap serves to emphasize how government policies within a neoliberal agenda serve to maintain and entrench poverty and the uncertainty and instability that come with it. It may be difficult enough to escape from the precarity trap with the social and cultural capital education at its best can provide, and well-nigh impossible without. Given the fluidity, uncertainty, and instability inherent in precarity, precise characterization of the precariat as a social class is difficulty. It is no surprise to learn that its members ‘veer wildly’ across occupations, race and ethnicity, ages (though they are disproportionately young), sex and sexualities, and abilities. Thus, this class group has limited capacity to represent its own interests, as a class-for-itself. The ambiguity surrounding the nature of the precariat, however, should not dissuade us of its importance. The characteristics that identify the precariat’s membership are uncertain and unstable work, lack of employment protection, limited capacity for economic accumulation, and vulnerability to sudden changes in circumstances. Members of the precariat also share the mal effects of these characteristics in terms of cost to health and wellbeing, though highly nuanced and variable in themselves. The question posed by Dovemark and Beach is of crucial importance for anyone who sees state funded schooling as a public good and a means of securing a socially just society (Apple, 2013) and of fighting precarity. The relationship between publicly funded schools and the workplace has long been problematic, as Willis’s Learning to Labour and other studies showed. This is why Left scholars such as Apple (1990) and Anyon (2014) have long argued for forms of public education that combat social, cultural, and economic reproduction and, indeed, form the centre of social movements to create ‘radical possibilities’ for social justice. Arguably, the emergence of precarity as a mal effect of neoliberalism introduces a new moment, an accentuation of capitalism’s tendency to exploit wage labour and to change the nature of labour itself. The marketization of education is highly problematic, as Dovemark and Beach show, because it implicates schools in the neoliberal agenda. Evans (2014) mention of intrusive pedagogies raises the question of the extent to which physical education does harm or good. Are schools part of the solution or part of the problem? This is the challenge that faces physical education within state school curricula, particularly as I argue

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in Chapter 5 as it has in the past decade acquired an increasingly explicit role for the enhancement of young people’s health and wellbeing. To the extent that physical education has unintentionally and unreflectively contributed to the reproduction and legitimation of inequities of gender, class, race, and disability, precarity brings its contribution to young people’s education and wellbeing into sharper focus than hitherto. The two chapters that follow seek to review where we are with precarity and young people and their health and wellbeing, and with teachers of physical education, before we can begin to formulate physical education’s response to precarity. This chapter has introduced precarity from the vantage point of theory. The next two chapters seek evidence to test this theory and to ground the arguments made here about the relationship between precarious work and health in the empirical data made available through research.

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Evans, J. (2014) Neoliberalism and the future for a socio-educative physical education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 19(5), 545–558. Evans, J. and Davies, B. (2015) Neoliberal freedoms, privatisation and the future of physical education, Sport, Education and Society, 20(1), 10–26. Evans, J. and Davies, B. (2014) Physical education PLC: Neoliberalism, curriculum and governance. New directions for PESP research, Sport, Education and Society, 19 (7), 869–884. Evans, J. and Davies, B. (2006) Social class and physical education, pp. 796–808, in D. Kirk, D. Macdonald and M. O’Sullivan (eds) The Handbook of Physical Education, London: Sage. Gard, M. (2014) eHPE: A history of the future, Sport, Education and Society, 19(6), 827–845. Gard, M. and Pluim, C. (2017) Why is there so little critical physical education scholarship in the United States? The case of Fitnessgram, Sport, Education and Society, 22(5), 602–617, doi:10.1080/13573322.2016.1213716. Green, K., Smith, A. and Roberts, K. (2005) Social class, young people, sport and physical education, pp. 180–196, in K. Green and K. Hardman (eds) Physical Education: Essential issues, London: Sage. Grenier, M., Phillipson, C., Laliberte Rudson, D., Hatzifilalithis, S., Kobayashi, K. and Marier, P. (2017) Precarity in late life: Understanding new forms of risk and insecurity, Journal of Aging Studies, 43, 9–14. Hoffman, S. J. (1987) Dreaming the impossible dream: The decline and fall of physical education, in J. A. Massengale (ed.) Trends Toward the Future in Physical Education, Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Inui, A. (2015) Entering the precariat: Young people’s precarious transitions in Japan, pp. 560–583, in J. Wyn and H. Cahill (eds) Handbook of Children and Youth Studies, New York: Springer. Judt, T. (2010) Ill Fares the Land, London: Penguin. Kirk, D. (2010) Physical Education Futures, London: Routledge. Kirk, D. (1992) Defining physical education: The social construction of a school subject in postwar Britain, London: Falmer. Kirk, D. and Colquhoun, D. (1989) Healthism and physical education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 10(4), 417–434. Klein, N. (2017) No Is not Enough: Defeating the new shock politics, London: Allen Lane. Klein, N. (2015) This Changes Everything, London: Penguin. Klein, N. (2010) No Logo, London: Fourth Estate (10th Anniversary Issue). Klein, N. (2007) The Shock Doctrine, London: Penguin. Kovesi, C. and Kern, L. (2018) ‘I Choose To Be Here’: Tensions between autonomy and precarity in craft market vendors’ work, City & Community, 17(1), 170–186. Lincove, J. A., Barrett, N. and Strunk, K. O. (2018) Lessons from Hurricane Katrina: The employment effects of the mass dismissal of New Orleans teachers, Educational Researcher, 47(3), 191–203. Macdonald, D. (2014) Is global neo-liberalism shaping the future of physical education?, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 19, 494–499. McCuaig, L., Enright, E., Rossi, A., Macdonald, D. and Hansen, S. (2016) An eroding social justice agenda: The case of physical education and health Edu-business in schools, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 87(2), 151–164.

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30 Social turbulence, precarity, education McIntosh, P. C. (1968) PE in England Since 1800, London: Bell. Meek, J. (2014) Private Island: Why Britain now belongs to someone else, London: Verso. Millar, K. (2014) The precarious present: Wageless labor and disrupted life in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, Cultural Anthropology, 29(1), 32–53. Mills, C. (2014) The Great British Class Fiasco: A comment on Savage et al., Sociology, 48(3), 437–444. Molé, N. J. (2010) Precarious subjects: Anticipating neoliberalism in Northern Italy, American Anthropologist, 112(1), 38–53. Näsström, S. and Kalm, S. (2015) A democratic critique of precarity, Global Discourse, 5(4), 556–573. Neilson, B. and Rossiter, N. (2008) Precarity as a political concept, or, Fordism as exception, Theory, Culture and Society, 25(7–8), 51–72. Penney, D. and Mitchell, S. (2017) Reforming curricula from the outside-in, pp. 157– 172, in C. Ennis (ed) Routledge Handbook of Physical Education Pedagogies, London: Routledge. Premji, S. (2018) ‘It’s Totally Destroyed Our Life’: Exploring the pathways and mechanisms between precarious employment and health and well-being among immigrant men and women in Toronto, International Journal of Health Services, 48 (1), 106–127. Runciman, D. (2018) How Democracy Ends, London: Profile. Savage, M., Cunningham, N., Devine, F., Friedman, S., Laurison, D., McKenzie, L., Miles, A., Snee, H. and Wakeling, P. (2015) Social Class in the 21st Century, London: Pelican. Smith, C. S. (2018) The precarious and the transitional: Labor casualization and youth in post-bubble Japan, Children’s Geographies, 16(1), 80–91. Sperka, L. and Enright, E. (2017) The outsourcing of health and physical education: A scoping review, European Physical Education Review, 1–24. Springer, S., Birch, K. and MacLeavy, J. (2016) The Handbook of Neoliberalism, London: Routledge. Standing, G. (2016) The precariat: The new dangerous class, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Terry, W. (2018) Precarity and guest work in US tourism: J-1 and H-2B visa programs, Tourism Geographies, 20(1), 85–106. Thorburn, M. (2018, ed) Wellbeing, Education and Contemporary Schooling, London: Routledge. Thorkelson, E. (2016) Precarity outside: The political unconscious of French academic labour, American Ethnologist, 43(3), 475–487. Tinning, R. (2001) The 2001 Senate inquiry: A non-preferred scenario for physical education, ACHPER National Journal, 48, 14–16. Tinning, R. (1992) Not so sweet dreams: Physical education in the year 2001, ACHPER National Journal, 138, 24–26. Williams, B. J. and Macdonald, D. (2015) Explaining outsourcing in health, sport and physical education, Sport, Education and Society, 20(1), 57–72. Williams, B. J., Hay, P. J. and Macdonald, D. (2011) The outsourcing of health, sport and physical educational work: A state of play, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 16(4), 399–415.

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van Kooy, J. and Bowman, D. (2018) ‘Surrounded with so much uncertainty’: Asylum seekers and manufactured precarity in Australia, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–18, doi:10.1080/1369183X.2018.1427563. Wang, H., Li, W. and Deng, Y. (2017) Precarity among highly educated migrants: College graduates in Beijing, China, Urban Geography, 38(10), 1497–1516. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 3

Precarity, young people, and health and wellbeing

Introduction In the previous chapter, I argued following Berlant, Bourdieu, Standing, and others, that there is a negative relationship between living in precarity and health and wellbeing. Bourdieu, as we noted, claimed that insecure and uncertain work ‘deeply affects’ those who experience it, particularly by ‘making the future uncertain’. Berlant’s analysis of ‘cruel optimism’ questions the possibility of a ‘good life’, the notion that hard work and good behaviour will be duly rewarded, by career advancement, economic security, and emotional stability. Moreover, Standing proposed that the precariat, a new and dangerous social class consisting of a wide variety of people living in precarity, experience the ‘four As’ of anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation. In Chapter 2, we considered how the marketization of education may already be schooling some young people for a precarious future, while health and physical education is in danger of capture by neoliberal practices such as outsourcing and intrusive pedagogies. Since the school is, along with the family, a primary site for the maintenance of the idea of a ‘good life’ and the possibility of change for social justice, this capture of education by neoliberalism could make school part of the problem rather than the solution to the mal effects of precarity. Powerful as these arguments are, it remains important to establish this relationship between precarity and health empirically. It is also important to explore in some detail how the ill effects of living in precarity manifest themselves in young people’s lives. We need to understand in what ways young people are affected by living precariously. Mental health issues are prominent within the writing about precarity, where tensions and frustrations within families, schools and communities are sources of anger and frustration, helplessness and hopelessness, anxiety and stress, and alienation. We need to consider too the other risks to health that precarious living produces, including those associated with sedentariness, poor diets and disordered eating, and polluted environments. The focus on mental health runs somewhat at odds to the prevailing and dominant concern for young people’s health in physical education since the

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early 1990s, which has been obesity and its ‘cure’, moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) (McKenzie & Lounsbery, 2009). As I show in Chapter 5, this concern has most recently been manifest in a focus in curriculum development on physical activity and physical fitness as physical education’s main contribution to health. It has also spawned a prominent advocacy for MVPA as a central aspect of physical education lessons, with programs of supporting research (Fairclough & Stratton, 2005; Trost, 2006). The scale of ‘the obesity crisis’ has been disputed by myself (Kirk, 2010; 2006) and more thoroughly and effectively by Gard and Wright (2005) and Gard (2011). We have been concerned not only with the factual accuracy of the evidence base on which so much of the obesity crisis talk rests. We have also been concerned with the implications of this single health focus for the practice and experience of physical education in schools. As I suggest in Chapter 5, when physical education’s contribution to health has a single focus (obesity prevention and reduction), a specific kind of physical education program tends to result. Lessons based on optimizing MVPA may contribute to young people’s ‘exercise dose’ for the day. They may also have counterproductive effects if obesity is not the only health issue affecting young people. Rather than take a ‘versus’ position, I think it will be important to investigate and acknowledge all of the detrimental effects of precarity for young people’s health, and to design programs accordingly. This chapter presents evidence of how precarity affects young people’s health and wellbeing. For some time, there has been information in the research literature on the relationships between notions such as ‘poverty’, ‘socio-economic position’, and ‘multiple deprivation’ and the health of young people. As we saw in Chapter 2, precarity is closely related to these concepts. But it adds other dynamics to these mainly income and resourcebased concepts, such as the experience of uncertainty, instability, insecurity, and precariousness in everyday life. In the first section of this chapter, I present a broad-ranging overview of the evidence that connects precarity to health among young people. Next, I consider three issues relating to precarity and health that have been investigated by physical education researchers. These are social media and health-related information, body image and body dissatisfaction, and social vulnerability. The purpose of this chapter is to bring together some of the empirical evidence of young people’s health and wellbeing and to establish its relationship with precarity and its correlates of poverty, multiple disadvantage, and socio-economic and environmental conditions.

Precarity, young people, and health and wellbeing: The evidence Empirical studies that consider the relationships between socio-economic conditions and health use a range of related concepts such as socio-economic position or status, social vulnerability, poverty, social class, and income

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inequality. In conditions of precarity, a number of additional issues accompany these socio-economic factors to affect young people’s health, such as parental unemployment, exposure to domestic violence, experience of abuse in childhood, level of mothers’ education, childhood bullying, crowded housing, and parental depression. This is not an exhaustive list of the often multiple deprivation young people living in precarity experience. The relationships of these factors to each other are complex and nuanced, as the studies I will review show. Nevertheless, a clear set of associations begin to emerge from this research that give substance to living in precarity and its health effects. Physical inactivity and young people’s health First of all, while as we will see, much of the data on the health effects of precarity relate to mental health, it is important not to lose sight of physical education’s traditional focus on physical activity and health. A review of Scottish Government’s 20 year strategy ‘Let’s Make Scotland More Active (LMSMA)’ (Scottish Executive, 2003) claimed that “physical inactivity remains one of Scotland’s major public health issues” (National Health Service Scotland, 2009, p.1). Research that has consistently demonstrated an association between physical inactivity and poor health (Webber et al., 2008) supports this strategy, and is based on the view that low levels of physical activity in adulthood is strongly influenced by physical activity levels in childhood. For example, a relationship has been posited between current and future levels of physical activity in at least two ways. One approach rests on tracking physical inactivity from childhood to adulthood (Trost, 2006; Raitakan et al., 1994). Another has focused on the extent to which educational and social capital at age 15 predicts physically active middle-aged individuals (Engström, 2008). Both approaches support the same conclusion, that childhood experience of regular physical activity is crucial to lifelong physical activity, and that social class and the sex of the individual along with a number of other factors play a highly influential part in this relationship. Within the pathogenic paradigm, physical inactivity is widely viewed as a risk factor for cardiovascular and other diseases (Janssen et al., 2016). Osteoporosis, once considered primarily a disease of the elderly, is now universally recognized to have paediatric antecedents (Faulkner & Bailey, 2007). A ‘social gradient’ in physical inactivity has been identified, with aspects of socio-economic position (SEP) such as education, household income and local area deprivation “all independently and strongly associated with inactivity” (Farrell et al., 2013, p.1). Bann et al. (2017) found SEP accounted consistently for large inequalities in the distribution of Body Mass Index (BMI, a proxy measure of obesity) across three generations born in the UK in 1946, 1958, and 1970. They noted also inequalities recorded in

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childhood widened progressively with age in all three cohorts, but were larger among more recently born generations of women from low SEP. Recent data from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) shows that in the UK girls are less physically active than boys in early adolescence and disparities increase up to and beyond the end of compulsory schooling (Townsend et al., 2015). In Scotland in 2016, only 36% of girls aged 13–15 met the recommended physical activity guidelines compared to 58% boys when school physical education was excluded. These percentages improved when school physical education was included, with 49% girls meeting the guidelines, though some way behind boys at 72% (Scottish Health Survey, 2016, table 3.6). In areas of multiple deprivation (as measured by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, SIMD), overall physical activity levels are lower for both males and females than their more affluent peers, with disparities between the sexes further accentuated (Scottish Government, 2015; Scottish Health Survey, 2016, table 3.7). Reinforcing the influence of poverty and sex on physical inactivity, and drawing on data from the Millennium Cohort Study, Kelly et al. (2017) found that 11 years old girls from the lowest income quintiles were twice as likely to have begun menstruation as girls from the highest income quintile have. They noted a range of consequent risks to health of early onset puberty for girls, including teenage pregnancy, poor mental health, and cardiovascular disease. Dwyer et al. (2006) reported that adolescent girls perceive menstruation as a barrier to their participation in physical education, particularly in co-educational classes. While the relationship between physical inactivity and health is wellestablished and accepted within the health community, claims that obesity among children continues to rise are not supported by the empirical data (Gard, 2011). For example, Stamatakis et al. (2010) show that childhood obesity and overweight prevalence among school-age children in England has stabilized in recent years. However, a twist in this tale is that children from lower socio-economic strata have not benefited from this trend. A secondary analysis of data from the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) undertaken by Black et al. (2018) for the town of Doncaster in the north of England reported on the prevalence of obesity among Reception Year (age 4) and Year 6 (10–11 year old) pupils for the period spanning the ‘Great Recession’ in England, in this case comparing data from 2006–2007 and 2014–2015. They compared data from schools in the most deprived areas of Doncaster with those in the least deprived. They found the gap between children in the most and least deprived areas had grown, for Reception children in the most deprived schools by 2.53% and for Year 6 children by 2.26%. They note that while the prevalence of obesity among school-aged children in England had plateaued during this period, the situation for children living in poverty had worsened compared to their less deprived peers.

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These data establish the importance of physical inactivity as a major factor in poor health among adults and children, while the trends in increasing prevalence of obesity as one outcome of physical inactivity appear to be affecting young people living in poverty disproportionately. Moreover, the studies cited show that the relationship children establish with physical activity in childhood strongly influences adult behaviour. Socio-economic position and the sex of individuals are key determinants of engagement in physical activity, with girls and women from poorer sections of society less likely to be physically active on a regular basis and more likely, as a consequence, to experience a range of health-related problems. Mental health and young people Complementing this focus on physical inactivity and health, recent research has explored the effects of precarity on the mental health of young people. This research reveals a wide range of mental health issues relating to unemployment, poverty, and multiple-deprivation. In one study, Frasquilho et al. (2017) drew on Portuguese data from the Health Behaviour of School Children (HBSC) study on the wellbeing of adolescents living with unemployed parents. They reported detrimental effects on the wellbeing of both girls and boys, though girls from lower socio-economic families reported more negative emotional wellbeing related to parental unemployment than boys. Also using HBSC data, in this case from 40 countries, Elgar et al. (2017) found a strong association between early-life income inequality and reduced health and wellbeing in adolescence, particularly among girls. Similar findings are reported by Sheikh (2018). Based on analysis of data from the Tromso study, a longitudinal project in Norway initiated in 1974, Sheikh (2018) reported that low socio-economic status and the experience of abuse in childhood were strongly associated with higher risk of chronic conditions later in life, including asthma, bronchitis, and psychiatric disorders. Bullying is one prevalent and ubiquitous form of childhood abuse. In 2016, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in the UK reported that 25, 740 Childline (telephone) counselling sessions with children in 2015/16 were about bullying. In another study using HBSC data, Cosma et al. (2017) investigated the relationship of bullying to changing associations with mental wellbeing in Scottish adolescents, between 1994 and 2014. They found that bullying victimization increased over this period, with bullied girls (though not boys) reporting being less happy and confident, thus strengthening the association between bullying, sex, and poor mental and emotional wellbeing. Brimblecombe et al. (2018) used the 1958 British birth cohort data to reveal that childhood bullying had long-term economic impact on individuals. Men and women bullied in childhood were more likely than those not bullied to be unemployed, and

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have little economic capital in the form of accumulated wealth, for example through home-ownership and savings. Focussing on Scottish data relating to perceptions of body size from the HBSC study, Whitehead et al. (2018) found that relative to young people who perceived their body to be ‘about right’, those who perceived themselves as overweight reported decreasing confidence, decreasing happiness, and increasing symptoms for mental illness. Girls who reported they were overweight were the least happy and most prone to mental health issues. In another recent study, Kenny et al. (2017) investigated the relationship between cyberbullying and friendship dynamics on adolescent body dissatisfaction. They found that adolescent girls were three times more likely than boys to report that they were ‘fat’. Those who reported themselves to be fat were twice as likely to suffer cyberbulling than those who did not. The clear conclusion from this analysis is that cyberbullying is a gendered activity with more girls than boys being bullied online, but also that body dissatisfaction through bullying can be mediated by strong friendships. The focus for bullying on young people’s perceptions of body shape sends a clear signal to physical educators that this issue is their business. We explore this issue of body image in more detail later in this chapter. Growing up in precarity can have a lifelong effect on health and wellbeing. Sonego et al. (2018) draw on data from a study in Madrid on intimate partner violence to show that the children of abused women are at greater risk of mental health problems later in life than those whose mothers are not abused. While exposure to domestic violence impacted negatively on both boys and girls, girls’ experiences were more strongly associated with mental health and behavioural problems, and hyperactivity. Anderson (2018) investigated the extent to which precarity in childhood may be responsible for limiting social mobility due to mental health and behavioural problems in adolescence. Analysing data from the UK National Child Development Study, which provides measures of socio-economic deprivation and childhood adversities, he found that for adolescents from the most disadvantaged backgrounds including low-income and crowded housing the relationship between behavioural problems and reduced social mobility increased by up to 50% compared to less deprived peers. Reporting results from a 2012 Health Survey in Scania, Sweden, Lindstrom and Rosvall (2018) showed that economic stress experienced in childhood is associated with self-reported suicide thoughts and suicide attempts in the general adult population. Jofre-Bonet et al. (2018) explored the health effects of the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008 in England using data from the Health Survey for England 2001– 2013. They found trends that contradict normative expectations from a pathogenic perspective but that may be explained by salutogenic perspective on precarity. They report a decrease in risky behaviours such as number of cigarettes smoked and amount of alcohol consumed. At the same time, there was an increase in the occurrence of obesity, consumption of medicines, and

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reporting of diabetes and mental health issues. These trends were accentuated for those with less education and for women. The authors’ explanation for these contradictory trends was the ‘uncertainty and negative expectations’ the recession itself generated. In other words, living in precarity made people ill even though they engaged in less risky health-related behaviour. Moore et al.’s (2017) study of school composition, school culture, and socio-economic inequalities in young people’s health drew on HBSC data from Wales. These researchers expose an important nuance of the differential health experiences for wealthier and poorer children. Attending schools that were generally affluent, poorer children fared worse in terms of health and wellbeing than they did when they attended schools where the majority of children were poor. They conclude that affluent schools are more unequal than poorer schools across a range of health behaviours, and that attending a more affluent school lowered young people from poorer families’ subjective wellbeing. They identify staff–student relationships as the key mechanism to explain this finding, in particular stronger pastoral care systems in schools serving poorer children. This short overview of some of the most recent empirical data available on the relationships between precarity and its correlates and young people’s health and wellbeing reveals a number of issues. The first is that there does appear to be strong empirical support for the arguments of Bourdieu, Berlant, Standing, and others that living in precarity has a detrimental effect on health, and that precarity impacts on the health of young people. Poverty is a key factor in this relationship, though the characteristics of precarity, such as anger, anxiety, anomie, and alienation exacerbate the impact of economic and other resource-based factors. Moreover, these studies show that the situation for the most multiply-deprived groups is getting worse, at least since 2008 and the worldwide economic recession, and that women and girls are regularly and more severely affected than men and boys. A second issue is that the relationships between precarity, health and wellbeing, and young people is highly nuanced. There are complex relationships between precarity and particular aspects of health. Those aspects of health the studies investigated include diabetes, obesity, asthma, and also hyperactivity, behavioural problems, depression, decreased confidence and unhappiness. In other words, precarity impacts on the whole person, not on any one single aspect of health, but variably and differently among individuals and communities. This holistic view of young people is a signal feature of a salutogenic concept of health (Antonovsky, 1996). Moreover, and also consistent with salutogenesis, there are variations within as well as between locales and social groups. The highly nuanced nature of the relationship between precarity, health, and young people means that we can only with great care and much qualification make generalizations. Moreover, we cannot assume that one-

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size-fits-all physical education programs or single-issue programs such as increasing MVPA are adequate responses to this complex situation. These studies taken together begin to establish an empirical base to arguments about the relationship between precarity and young people’s health and wellbeing. In the next part of this chapter, I want to consider three issues that relate more specifically to the work of health and physical educators, social media and health-related information, body image, and social vulnerability. These issues provide more detail on the nature of precarity and its impact on young people’s lives in general and on their health and wellbeing more particularly.

The internet, social media, health, and young people The internet and the uses of social media more particularly are ubiquitous features of everyday life. For many people it is difficult to imagine life without internet access, and without the accompanying devices of mobile phone, tablet, and laptop. Not surprisingly, given the pervasiveness of digital technology, it is increasingly impacting on health and wellbeing, most obviously through apps and wearable devices, and less obviously as a means of finding health-related information (Goodyear & Armour, 2019). In this latter respect, in a nationally representative survey of over 1,100 English and Spanish speaking US teenagers aged 13–18, Wartella et al. (2016) discovered that among all media, the internet was the primary source of health information for these young people. Within this context of prevalent internet use, one in ten young people in this study reported they got ‘a lot’ of health information from social media sites. A recent UK study of over 1,300 13–18 year olds and 35 adult stakeholders focused specifically on young people’s uses of social media for health-related information, using an online survey, classroom activities, focus groups and interviews (Goodyear & Armour, 2019). Drawing on data from this study, Goodyear, Armour and Wood (2018) report that just over half of the young people they surveyed accessed health-related information on social media, with just under a half of these claiming this had had a positive impact on their health, with around a quarter responding that the impact was for them negative. Both studies suggest that while young people are often sceptical of health messages and products on the internet and social media in particular, there is a tension in the discourse around adolescents’ social media use between benefit and risk. This tension emerges as a prominent theme in much of the research on this topic. For example, Goodyear et al. (2018) note that young people have very different and more positive views than adults on the uses and benefits of social media. They point out that the public discourse around risk may lead adults to miss some potential benefits to health of social media use. Consistent with this point and taking a salutogenic perspective, Quennerstedt (2019) sees social media as a health resource. He

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acknowledges there are risks, but argues that these are different from the risks typically identified by adults. Other researchers have argued that while social media may provide opportunities for accessing health-related information, young people lack the critical health literacy skills to make accurate judgements of the value of health information (Cusak et al., 2017; Dudley et al., 2019). Researchers also report the potential for serious harm of internet use generally (Marchant et al., 2017), social media and mental health in particular (Frith, 2017), social media addiction (Webb & Wasilick, 2015), and negative effects on for example body image (Andsager, 2014). According to Goodyear et al. (2018), there have been methodological and theoretical constraints on research into young people’s social media use. Too few studies have placed young people themselves at the centre of the research, and few have focused on the pedagogical potential of social media, as a tool for learning. In this respect, along with Rich (2019), they see social media as a form of public pedagogy. Given the varieties of social media, they argue for a new way of thinking about pedagogy that accounts for the relationship between the user and the particular functionalities of social media (Casey, Goodyear & Armour, 2017). They suggest that content is particularly important in this relationship since it migrates across digital media forms and sites, taking on different meanings in different contexts. They are interested, in particular, in users’ dynamic interaction with content and its production and circulation. Goodyear et al. (2018) identify five forms of content on social media young people viewed as health-related: automatically sourced; suggested or recommended; peer content; likes; and reputable content. They outline each in detail in separate case studies built on the data from their project (Goodyear & Armour, 2019). The first, second, and fourth forms of content were features of the functionality of social media, and sometimes produced information that young people said they knew wasn’t intended for their agegroup and so was mostly inappropriate. This content became available to them because of the networks they belonged to, reflecting other people’s preferences and searches, and in the case of likes, as a means of affirmation of choices. Peer content was created by young people themselves, often taking the form of selfies and made available for the purpose of comparison. Of the five types of content, reputable content was most trusted because it came from official organisations like the National Health Service and Sport England, from celebrities, and from major brands. They make the point that all five forms of content influenced young people affectively, making them feel good or bad about themselves, and also often promoting and confirming common sense assumptions about health. Goodyear et al. argue that in contrast to the risk and control discourse of adults, young people on the whole view social media positively and are, indeed, often knowledgeable and discerning users and generators of material in their own right. Indeed, Enright and Gard (2019) argue that young people

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should be at the centre of the creation of their own digital media as a form of ‘digital democracy’. Along with Enright and Gard (2019) and Quennerstedt (2019), Goodyear et al. (2018) propose social media can be a powerful source of health-related information for young people. This said, they also acknowledge there is evidence, in their data, of young people finding themselves in vulnerable situations, where rather than being in control of social media, social media was controlling them. Marchant et al. (2017) support this finding, arguing there is significant potential for harm from online behaviour (normalization, triggering, competition, and contagion) as well as the potential to exploit its benefits (crisis support, reduction of social isolation, delivery of therapy, and outreach). They (Marchant et al.) also note that young people appear to be increasingly using social media to communicate distress, particularly to peers. One of the key findings of the US study by Wartella et al. (2016) is that there are substantial technology and health differences, a ‘digital divide’, between young people from low-income families (earning less than US $25,000 per year) compared to their more affluent peers. This finding amplifies the studies we noted earlier in this chapter concerning the social gradient in the prevalence of physical inactivity and mental health problems among young people. Wartella et al. report that young people in the lowerincome category were considerably more likely to have faced a significant health issue in their family, and saw the threat of poor health as of personal significance to them more than their better-off peers. At the same time, the poorer youth were less likely to experience a health education program at their schools or to have access to a smart phone, laptop or tablet, where, Wartella et al. (2016) report, there was a 17–26 percentage difference. These data raise an important point, which is that ‘young people’ or ‘youth’ cannot be treated as a homogenous category in research or policy. This research shows that there is no such thing as ‘young people’ as a uniform category that suits one-size-fits-all solutions to social media use, nor to health and wellbeing. Gard (2004), for example, has been a vociferous critic of the obesity lobby’s insistence that ‘everyone everywhere’ is at risk of becoming obese. He is right to be critical because this is not so. As the studies we cited earlier showed, children living in multiple-deprivation have a considerably greater risk of becoming obese than their less deprived peers (Black et al., 2018; Bromley et al., 2017; Stamatakis et al., 2010). Like obesity, neither is the risk of harm from social media use uniform. Young people from all parts of society experience similar hazards in everyday life, but not equally. Indeed the methodology of constructing the case studies in Goodyear & Armour’s (2019) edited book to create ‘individuals’ who typify particular ways of engaging with social media makes this point clearly. A key message is that young people use and experience social media differently. In attempting to account for the variable ways in which young people interact with and respond to social media’s messages, Goodyear et al. (2018)

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thus argue for an adaptive pedagogical framework that places content at its core. This framework also acknowledges young people’s self-positioning in networks and other digital communities, and the moral and ideological messages embedded in social media (Casey, 2019), which result in particular behaviours and understandings. This work has important implications for critical pedagogy since they see much of the pedagogical work of social media as a tool for health promotion within the affective domain while retaining a focus on cognitive skills at the centre of such approaches as critical health literacy. A considerable challenge for teachers, parents, and health workers, within a ‘digital democracy’, is how to support young people discriminate between useful and harmful health-related information. How, in short, do they become critical consumers of the metaphors social media produce (Bergsma & Carney, 2008; Dudley et al., 2019)? Can young people in their diversity learn to decode metaphors? Can they learn to see through fake or misleading advertising? Can they become aware of alternatives to the narrow range of information social media feeds them? Who is best placed to help young people, particularly when they think their teachers or parents don’t understand the challenges they face? Is there a role for schools and for physical education in particular to use social media for the better health and wellbeing of young people? (Kirk, 2019).

Body image, health and wellbeing A matter of considerable relevance to physical educators is the relationship between young people’s body image and health and wellbeing. Writers regularly observe that physical education is one of only a few areas of the school curriculum in which the body is the primary medium of learning (Armour, 1999; Standal, 2015; Stolz, 2014). Body image emerged as a psychosocial concept in the research literature around the 1930s. According to Gallagher (2005), the concept has been much misunderstood. Gallagher points out that body image and body schema are often used interchangeably in the literature, but that they refer to different aspects of embodied experience. Standal (2015) offers an interpretation of Gallagher’s distinction, from phenomenological and pedagogical perspectives. He proposes that the body schema operates at a reflexive level most of the time, below the level of awareness, although it is nevertheless part of our intentional movements. It appears automatic, particularly in highly skilled sports performers and dancers, but cannot be completely automatic because we are able to modify already learned movements in novel situations and to learn to move in new ways. Body image exists at a higher level of awareness than the body schema, and is concerned with our attention to our bodies and parts of our bodies as objects. It is this sense of body image that is common to the (mainly psychological) research literature where, according to Kerner et al. (2018a), body image is the image we form of ourselves. In this research tradition, body image has

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two components. The first is perceptual, and concerns our estimates of our body shape and size. The second is attitudinal, and refers to levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with these estimates of shape and size. Disturbances to body image, particularly when attitudes swing away from satisfaction towards dissatisfaction, have been linked to depression, eating disorders and physical inactivity (Smolak, 2004). While some studies suggest body image disturbance is more likely to affect females than males, Kerner et al. (2018c) note that similar proportions of girls and boys are affected, though in different ways. They found that girls tended to report a desire to be thinner than they think they are. Some boys also report wishing to be thinner, but a majority said they want to be bigger than they currently think they are, in terms of being more muscular. It would appear then that body image is gendered in ways that reflect some stereotypical social norms, often represented in media, a point we will return to below (Gorely et al., 2003). Kerner et al. (2018a) also note a distinction within the psychological literature between trait components of body image disturbance, which are relatively enduring and cross-contexts, and state components, which are sensitive to proximal events. They point out that we know very little about how school physical education impacts on state components of body image disturbance. Kerner et al. (2018a) identify a number of proximal events in physical education that might cause body image disturbance towards dissatisfaction. Learning in physical education is largely a public process, in so far as pupils are constantly visible to each other as they attempt to master skills or to exercise (Walseth et al., 2018). The public nature of physical education can lead to social scrutiny by peers. In an activist intervention in Glasgow schools, adolescent girls reported experiencing ridicule and embarrassment in co-ed classes with boys, and also fear of being judged by other girls (Kirk et al., 2018). Another proximal event in physical education that might trigger body image disturbance is the experience of the changing room, where pupils are required to undress in front of others (O’Donovan & Kirk, 2008). Exposure of the body can happen in physical education in other ways, for example through wearing particular clothing and in particular activities such as swimming (Flintoff & Scraton, 2001) and yoga (Kirk et al., 2018). Of course, young people come to physical education classes with many historical experiences that have shaped their respective body images and, so, with more or less body image satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The extent to which these proximal events in physical education classes might cause some degree of body disturbance is highly dependent on these historical experiences. Kerner et al. (2018b) discovered a reciprocal relationship between levels of body image satisfaction or dissatisfaction and experiences of physical education. Pupils with higher state body satisfaction were more likely to report that they enjoyed physical education and that, moreover, this experience stimulated them to engage in physical activities outside of school. As a

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corollary, those with lower state body satisfaction were less likely than the more satisfied pupils to enjoy physical education and indeed more likely to be amotivated towards physical education. As a further corollary, Kerner et al., (2018b) found that when pupils’ perceptions of their own physical competence in physical education was considered, there was a strong association between feeling competent and being satisfied with your own body image. This is an important finding, because it suggests there may be a reciprocal relationship between positive body image and actual as well as perceived physical competence. As such, providing opportunities for young people to learn physical skills remains an important task for physical education teachers (Stodden et al., 2008). Where pupils ridicule, judge, and disrespect others as they participate in physical education lessons, teachers can exercise some degree of influence over the construction and maintenance of the classroom environment (Lamb et al., 2018). Moreover, issues of clothing for physical education have been debated at length in public and professional forums, and many teachers have acted to ensure that girls are allowed to wear appropriate, comfortable and modest clothing (Flintoff & Scraton, 2001). Proximal events in class are one way in which physical education might influence body image. Oliver’s (1999) research showed how (what the psychologists call) the trait components of body image get constructed through girls’ (in this case) consumption of and interaction with various media, including magazines, movies, and television. Over time, these experiences of media representations of bodies, in particular, but also within the peer group, family, and school generally, establish norms of body ideals associated with femininities (and masculinities), ethnicities, and sub-cultural groups such as ‘sporty girls’ and ‘girly girls’ (Oliver et al., 2009). Oliver recognized that school physical education also offered opportunities to involve girls in analysing and deconstructing their favourite media images, in order to reveal some of the ways advertisers manipulate their body image perceptions and attitudes, often to manufacture tastes, desires, and preferences in order to sell particular products (Oliver, 2001). This groundbreaking activist work proposed a task for physical educators is to assist girls learn more about the social construction of their bodies and experiences of embodiment by learning to identify, name, critique, and negotiate or transform barriers to being physical active (Oliver & Kirk, 2015). There are lessons here for the development of a critical pedagogy that can address the challenges presented by social media and digital technology use more broadly, as mentioned earlier in this chapter. The challenge of this work has been taken up in various studies (Azzarito, 2010; Fisette, 2011). In one study that drew on and sought to develop Oliver’s work, O’Brien et al. (2008) reported on an intervention that aimed to combine the regular experience of practical physical activity learning with social critique of forces that encouraged girls to view appearance-based

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attributes as most important in defining who they are. They examined the effects of an eight-week, ‘girl-friendly’ physical and health education module on self-objectification and social physique anxiety among a group of Irish girls. The purpose of the module was to do ‘body work’ at a practical level, but also to engage students in critical inquiry about the body in contemporary society. They found that the girls in the experimental condition decreased the priority they placed on the objectifying attribute of sex appeal and increased the priority they placed on two competence attributes, health and strength. However, for girls in the control condition who received their regular physical education classes, the objectifying, appearance-based attributes tended to become more important, while fitness became significantly less important. Results from the control group also showed significant increases in social physique anxiety. O’Brien et al. concluded that it seems traditional, sport technique-based forms of physical education may actually be doing more harm than good with regards to altering girls’ self-objectifying tendencies where their body image depends on their appearance and attractiveness rather than their physical competence, strength, and wellbeing. We consider Oliver’s work and others influenced by her activist approach in more detail in Chapter 8 in relation to critical pedagogies of affect. We noted in the previous section that body image may be impacted negatively by young people’s experiences of social media. We noted in this section Oliver’s work with adolescent girls analysing and deconstructing media images of female bodies in magazines. Oliver’s research predates the widespread prevalence of social media. In this relatively recently emerging and developing context, Andsager (2014) argues for the importance of identifying the ways in which social media can be differentiated from traditional media in order to understand its potentially powerful influence on shaping body image. She proposes that better understanding these differences is a basis for the development of media literacy training to increase scepticism and reduce the detrimental effects of messages. Perloff (2014) notes five differentiating features of social media in relation to the construction of body image norms and stereotypes. A first feature is interactivity, where receivers of social media message often are also producers. As producers, a second feature is enhanced autonomy and personal agency of users. A third feature is that social media is highly personalized in contrast to more traditional media forms, to the extent that individuals bond with technology. Another aspect of this feature is the extent of self-disclosure social media facilities, with all of its attendant opportunities and risks. Fourth, social media creates spaces that offer an experience of reality which is often removed from actual everyday life. A fifth differentiating feature is that social media offers possibilities of linking with like-minded others, creating shifting communities who share information, images, and more. Research on social media and body image is emerging and under development. Fardouly and Vartanian’s (2016) review of research showed social

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media use is associated with body image concerns among young women and men, with the few available longitudinal studies suggesting that this association may strengthen over time. They note that appearance comparisons play a prominent role in the relationship between social media and body image. As we noted earlier in this chapter, Kenny et al. (2017) found in a study of cyberbullying that girls who reported themselves to be fat were twice as likely to suffer cyberbullying than those who did not, and that cyberbullying is a gendered activity with more girls than boys being bullied online. The case studies in Goodyear and Armour’s (2019) collection reveal that aspects of body image are prominent in young people’s concerns. Jess’s case involves her in ‘faking it’, where she uses Photoshop to alter the image of herself that she makes available on social media. Leah is concerned about the harm ‘skinny girls’ do to others when they post images of themselves. Yaz searches for information on body-building, often encountering images and practices that are not appropriate to someone his age. Even though body image is not the primary topic of these case studies, and even though the young people are often sceptical of images (for example) being ‘real’, the body nevertheless comes through prominently in their narratives about their social media use. Despite disputes around and misunderstandings of the meaning of body image (Gallagher, 2005), the concept has been an important focus for (mainly psychological) research linking body image disturbance and dissatisfaction to eating disorders, physical inactivity and depression. Its importance for physical educators should be clear, particularly in relation to physical education’s contribution to young people’s health and wellbeing, given the very public display of the body as young people learn to move and move to learn. As Kerner et al.’s research shows, there are proximal events in physical education lessons what can influence body image, sometimes positively when physical educators design learning experiences to assist girls (in the case of Oliver’s work and O’Brien et al.’s study) to challenge appearance as a basis for their body image. Body image is also constructed socially, over time, and through a wide range of experiences, among which is young people’s engagements with the media, and social media in particular. In the social media context, we might note that concerns about young people’s vulnerability often come up, particularly when adults discuss social media (Goodyear & Armour, 2019). Indeed this notion of vulnerability appears regularly in the literature on young people, precarity, and health and wellbeing.

Social vulnerability, health, and young people To be vulnerable is to be liable to be hurt, physically or emotionally. The term social vulnerability suggests the sources of potential hurt go beyond individuals and are to be found in communities and in society more broadly. In Luguetti et al.’s (2017b) study of socially vulnerable youth in a community

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soccer program in Santos, Brazil, young people were exposed to a range of negative influences such as drug trafficking, alcohol and substance abuse, organized crime, domestic violence as well as violence on the streets, grinding poverty, and poor health. The situation in Brazil, as in many other countries of the Global South, offer different pressures on the lives of young people to those living in the Global North. Nevertheless, their social vulnerability has its roots in precarity. Luguetti, who carried out the fieldwork for the project, tells about a training session in the program that reveals just how vulnerable are the young people. I saw the last training session, and I want to talk to you (Kim). I have never seen a training session like that. It was so crazy…I counted at least 8 drug addicts on the soccer field. The field has a big wall, and the drug addicts sit on the wall and watch the game. They consume drugs while the boys are playing. It is happening in the open where everyone can see it! Suddenly, a drug dealer was coming in our direction. Coach Anthony and the boys were sitting in the middle of the field. This drug dealer came towards us and he looked at us. He signalled to greet Anthony, a kind of ok. I was really nervous and unprotected. I felt vulnerable and unable to defend the boys. Anthony responded to the drug dealer with the same sign. KIM: What does that sign mean? CARLA: I think it is in relation to power, something like ‘I know that you’re here’. I think the drug dealer was trying to show us who was in charge! A guy was completely drunk, whistling and calling for the end of the training session. ‘STOP, STOP,’ he was screaming. The training sessions were always crazy like this. Remember what happened last week? I saw two policemen come running onto the field carrying big guns. The small kids were so afraid! It was the first time I’d seen this police approach. The coaches have talked about this, but I had never seen it. It was crazy how kids run everywhere. Everybody was afraid. The cops were shouting ‘GO, GO, GO!’. The action of police was crazy! (Luguetti et al. 2017b, p.497) CARLA:

The presence of drug users, a dealer, and police close to the soccer field where the young people were training shows how proximal danger is. The factors that feed these young people’s social vulnerability, while not always as dramatic as a drugs raid at the soccer field, are nevertheless ever-present. Early in her project, Luguetti noticed that some of the young people listened enthusiastically to funk music. Later, she encouraged some of them to write some song lyrics, which provide further insights into these ever-present conditions of precarity. I had no bathroom I had nothing to eat

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My house had wooden walls I’m preparing for the worst I may be arrested or may be killed. (Funk songs created by the boys, in Luguetti et al., 2017b, p.337) Luguetti et al. (2017b, p.337) commented that “the lyrics they selected communicated far more than what they had previously told us about the barriers they experience that impact their abilities to play sport”. The sports facility at one of the project venues was not just dangerous at times due to the presence of drug dealers and users. The grass pitch had been built on a waste dump, and some of the young people began to report that they had contracted a rash after falling on the pitch. Luguetti et al. (2017b, p.503) observed: Lack of sanitation was a barrier the boys experienced in the sports project. After several sessions, the boys started to talk about not wanting to get sick because of the dirty grass. They also talked about the smell of the open canals next to the soccer field. A final insight from Luguetti et al.’s project was the extent to which the program provided the young people with a sense of community and a place where they were cared for. In conversation with the coaches, Luguetti ask them to tell her about the boys: The vast majority have no financial stability. In relation to the psychological, they have low self-esteem. They receive little affection. I have never met many of their parents and I realized that they do not care about the project. RIAN: I think demonstrations of affection are essential to the boys. I use to hug them. I realize this is necessary for them. Many times, I’m walking by and one of them comes and hugs me. DANIEL: Their lives are hard. We realized that they have absent families and they live in inadequate houses. (Luguetti et al., 2017b, p.501) NEO:

As a concept, social vulnerability has been emerging in the research literature in physical education and sport, and clearly has close associations with precarity. Because it uses an activist approach, Luguetti et al.’s work provides insights into the challenges the young people in the community soccer program face in their everyday lives. The extent to which any school-based or after school program of physical education can support them to deal with the challenges precarity presents to them is a key question, to be explored further in Chapter 8.

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Conclusion The purpose of this chapter has been to explore the evidence of the effects of precarity and its correlates on the health and wellbeing of young people. Theorizing around precarity is often complex and dense and does not always refer to or use empirical research. It has been important, then, to ground accounts of the nature of precarity and health in the available empirical evidence. This chapter has brought together a considerable wealth of recent data, suggesting researchers of health and wellbeing recognize the importance of understanding how precarity affects young people. As the selective and all too brief overview of these studies shows, there does appear to be strong empirical support for the argument that precarity has a detrimental effect on the health of young people. We also noted from these studies that the relationships between precarity, health, and wellbeing and young people is highly nuanced. There are complex relationships between precarity and particular aspects of health, with variability between and within social groups and locations. This means that it is inappropriate to generalize about the effects of precarity on health and wellbeing. This insight is consistent with the accounts of precarity by scholars such as Standing (2016) and Berlant (2011) that the precariat consists of a diverse collection of individuals and communities. Any common or shared features of precarity’s effects on health and wellbeing must be carefully contextualized. This also means that ‘young people’ or ‘youth’ cannot be treated as a homogenous category in research or policy. There is no such thing as ‘young people’ as a uniform category that would suit one-size-fits-all pedagogical solutions, a matter I take up in detail in Chapter 6. With these caveats about nuance, complexity, and diversity stated, we discovered from the empirical studies reviewed that we can, nevertheless, speak with some confidence of a social gradient in relation to the prevalence of physical inactivity among social groups. There appears to be sound evidence that young people who live in precarity are less likely to be physically active routinely and regularly as young people who live in more affluent and stable circumstances. Moreover, this social gradient also contains a ‘gender gradient’, whereby girls and women living in precarity are more likely to be physically inactive than boys and men. Similarly, when we considered social media as a source of health-related information, we learned that there exists a digital divide between young people from low-income families compared to their more affluent peers. At the same time, some young people living in precarity are more likely to have experienced a serious health issue in their families but to have less access to health information either at school or through digital technology. While these data are less likely to report explicitly on race and ethnicity, ability and locale, there is evidence elsewhere that shows people living in precarity are most likely to be Black or a member of an ethnic minority group, are recent immigrants from the Global South and may, due to health and wellbeing problems, be disabled (Azzarito et al.,

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2017; Fitzpatrick, 2013; Oliver et al., 2009). The intersectionality of precarity will become increasingly evident in the chapters that follow. The importance of body image for health and wellbeing should be clear, as should its significance for physical education given the very public display of the body as young people learn to move and move to learn. High levels of body image dissatisfaction are closely linked to physical inactivity, eating disorders and unhappiness in young people. Once again, young people living in precarity are less likely than their more affluent peers to have such issues recognized. If and when they are recognized, they are also less likely to have access to support to help them deal with body image and related problems. Beside the life and death issues that are uncovered by the emerging research on social vulnerability from countries of the Global South, such as Brazil, body image may appear to be a ‘first world problem’. Such comparisons should not, however, be made. The research shows that body image dissatisfaction is a source of deep unhappiness for many young people, in particular girls, and thus should feature prominently in the pedagogies physical educators develop for working with young people living in precarity. The pervasiveness of digital media, and social media particularly, and their uses by some young people to source information about health and wellbeing, present particular challenges for schools and for physical and health education. As we saw in Goodyear and colleagues’ work, young people generally have a positive and discerning view of social media as a means of accessing information. However, research also provides evidence of the potential for harm social media presents, not just in terms of providing inaccurate or inappropriate information, but also for shaping beliefs and desires. Young people living in precarity may have limited access to support for their health and wellbeing, while also being more likely to experience health issues themselves. Schools may be one of the few places where such support is available to them, bearing in mind the concerns raised earlier in this chapter and in Chapter 2 about the marketization of education and schools’ capture by the neoliberal agenda. In this context, teachers who have a specific remit for young people’s health and wellbeing are of central importance. At the same time, young people are sceptical of adults’ abilities to understand social media’s significance to them and to be a source of advice on social media issues (Kirk, 2019). Given the potential importance of schools for young people living in precarity, who their teachers are, and their suitability to support young people’s health and wellbeing, become matters of considerable significance. In the next chapter, we consider physical education teachers and teaching in precarity.

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Andsager, J. L. (2014) Research directions in social media and body image, Sex Roles, 71, 407–413. Antonovsky, A. (1996) The salutogenic model as a theory to guide health promotion, Health Promotion International, 11(1), 11–18. Armour, KM. (1999) The case for a body‐focus in education and physical education, Sport, Education and Society, 4(1), 5–15. Azzarito, L. (2010) Future girls, transcendent femininities and new pedagogies: Toward girls’ hybrid bodies?, Sport, Education and Society, 15, 261–275, doi:10.1080/ 13573322.2010.493307. Azzarito, L., Macdonald, D., Dagkas, S. and Fisette, J. (2017) Revitalizing the physical education social-justice agenda in the global era: Where do we go from here?, Quest, 69(2), 205–219, doi:10.1080/00336297.2016.1176935. Bann, D., Johnson, W., Li, L., Kuh, D. and Hardy, R. (2017) Socioeconomic inequalities in body mass index across adulthood: Coordinated analyses of individual participant data from three British birth cohort studies initiated in 1946, 1958 and 1970, PLoS Med, 14(1), 1–20. Bergsma, L. J. and Carney, M. E. (2008) Effectiveness of health-promoting media literacy education: A systematic review, Health Education Research, 23(3), 522–542. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brimblecombe, N., Evans-Lacko, S., Knapp, M., King, D., Takizawab, R., Maughan, B. and Arseneault, L. (2018) Long term economic impact associated with childhood bullying victimisation, Social Science and Medicine, 208, 134–141. Black, M., Joseph, V., Mott, L. and Maheswaran, R. (2018) Increasing inequality in childhood obesity in primary schools in a northern English town, Public Health, 158, 9–14. Bromley, C., Tod, E. and McCartney, G. (2017) Obesity and health inequalities in Scotland: Summary report, Edinburgh: NHS Health Scotland. Casey, A. (2019) The role of internet memes in shaping young people’s health-related social media interactions, pp. 162–176, in V. A. Goodyear and K. M. Armour (eds) Young People, Social Media and Health, London: Routledge. Casey, A., Goodyear, V. A. and Armour, K. M. (2017) Rethinking the relationship between pedagogy, technology and learning in health and physical education, Sport, Education and Society, 22(2), 288–304. Cosma, A., Whitehead, R., Neville, F., Currie, D. and Inchley, J. (2017) Trends in bullying victimization in Scottish adolescents 1994–2014: Changing associations with mental well-being, International Journal of Public Health, 62(6), 639–646, doi:10.1007/s00038–00017–0965–0966. Cusak, L., Desha, L. N., Del MarC. B. and Hoffman, T. C. (2017) A qualitative study exploring high school students’ understanding of, and attitudes towards, health information and claims, Health Expectations, 20, 1163–1171. Dudley, D., Van Bergen, P., McMaugh, A. and Mackenzie, E. (2019) The role of social media in developing young people’s health literacy, pp. 147–161, in V. A. Goodyear and K. M. Armour (eds) Young People, Social Media and Health, London: Routledge. Elgar, F. J., Gariépy, G., Torsheim, T. and Currie, C. (2017) Early-life income inequality and adolescent health and well-being, Social Science & Medicine, 174, 197–208, doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.10.014.

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52 Young people and precarity Enright, E. and Gard, M. (2019) Young people, social media and digital democracy: Towards a participatory foundation for health and physical education’s engagement with digital technologies, pp. 177–192, in V. A. Goodyear and K. M. Armour (eds) Young People, Social Media and Health, London: Routledge. Dwyer, J. J. M., Allison, R., Goldenberg, E. R., Fein, A. J.et al. (2006) Adolescent girls’ perceived barriers to participation in physical activity, Adolescence, Spring, 75–89. Engström, L-M. (2008) Who is physically active? Cultural capital and sports participation from adolescence to middle age: A 38-year follow-up study, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 13(4), 319–343. Fairclough, S. and Stratton, G. (2005) ‘Physical education makes you fit and healthy’: Physical education’s contribution to young people’s physical activity levels, Health Education Research, 20(1), 14–23. Fardouly, J. and Vartanian, L. R. (2016) Social media and body image concerns: Current research and future directions, Current Opinion in Psychology, 9, 1–5. Farrell, L., Hollingsworth, B., Propper, C. and Shields, M. A. (2013) The socioeconomic gradient in physical inactivity in England, CMPO Working Paper Series No. 13/311. Faulkner, R. A. and Bailey, D. A. (2007) Osteoporosis: A pediatric concern, Medicine and Sport Science, 51, 1–12. Fisette, J. L. (2011) Exploring how girls navigate their embodied identities in physical education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 16(2), 179–196. Fitzpatrick, K. (2013) Critical Pedagogy, Physical Education and Urban Schooling, New York: Peter Lang. Flintoff, A. and Scraton, S. (2001) Stepping into leisure? Young women’s perceptions of active lifestyles and their experiences of school physical education, Sport, Education and Society, 6(1), 5–21. Frasquilho, D., Matos, M. D., Marques, A., Gaspar, T. and Caldas-De-Almeida, J. (2017) Factors affecting the well-being of adolescents living with unemployed parents in times of economic recession: Findings from the Portuguese HBSC study, Public Health, 143, 17–24. Frith, E. (2017). Social media and children’s mental health: A review of the evidence. Accessed from: https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Social-Media_ Mental-Health_EPI-Report.pdf. Gallagher, S. (2005) How the Body Shapes the Mind, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gard, M. (2011) The End of the Obesity Epidemic, London: Routledge. Gard, M. (2004) An elephant in the room and a bridge too far, or physical education and the ‘obesity epidemic’, pp. 68–82, in J. Evans, B. Davies and J. Wright (eds) Body Knowledge and Control: Studies in the sociology of physical education and health, London: Routledge. Gard, M. and Wright, J. (2005) The Obesity Epidemic: Science, morality and ideology, London: Routledge. Goodyear, V. A. and Armour, K. M. (2019, eds) Young People, Social Media and Health, London: Routledge. Goodyear, V. A., Armour, K. M. and Wood, H. (2018) Young people and their engagement with health-related social media: New perspectives, Sport, Education and Society, doi:10.1080/13573322.2017.1423464.

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Gorely, T., Holroyd, R. and Kirk, D. (2003) Muscularity, the habitus and the social construction of gender: Towards a gender relevant physical education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(4), 429–448. Janssen, X., Mann, K. D., Basterfield, L., Parkinson, K. N., Pearce, M. S., Reilly, J. K., Adamson, A. J. and Reilly, J. J. (2016) Development of sedentary behavior across childhood and adolescence: Longitudinal analysis of the Gateshead Millennium Study, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 13, 88. Jofre-Bonet, M., Serra-Sastre, V. and Vandoros, S. (2018) The impact of the Great Recession on health-related risk factors, behaviour and outcomes in England, Social Science and Medicine, 197, 213–225. Kelly, Y., Zilanawala, A., Sacker, A.et al. (2017) Early puberty in 11-year-old girls: Millennium Cohort Study findings, Archives of Disease in Childhood, 102, 232–237. Kenny, U., Sullivan, L., Callaghan, M., Molcho, M. and Kelly, C. (2017) The relationship between cyberbullying and friendship dynamics on adolescent body dissatisfaction: A cross-sectional study, Journal of Health Psychology, doi:10.1177/ 1359105316684939. Kerner, C., Haerens, L. and Kirk, D. (2018a) Understanding body image in physical education: Current knowledge and future directions, European Physical Education Review, 24(2), 255–265. Kerner, C., Haerens, L. and Kirk, D. (2018b) Body dissatisfaction, perceptions of competence and lesson content in physical education, Journal of School Health, 88, 576–582. Kerner, C., Kirk, D., De Meester, A. and Haerens, L. (2018c) Why is physical education more stimulating for pupils who are more satisfied with their own body?, Health Education Journal, 78(3), doi:10.1177/0017896918798420. Kirk, D. (2019) School physical education and learning about health: Pedagogical strategies for using social media, pp. 86–100, in V. A. Goodyear and K. M. Armour (eds) Young People, Social Media and Health, London: Routledge. Kirk, D. (2010) Physical Education Futures, London: Routledge. Kirk, D. (2006) The ‘obesity crisis’ and school physical education, Sport, Education and Society, 11(2), 121–133. Kirk, D., Lamb, C. A., Oliver, K. L. with Ewing-Day, R., Fleming, C., Loch, A. and Smedley, V. (2018) Balancing prescription with teacher and pupil agency: Spaces for manoeuvre within a pedagogical model for working with adolescent girls, The Curriculum Journal, 29(2), 219–237. Lamb, C. A., Oliver, K. L. and Kirk, D. (2018) ‘Go for it girl’: Adolescent girls’ responses to the implementation of an activist approach in a core physical education programme, Sport, Education and Society, 23(8), 799–811, doi:10.1080/ 13573322.2018.1484724. Lindstrom, M. and Rovall, M. (2018) Economic stress in childhood and suicide thoughts and suicide attempts: A population-based study among adults, Public Health, 163, 42–45. Luguetti, C., Oliver, K. L., Dantas, L. and Kirk, D. (2017a) ‘The life of crime does not pay; stop and think!’: The process of co-constructing a prototype pedagogical model of sport for working with youth from socially vulnerable backgrounds, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 22(4), 329–348, doi:10.1080/17408989.2016.1203887. Luguetti, C., Oliver, K. L., Kirk, D. and Dantas, L. (2017b) Exploring an activist approach to working with boys from socially vulnerable backgrounds in a sport context, Sport, Education and Society, 17(4), 493–510, doi:10.1080/13573322.2015.1054274.

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54 Young people and precarity Marchant, A., Hawton, K., Stewart, A., Montgomery, P., Singaravelu, V., Lloyd, K., Purdy, N., Daine, K. and John, A. (2017) A systematic review of the relationship between internet use, self-harm and suicidal behaviour in young people: The good, the bad and the unknown, PLoS ONE, 12(8), e0181722. McKenzie, T. L. and Lounsbery, M. A. (2009) School physical education: The pill not taken, American Journal of Lifestyle Education, 3, 219–225. Moore, G. F., Littlecott, H. J., Evans, R., Murphy, S., Hewitt, G. and Fletcher, A. (2017) School composition, school culture and socioeconomic inequalities in young people’s health: Multi-level analysis of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) survey in Wales, British Educational Research Journal, 43(2), 310–329, doi:10.1002/berj.3265. National Health Service Scotland (2009) Five year review of ‘Lets Make Scotland More Active’: A strategy for physical activity, Edinburgh: NHS Health Scotland. O’Brien, J., Martin Ginis, K. A. and Kirk, D. (2008) The effects of a body-focused physical and health education module on self-objectification and social physical anxiety in Irish girls, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 27(1), 116–125. O’Donovan, T. M. and Kirk, D. (2008) Reconceptualizing student motivation in physical education: An examination of what resources are valued by pre-adolescent girls in contemporary society, European Physical Education Review, 14(1), 1–22. Oliver, K. L. (2001) Images of the body from popular culture: Engaging adolescent girls in critical inquiry, Sport, Education and Society, 6(2), 143–164, doi:10.1080/ 13573320120084245. Oliver, K. L. (1999) Adolescent girls’ body-narratives: Learning to desire and create a ‘fashionable’ image, Teachers College Record, 101(2), 220–246. Oliver, K. L. and Kirk, D. (2015) Girls, Gender and Physical Education: An activist approach, London: Routledge. Oliver, K. L., Hamzeh, M. and McCaughtry, N. (2009) Girly girls can play games / Las niñas pueden jugar tambien: Co-creating a curriculum of possibilities with fifthgrade girls, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 28, 90–110. Perloff, R. M. (2014) Social media effects on young women’s body image concerns: Theoretical perspectives and an agenda for research, Sex Roles, 71, 363–377. Quennerstedt, M. (2019) Social media as a health resource: A salutogenic perspective, pp. 71–85, in V. A. Goodyear and K. M. Armour (eds) Young People, Social Media and Health, London: Routledge. Raitakan, O. T., Porkka, K. V. K., Taimela, S., Telama, R., Räsänen, L. and Vllkari, J. S. (1994) Effects of persistent physical activity and inactivity on coronary risk factors in children and young adults: The cardiovascular risk in young Finns study, American Journal of Epidemiology, 140(3), 195–205. Rich, E. (2019) Young people and public pedagogies of the body within social media, pp. 132–146, in V. A. Goodyear and K. M. Armour (eds) Young People, Social Media and Health, London: Routledge. Scottish Executive (2003) Lets Make Scotland More Active: A strategy for physical activity, Edinburgh: The Stationery Office Bookshop. Scottish Government (2015) http://www.scotpho.org.uk/behaviour/physical-activity/ data/adults. Scottish Health Survey (2016) http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2017/10/7371/down loads.

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Sheikh, M. A. (2018) Childhood adversities and chronic conditions: examination of mediators, recall bias and age at diagnosis, International Journal of Public Health, 63 (2), 181–192. Smolak, L. (2004) Body image in children and adolescents: Where do we go from here?, Body Image, 1, 15–28. Sonego, M., Pichiule, M., Gandarillas, A., Polo, C. and Ordob, M. (2018) Mental health in girls and boys exposed to intimate partner violence, Public Health, 164, 26–29. Stamatakis, E., Wardle, J. and Cole, T. J. (2010) Childhood obesity and overweight prevalence trends in England: Evidence for growing socio-economic disparities, International Journal of Obesity, 34(1), 1–14. Standal, O. F. (2015) Phenomenology and Pedagogy in Physical Education, London: Routledge. Standing, G. (2016) The Precariat: The new dangerous class, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Stodden, D. F., Goodway, J. D., Langendorfer, S. J., Roberton, M. A., Rudisill, M. E., Garcia, C. and Garcia, L. E. (2008) A developmental perspective on the role of motor skills competence in physical activity: An emergent relationship, Quest, 60, 290–306. Stolz, S. (2014) The Philosophy of Physical Education: A new perspective, London: Routledge. Townsend, N., Wickramasinghe, K., Williams, J., Bhatnagar, P. and Rayner, M. (2015) Physical Activity Statistics 2015, British Heart Foundation: London. Trost, S. G. (2006) Public health and physical education, pp. 163–187, in D. Kirk, D. Macdonald and M. O’Sullivan (eds) The Handbook of Physical Education, London: Sage. Walseth, K., Engebretsen, B. and Elvebakk, L. (2018) Meaningful experiences in PE for all students: An activist research approach, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 23(3), 235–249, doi:10.1080/17408989.2018.1429590. Wartella, E., Rideout, V., Montague, H., Beaudoin-Ryan, L. and Lauricella, A. (2016) Teens, health, and technology: A national survey, Media and Communications, 4(3), 12–23. Webb, M. C. and Wasilick, L. M. (2015) Addressing social media addiction via the classroom, Journal of Health Education Teaching Techniques, 2(3), 1–9. Webber, L. S., Catellier, D. J., Lytle, L. A.et al. (2008). Promoting physical activity in middle school girls: Trial of Activity for Adolescent Girls, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 34(3), 173–184. Whitehead, R. D., Cosma, A., Cecil, J., Currie, C., Currie, D., Neville, F. and Inchley, J. (2018) Trends in the perceived body size of adolescent males and females in Scotland, 1990–2014: Changing associations with mental well-being, International Journal of Public Health, 63(1), 69–80.

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Chapter 4

The occupational socialization of physical education teachers, stress and burnout, and precarity

Introduction In the face of precarity and of its malign effects on young people’s health and wellbeing, at least two challenges confront teachers. The first is their preparedness and suitability to teach young people experiencing precarity. The second is the effects of precarity on teachers themselves as workers. Two questions follow. How well suited and prepared are physical education teachers to contribute to a wider educational agenda that includes physical and mental health and wellbeing. How well prepared and supported are teachers if they themselves experience precarity and, thus, stress and burnout? In order to answer these questions, we first need to understand the emerging context in which teachers and teaching are embedded. Each challenge is strongly influenced by neoliberal practices in education systems and in schools. The first challenge is perhaps the more obvious of the two. If the precariat is increasing in size, then it is likely that teachers of physical education are going to encounter and teach more young people living in precarity. While the rise of precarity most affects schools located in disadvantaged areas, schools in all but the most affluent communities will have some underserved young people. Moore et al.’s (2017) study drawing on HBSC data from Wales showed that poorer children attending relatively affluent schools fare worse in terms of health and wellbeing than they do when they attend schools where the majority of children are poor. The pupils’ relationships with their teachers emerged as part of the explanation of this finding along with the pastoral care support structures within schools serving disadvantaged neighbourhoods. In such circumstances, and given physical education teachers’ express remit to teach for health and wellbeing set out in recent curriculum policies in state and national jurisdictions across the Global North, a particular responsibility and challenge emerges. In order to gain some traction on questions of teacher’ suitability and preparedness to meet this first challenge, I will spend some time in the first part of this chapter considering what we can learn from the research

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literature on the occupational socialization of physical educators. This line of research is enjoying something of a renaissance, perhaps not unrelated to the rise of precarity and the pressures on schools that it exerts, following a productive beginning in the late 1970s through to the 1990s. Serendipitously, research from two periods in time some 30 years apart allows us to make comparisons of the kinds of recruits attracted to teaching physical education and trends in the socialization into teaching process. A second challenge may be somewhat less obvious, but as neoliberal practices continue to take hold in public education, it is no less confronting than the first. This is the possibility that teachers themselves may experience precarity and become members of the precariat. Some time ago, Macdonald and Tinning (1995) warned of a trend towards the proletarianization of physical education teaching resulting from de-professionalization and marginalization as PETE programs became increasingly narrowly technical and utilitarian. Recently, and affecting teachers more broadly, we can detect a trend towards the precaritization of teaching. In general terms, the erosion of funding for public schools has been a concern for some time in countries of the Global North (Apple, 2013; Ball, 2017). Against a backdrop of the replacement of schools in local authority control with privately run academy chains in England, it is now commonplace to read reports in the daily press of insufficient funds to run essential programs (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/ school-funding-cuts-budget-pressure-department-for-education-dfeworth-less-campaign-a8554496.html). In a June 2018 issue of the Guardian newspaper, Donna Ferguson reported that in April of that year the charity Education Support Partnership experienced a 157% rise in applications for grants from homeless and hungry teachers compared to the same month the previous year, with one teacher quoted as saying that “It was humbling. I never thought it would happen to me”. (https://www.theguardian.com/educa tion/2018/jun/26/teachers-on-charity-homeless-hungry) The circumstances that led teachers in England to apply to a charity for help were most often illness and housing costs. However, Andrews and Lawrence (2018) reported that publicly funded schools, in particular those maintained by local government, were experiencing severe funding pressure to the extent that significant numbers of primary and secondary schools had in 2016–2017 spent more than their income, some for two years in a row. While the proportions varied for different parts of England, in some areas the number of secondary schools had between 2014 and 2017 trebled, up to 26%. Meanwhile the proportion of primary schools in deficit had also increased to 7%. These kinds of pressures on public school budgets in England can lead, inevitably, to insecure employment for teachers. Teachers who leave are not replaced, teachers on short-term contracts or supply teachers are used to shore up gaps, and class sizes increase. In Britain, austerity has led to an erosion of teachers’ wages which is making recruitment to some secondary

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school subjects increasingly difficult, with significant teacher shortages in for example maths, physics and home economics. In Scotland in January 2019, the teacher unions threatened national strike action for better pay, a battle they won in March 2019. In the US, there are ready examples of uncertainty and instability within the teaching force. McWilliams (2016) reports on the effects of the ‘doomsday budget’ of March 2013 in the public school system in Philadelphia which saw cuts of 3,500 support staff and US$300m to an already distressed system that had been under-resourced for years. As well as detrimentally affecting the school population of low-income students of colour, McWilliams provides an account of how teachers experienced neoliberal policies at ‘ground-zero’ as they became both complicit in and resistant to the implementation of these policies. In another example from the US that I mentioned briefly in Chapter 2, Lincove et al. (2018) report on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, where the Orleans Parish school district sacked over 4,000 teachers as part of a transition to a market-based system of charter schools. Around one third of the predominantly Black and locally trained teacher workforce was re-hired but on inferior contracts, notably without a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that had been a commonplace protection in the past. Over six hundred new hires joined the Orleans workforce after the mass sackings, completely changing the demographic. Over 60% of the new teachers were White, only 16% held Master degrees compared with almost 70% of the pre-Katrina cohort, and over half of the new teachers were educated outside Louisiana. Lincove et al. (2018, p.193) summarize: “the relative job security of the pre-Katrina CBA was replaced by a decentralized system with multiple employers, few employment protections, uncertain compensation, and greater test-based accountability”. As Ball (2017) shows, the academy schools in England have adopted similar practices in relation to teachers’ contracts, pay, and conditions. In these examples we can see clear evidence of the precaritization of teaching. These two challenges taken together raise additional questions about teacher suitability and preparedness for precarity. In Chapters 2 and 3 we have already rehearsed the psychological down-side of precarity, with the four As of anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation. There is a high probability that teachers of physical education will work with growing numbers of young people who live in underserved communities and who experience precarity. Working in schools that may themselves be underfunded and resourced presents challenges that are potentially stressful. The literature on teacher stress and burnout, which will form the second main section of this chapter, provides important and revealing insights into the pressures that lead teachers to leave teaching or transition out into some other subfield of education. Supporting young people who live in precarity is one of several factors that may influence burnout and attrition. If we add to this that teachers themselves are experiencing insecure and unstable employment, are themselves members of the

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precariat, there appears to be considerable potential for stress and trauma among teachers. This chapter considers these two challenges of precarity for teachers of physical education who, within a configuration of physical education-ashealth-promotion I outline later in this book, have an explicit remit to support the health and wellbeing of young people in their schools. In the next section, I will explore the research literature on occupational socialization into teaching physical education, drawing on material from the beginning of this line of research in the late 1970s and a more recent return to this topic since the early-2010s. Data from this body of literature suggests that physical education teachers may not be prepared through their socialization into teaching to work with young people experiencing precarity and, indeed, many may have backgrounds, values and interests that do not suit them for this work (Barker, 2019). Next, I will consider what we know from research about teacher burnout and secondary traumatic stress, particularly when teachers work in what are known in the US as ‘urban schools’, schools that regularly have high proportions of young people from underserved communities including low-income Black and ethnic minority young people. This literature provides evidence of the experiences teachers might expect to have as precarity becomes more prevalent. In the chapter’s conclusion, I reflect on what we have learned from this research on what needs to be done to support teachers for the experience of precarity among their pupils and also, personally, as workers.

Teacher socialization: Becoming a physical education teacher Consideration of teacher socialization into teaching is a good place to start in better understanding how teachers might be prepared for precarity in their working lives. There is a research literature on this process that provides insights into the kinds of people who become physical educators, their values and interests on entering into this occupation, their experiences of the job once they are teaching in schools, and their career paths as remainers, leavers, or migrators (Mäkelä et al., 2014). The notion of socialization into teaching encompasses but also valuably moves beyond formal teacher education processes, such as initial undergraduate or postgraduate programs that provide certification for teaching. In addition, it allows us to consider the prior experiences of individuals who enter such programs, the workplace as a space for socialization, and the nature of the job itself. The edited collection on Teacher Socialization in Physical Education by Richards and Gaudreault (2017, eds) and a recent special issue of the Journal of Teaching in Physical Education (Woods & Ayers, 2019) marks the consolidation of interest in research on the process of becoming a physical educator. This line of research first appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s with its foundational scholars Alison Dewar, Hal Lawson, and Tom

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Templin, among others. A historical overview chapter by Templin et al. (2017) in the Richards and Gaudreault book reveals a research program that spans four decades, though attention to socialization has waxed and waned over this period. In the foundational phase, Locke and Massengale (1978) considered role conflict in physical educators between teaching and coaching, which was to prove an enduring topic of interest in the US (Richards & Templin, 2012). Meanwhile Templin (1979) focused on occupational socialization and the student teacher. Lawson (1986, 1983) provided an early theoretical framework that was to endure over subsequent decades (CurtnerSmith, 2017). This framework consisted of an anticipatory socialization phase known as acculturation, a professional socialization phase of initial teacher education, and an organizational socialization phase of workplace and continuing professional learning. Within this theoretical framework, Templin et al. show the steady development of topics and methods from the initial foundational work. Within the acculturation phase, researchers discovered the subjective warrant, a perceptual framework through which prospective recruits view an occupation in comparison to their own abilities and interests that may suit them to do that particular kind of work. This research found that the subjective warrant is a decisive factor in an individual’s decision to embark on a career in physical education (eg. Dewar, 1983; Lawson, 1983; Dewar & Lawson, 1984) and also influences the subsequent career path teachers follow. In this early work, the subjective warrant consisted of a love of sport, a desire to work with people, and a commitment to provide a service to society. Some research also found recruits, in particular males, were attracted to PETE programs because of their perception of modest academic entry requirements, that the work wasn’t deskbound, and that it offered long holidays and demanded little preparation (Dewar, 1983). This early research on the acculturation phase discovered, moreover, that the majority of recruits to careers in physical education teaching were in their early 20s, able-bodied, middle-class, and conservative in their views of physical education and its purpose in schools. Invariably, though rarely stated explicitly, they were also predominantly White. During the professional socialization phase, researchers considered the influence of physical education teacher education courses and, in particular, students’ experiences of teaching in schools as part of their professional preparation (Tannehill, 1989). Studies of organizational socialization investigated the experiences of new teachers as their entered the workforce (O’Sullivan, 1989), and the lives and careers of veteran teachers (Sparkes, Templin & Schempp, 1993), including the reasons why teachers leave teaching (Macdonald, Hutchins & Madden, 1994). This line of socialization research was already reaching a level of maturity by the time Templin and Schempp (1989) produced the first edited collection of papers in the late 1980s, Socialization into Physical Education: Learning to Teach.

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Templin et al. (2017) note that socialization research during the 1990s focused almost entirely on the professional socialization phase of initial teacher education, with many physical education teacher educators studying their own students (Curtner-Smith, 1996; Schempp & Graber, 1992). This was often justified on the basis that research conducted during the foundational phase had shown physical education teacher education was ineffective in influencing the beliefs and values student teachers had developed during their acculturation. Researchers also studied the organizational phase during the 1990s as scholars considered how workplace conditions influenced teachers’ motivations, frustrations, and career development (Armour & Jones, 1998; Locke, 1992). Noteworthy for our purposes here, Templin et al. (2017) comment that few physical education teacher education programs at this time sought to prepare teachers for work in schools as socio-political organizations, even though a literature on critical pedagogy was emerging at this time. While student teachers were encouraged in some university programs to be innovative teachers of physical education, Brown (1999) found that much of the socialization process reflected and reinforced the value of student teachers’ own experiences of school physical education. The net effect was complicity in and reproduction of the existing normative order in physical education teaching, in which the status quo prevailed. Any radical or innovative impulses that may have been internalized by student teachers during their professional socialization were quickly ‘washed-out’ in the first few years of teaching as new teachers sought to fit into the workplace culture in schools (Curtner-Smith, 1997). Richards and Gaudreault (2017) observe that research on physical education teacher socialization appeared to lose momentum in the 2000s, linked to a growth of the field of physical education pedagogy research generally and to a shift more specifically to a diverse range of topics including learners and learning (Kirk, Macdonald & O’Sullivan, 2006; Kirk & Haerens, 2014). While not couched in terms of socialization theory as it had been defined in the 1980s, an interest in teachers and teachers continued nevertheless, with prominent lines of research on teachers’ continuing professional development (Armour & Yelling, 2004), teachers’ learning to teach innovative pedagogical models, such as sport education (Curtner-Smith & Sofo, 2004), and teacher emotions (McCaughtry, 2004). Since around 2010, however, the revival of an interest in teacher socialization as a theoretical underpinning for research on teachers (Richards & Templin, 2011) presaged the Richards and Gaudreault (2017, eds) book and the JTPE special issue. While the 17 chapters in the 2017 book offer many new insights into the teacher socialization process in physical education, there also appear to be a number of remarkably enduring features of becoming a physical educator. We learn from this work that socialization research continues to have a strong US orientation, with 13 of the 17 chapters written by US-based authors, something Richards (2015) and Richards and Gaudreault (2017)

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themselves note. As such, the three phases of the socialization process first identified by Lawson in the early 1980s appear to remain intact, as evidenced by Templin et al.’s (2017) historical overview, as does an assumption that prospective teachers of physical education are generally recruited directly from school (Curtner-Smith, 2017). Relatedly, the substance of the subjective warrant first outlined in the early 1980s appears to continue to be a major motivating device for individuals to become physical education teachers, and has salience in other countries too, including Germany (Merrem & Curtner-Smith, 2019), the UK (Green, 2002), and Australia (Macdonald, Abernethy & Bramich, 1998). Related to the subjective warrant, researchers have had an ongoing concern over recruits and novice teachers being oriented to coaching over teaching (Curtner-Smith, 2017). This is a feature specific to high schools and their place in the sports system in the US (Lawson, 2017), and the potential for role conflict between these orientations remains, an issue first addressed in the late 1970s (Locke & Massengale, 1978). Graber et al. (2017) note that at least since the early 1990s physical education teacher education was recognized as a dialectical process and, as such, student teachers possess a degree of agency during their preservice courses. This dialectical character presents opportunities for teacher educators to influence their students. Nevertheless, physical education teacher education continues to struggle to change students’ dispositions developed during the acculturation phase (Brown & Evans, 2004) and to prepare novice teachers for the realities of schools as workplaces (Richards, Templin & Gaudreault, 2013). The professional socialization of physical educators is not helped, either, by aspects of the organizational socialization phase and, in particular, the workplace culture of schools. We noted earlier the finding in the unlikely event that physical education teacher education courses have an influence on student teachers to be innovative, this ‘washes-out’ in the first few years of teaching (Curtner-Smith, 1997). From an Australian perspective, Rossi et al.’s (2017) research on the physical education staffroom as a socializing space shows that for novices to survive their school placements and first teaching posts they must engage in particular kinds of behaviour, including jokes, pranks, and banter, that are required to fit in. They argue that much of this behaviour runs counter to the values student teachers experience at the university, in this case the University of Queensland, based on principles of social justice (Rossi et al., 2015). Thorburn and Gray (2010) comment that as initial teacher education increasingly takes the form of one to two year postgraduate certificate programs where teachers spend up to half of their time in schools, as it does in the UK, partnerships between schools and universities become more and more important. As they note, however, it may be difficult to find common ground between teachers and university teacher educators as the formers’ views of what beginning teachers need to know may be shaped by the

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immediate demands of the workplace, while university physical education teacher educators are increasingly required to produce publishable research. While these teacher and teacher educator orientations need not necessarily be at odds, teacher socialization research reveals that there are nevertheless considerable tensions to be managed during the professional socialization phase. In their discussions of the future of socialization research, both Lawson (2017) and Richards and Gaudreault (2017) recognize that the monopoly physical educators have enjoyed within the occupational socialization cycle is now and has been for some time under threat from competing interests, including sport and public health. Writing specifically about the situation in the US, Templin, Graber and Richards (2019) argue that a crisis in the supply of physical education teachers is immanent, with enrolments in initial teacher education programs falling alarmingly, not just in physical education but in teaching more broadly. As neoliberal practices of marketization of education and privatization of schools continue apace, bringing with them less job security, lower wages, and higher workloads, it may be that teaching as an occupation becomes less attractive still. Changes within the higher education field, such as the rise of kinesiology/sport and exercise sciences, so clearly mapped out in Lawson’s research program (Lawson, 2007, 1991), have moved physical education teacher education from the core of the higher education field prior to the 1980s to its margins since (Kirk, 2000). For prospective recruits, there are now options available for careers in sportrelated occupations not even imagined when researchers carried out the first socialization studies. These and a number of other trends now raise questions about the relevance of socialization research that is too firmly rooted in the 1980s foundational work. For example, the extent to which the substance of the subjective warrant for physical education teaching continues to be applicable, with love of sport as a central pillar, is now questionable, considering the negative ways in which physical education teaching is presented to the general public (McCullick et al., 2012; Ives & Kirk, 2012). This public image adds to difficulties with recruitment and retention (Templin et al., 2019). In some countries, such as the Australia, Ireland, and the UK, there has been no drop in popularity of a career in physical education teaching to mirror the US situation. Nevertheless, undergraduate degrees in initial teacher education have greatly reduced in numbers since 2010. These courses have been replaced by one year postgraduate certificate programs, thus attracting recruits from an older and more diverse demographic than may formerly have been the case (Thorburn & Gray, 2010). As Thorburn and Gray note, student teachers enter the one-year initial teacher education programs with a variety of undergraduate experiences of sport and exercise sciences, sport development, sport coaching, and physical activity and health. They question the extent to which these degree programs are fit for purpose in the

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preparation of physical education teachers, though of course they are thinking of the multi-activity programs of traditional physical education, organized by sport and physical activity-based content. At the same time, in some countries, such as Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the UK, high stakes examinations are now embedded in physical education in middle and senior high school, with a consequent requirement for different teacher knowledge and skill sets and a less marginal status in schools. Other developments, such as the policy shift to physical education-as-health-promotion (McCuaig & Quennerstedt, 2018), and the growing influence of physical literacy as a basis for the renewal of physical education programs, offer further challenges to teacher preparation (Flemons, Diffey & Cunliffe, 2018). Physical education as a ‘whitewashed’ occupation We noted Dewar and Lawson’s observation that many recruits to physical education teaching in the 1980s were young, able-bodied, sporty, and conservative in their values, and also predominantly White. Dewar (1990) comments that the situation of women in physical education teacher education programs in a Canadian university in the 1980s was only the most visible form of oppression since other groups who might also be oppressed had already been ‘selected-out’ of the program at the recruitment stage. In the late 1980s, Crase and Walker (1988) were among the first scholars to note the serious absence of Black and other ethnic minority teachers of physical education in US schools. They commented at this time that the Black physical educator was an ‘endangered species’. Smith (1993) argued in the early 1990s that a crisis was looming for physical education. Researchers were projecting a rise in the proportion of Black and ethnic minority children and youth attending schools in the US over the following decade which the small numbers of available Black teachers could not match. This meant these young people would not have the cultural role models Smith claimed they needed. Hodge and Stroot (1997) located this issue explicitly within the teacher socialization framework, arguing that little attention had been paid to the overwhelming Whiteness of physical education teachers by socialization researchers. Indeed, while some occupational socialization research has considered the gender, socio-economic status, and ethnicity of individuals who become physical education teachers (Placek et al., 1995), it is only recently that the demography of physical education teachers has become an explicit topic of investigation. Douglas and Halas (2013) revealed a lack of racial diversity in Canadian university faculties of kinesiology, where the majority of scholars, including physical education teacher educators, are White and middle class. They had to dig for this information since the Canadian government does not require citizens to provide data about race and ethnicity in exercises, such as the national census. They argue that this omission, in a nation growing

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increasingly diverse year-on-year, rests on a normative assumption that Canadians are White. In the US, Flory (2015) noted the rising ethnic diversity of urban public schools, where young people of colour represent 47% of enrolled students. Yet, she notes, the majority of physical education teachers are White and middle class and are unlikely to have attended an urban school as students themselves. In England, an average of 25% of pupils attending state funded secondary schools come from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds, a figure that is slightly higher for primary schools. However, according to Dowling and Flintoff (2018), since young people from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds are more likely to be concentrated in multiply-deprived areas of big cities, the proportion of these young people in such schools compared to students who are White is likely to be much higher. In Norway, a similar situation exists whereby some urban schools have large overrepresentations of ‘immigrant’ students. Flintoff, Dowling and Fitzgerald (2015) note for England in 2007–2008 (the most recent figures available to them), less than 3% of recruits to physical education teacher education courses came from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds. Searching for an explanation for such low number, Flintoff et al. speculate that the embodied nature of physical education may be a factor. From an intersectional perspective that takes gender, race, ethnicity, social class, and able-bodiedness together, she proposed that physical education may reproduce and reinforce stereotypes of embodiment. Arguing in similar fashion to Douglas and Halas, Dowling and Flintoff (2018) suggest that physical education policies in England and Norway are, effectively, ‘whitewashed’. They found Whiteness is made invisible and universalized. There is also an unspoken hierarchy in place which places Whiteness at the top. Developing their analysis, Flintoff and Dowling (2019) argue that while Norway and England have official policies that are antiracist, Whiteness is assumed as the norm. In England, and with new pressures to reduce immigration, some politicians have supported a culture in which ‘British values’ are required to be taught in schools. They claim that intersections of race and ethnicity with gender, class, and disability are commonly ignored in policy in both England and Norway, which has the effect of othering anyone who does not fit the norm of Whiteness and able-bodiedness, and leads inevitably to a deficit model of difference. Flintoff and Dowling (2019) point to physical education’s connection to sport, where racialization and othering of performers is common. In this context, they argue that teachers’ responses vary, in part because racism is systemic and institutionalized, and is experienced differently at the level of the individual. This variety of experience feeds colour-blindness in physical education, where teachers do not see race as an issue, making one teacher’s comment possible: “I just treat them all the same, really”. They acknowledge that the variety of ways teachers and pupils experience difference presents particular challenges for the development of explicitly antiracist practice in

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physical education and physical education teacher education. Despite important cultural, historical and economic differences between England and Norway, Flintoff and Dowling (2019) conclude there are striking continuities in physical education policy in terms of discussions of ‘our’ (White) shared physical cultural heritage. Flory (2016) reports that 50% of teachers in the US across all subject areas leave within their first five years, particularly teachers who begin careers in urban schools. She writes: Urban PE teachers may also face discrepancies between teacher and student cultural backgrounds. School populations across the US continue to diversify, yet, most teacher education candidates are White, middle-class females with Eurocentric vantage points (…) These teachers are likely to encounter students who are ethnically, culturally, and socioeconomically much different than themselves in urban schools. (…) We know little about how physical educators are prepared for teaching in urban schools. New teacher survival involves learning about the school environment, students, and being effective in that setting; early career urban PE teachers may not know how to navigate discrepancies between personal histories and the cultural backgrounds of their students. (Flory, 2016, p.431) In this context, Flory (2016) studied three White, middle-class teachers who had been working in urban schools for between four and six years. Their struggles to fit into this environment were accentuated through lack of sociocritical coursework during their university preparation, indoctrination into team sports, and poor facilities in the urban school environment for the kinds of sport-based physical education they offered. Flory notes that novice teachers are more likely to begin their careers in urban schools in some parts of the US since this is where teacher attrition and turnover is highest. Drawing on the occupational socialization literature, Flory reminds us that many young teachers embody values they were taught at school. She suggests the acculturation process ill-prepares them for teaching in environments different from those they know. What new teachers learn during the anticipatory socialization phase of socialization is powerful and enduring because its biographical (Brown, Morgan & Aldous, 2017). Because embodied values are internalized prior to beginning to teach, and because their own experience is so foreign to the urban schools they find themselves in, Flory argues that disruptive and disengaged student behaviour are a major source of teacher stress and burnout. As we noted in the introduction to this chapter, the rise of precarity increases the possibility that teachers may find themselves working in challenging school environments, such as those described by Flory. This work by Flory and others (Marttinen et al., 2019; Azzarito & Simon, 2017;

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Fitzpatrick, 2013; Curtner-Smith et al., 2001) who have studied urban schools provides a forewarning of what teachers can expect, as publicly funded schools serve increasingly diverse young people with chronic underfunding and diminishing resources. Any of these factors by themselves will be challenging enough for teachers. Taken together, there is clear potential for anxiety, stress, and trauma for both students and teachers. We need to have a good understanding, then, of the nature of teachers stress and burnout and their causes as we consider how to support teachers working in precarity.

Teacher stress, burnout, and attrition We noted Flory’s claim that around 50% of teachers in the US leave teaching within their first five years. This is a very high level of attrition compared to other countries, such as England, where attrition is on the rise but is around 11% (https://fullfact.org/education/teacher-retention-are-englands-tea chers-leaving/). Behind these figures lie widespread and regular reports in the media of high numbers of teachers experiencing depression and anxiety due to ‘pressures of the job’ (https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17286664.ha lf-of-teachers-experience-depression-and-anxiety-problems-amid-pressures-of -the-job/). A recent report in the Herald newspaper claimed that more than three-quarters of teachers in Scotland frequently experience work-related stress (https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17338604.more-than-three-qua rters-of-scots-teachers-frequently-feel-stressed/). The Guardian reported that work-related stress was behind an increasing number of teachers taking longterm sickness leave (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jan/11/ep idemic-of-stress-blamed-for-3750-teachers-on-longterm-sick-leave). A USA Today survey found that teachers’ mental health was badly affected by jobrelated stress (https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/30/survey-tea chers-mental-health-declining-amid-job-stress/811577001/). The situation of head teachers, in particular, is highlighted regularly, not only in terms of the difficulties of recruiting to these positions of responsibility in schools, but also the stress relating to dealing with violent parents, teacher redundancy, and tight budgets (https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/school-life/p rincipals-at-breaking-point-as-they-struggle-with-violent-parents-and-high-str ess/news-story/351316b2957182728b7c073577d415d8). The results of the surveys on which these press reports are based make dramatic headlines, though behind the sensationalism that often accompanies such reporting lie some truths about teaching as complex and challenging work. At the same time, they provide us with little detail about the conditions under which the teachers mentioned in these reports work, who they are and where their schools are located. Consistently, such reports point to rising workloads, disruptive student behaviours, and stagnant levels of pay to explain what appears to be an emerging crisis in teaching. In some

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countries, such as the US, the crisis might already be here (Flory, 2016; Templin et al., 2019). Amid calls to recruit more teachers, to provide alternative routes into teaching, to attract mature-age ‘career-changers’, to reduce bureaucracy, and to pay teachers higher salaries, physical education teachers are rarely if ever mentioned. Is this because there is no attrition from physical education teaching, or that physical educators do not experience stress? The relatively small research literature on physical education teacher stress, burnout, and attrition suggests that prevalence is relatively low compared with other subject areas, though there is considerable variation from country to country and locale to locale within countries. For example, Mäkelä et al. (2014) focused on attrition of just under 1,000 physical education teachers in Finland who graduated between 1980 and 2006. Attrition over this roughly 25 years period was 23%. While this figure might appear high, Mäkelä and colleagues note only 13% of this group actually left teaching altogether. The remaining 10% ‘migrated’ from teaching physical education to teaching another school subject, or to a teaching-related role, such as advisor, inspector or teacher educator. They noted an interesting pattern in teacher turnover among this group. Younger teachers (with 0–5 years’ experience) had a higher tendency to leave teaching completely, while older and more experienced teachers had a higher tendency to migrate. This pattern appears also in Macdonald’s (1999) review of teacher attrition research. She found that attrition is age-related and can be mapped on to a U-curve, high in the early years of teaching, stable in the middle, and then high again towards retirement. The extent to which Mäkelä et al.’s Finnish study is representative of other countries of the Global North is difficult to gauge. For instance, they argue that levels of physical education teacher attrition are lower for the developed countries of the Global North than countries that are ‘economically and socially unstable’. At the same time, they cite a paper by Macdonald, Hutchins, and Madden (1994) to suggest that physical education teacher attrition in Australia had been as high as 37% in the period studied. However, as this and other Australian studies at the time showed (Macdonald, 1995; Macdonald & Kirk, 1996), there were particular circumstances that explain these figures. The teachers who had graduated from the University of Queensland program were typically very highly qualified school leavers (among the top 13% annually of university intake, Macdonald and Kirk, 1996) who found a significant disparity between their expectations of the nature of physical education teaching and the reality of work in schools. This reality was accentuated for new teachers who were required to complete a period of ‘country-service’ in Queensland’s rural communities before they could be considered for a (more familiar and desirable) city posting. As Mäkelä et al. suggest, where attrition occurs, there are always situational factors accounting for some level of turnover that may differ from place to place. This is why social ecologies of schools, teachers’ work, and children-

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families are such important contributions to our understanding of nuanced variation in education systems (Wilcox et al., 2014). At the same time, the literature on attrition and burnout in physical education teaching does report some common features. As a case in point, this Australian example illustrates the importance of the congruence between the subjective warrants of recruits into teaching and their first teaching experience in making the decision to remain or leave. Perhaps one reason why there are relatively low levels of attrition in developed countries generally is that the subjective warrants of teachers who stay in teaching closely match the reality of their teaching experience. This would account for the U-curve, where younger teachers whose subjective warrant doesn’t match reality are more likely to leave in the first five years, as was the case with the Queensland graduates who had to complete country-service in rural schools. Other factors explain the upsurge in attrition, even migration, among older teachers who presumably felt comfortable enough to remain in teaching for a relatively long period of time. For instance, a Dutch study found that older physical education teachers may be more susceptible to burnout due to an increase in emotional exhaustion and decrease in personal accomplishment linked to the deterioration of their physical capabilities (Brouwers, Tomic & Boluijt, 2011). Where attrition does occur, to what extent are stress and burnout responsible, and which other factors might be at work? Mäkelä et al. (2014) note the strong link made in the research literature between stress and attrition. Macdonald (1999) revealed subject specific variations as well as state of the economy and other locale-based issues feeding attrition. She showed that conditions that affect service, external to the school, such as the economy and how teachers are perceived in the community, and conditions of service, such as pay, intensification of work, promotion prospects, class sizes, physical condition of schools, and student misbehaviour, are key to explaining teacher turnover. While Mäkelä et al. discuss a range of external economic factors affecting teacher decisions to leave teaching, none relate to precarity except their observation that in tough economic times teachers tend to not to give up their jobs. A small number of studies, mostly based on questionnaire data, have investigated the nature of burnout among physical education teachers. The choice by researchers of the term ‘burnout’ is in itself interesting, echoing physical education’s close affinity to sport, where this concept has been studied extensively among athletes and coaches. Googer et al. (2007) note the importance of the concept since it clearly relates to mental health, and its status as a colloquialism in professional sports with the vivid imagery it invokes. They also note that research on burnout in sport has been strongly influenced by studies of burnout at work, where emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced performance and personal accomplishment are key characteristics.

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In a study of Australian teachers, Spittle, Kremer, and Sullivan (2015) measured these three characteristics to report low to moderate levels of burnout. They found few differences according to sex and age, with younger male teachers more susceptible to burnout than other teachers. It is notable that these researchers had a questionnaire return rate of less than 20%, which may be an indicator of the sensitivity of this issue for teachers, associated as it is with mental health, even when their participation in the study was anonymous. In the US, Ješinová et al. (2014) studied job satisfaction and dissatisfaction among adapted physical education specialists. Dissatisfaction was conceptualized as a correlate of burnout and attrition. They found the highest levels of dissatisfaction relating to school and district policies, relationships with supervisors, and lack of teaching space. They noted with surprise that the severity of children’s disabilities and their heterogeneity were not major factors in dissatisfaction, suggesting these teachers had a vocational commitment to work with disabled young people. Koustelios and Tsigilis’s (2005) study of Greek physical education teachers also focused on burnout and job satisfaction. They found low levels of burnout among Greek teachers. Furthermore, like the teachers in Ješinová et al.’s study, the job itself was the primary source of satisfaction. Teachers who are satisfied with their jobs are less likely to feel emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and more likely to feel a sense of personal accomplishment, leading these researchers to posit a link between satisfaction and intrinsic motivation. Several studies have followed Koustelios and Tsigilis’s lead on this link between burnout and motivation. Whipp and Salin (2018) reported on the reasons Australian teachers give for staying in physical education. Framed by concepts from Self Determination Theory (SDT), they found that high scores on autonomy, competence, and relatedness predict strong intentions to stay in teaching. These intentions influence in turn a range of organizational and personal factors, echoing the findings of Mäkelä et al.’s (2014) study. Bartholomew et al. (2014) turned these relationships around to ask about the thwarting of the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, and job pressure. They discovered strong relationships between needs thwarting, increased job pressure and burnout. In a more recent study, Bartholomew et al. (2014) explored the relationship between controlling teacher behaviour and student motivation, while Shen et al. (2015) explored the relationship between teacher burnout and student motivation. Both studies found predictable relationships between controlling teaching behaviour on the one hand and emotional exhaustion on the other, in terms of thwarting student needs. In another study of teacher motivation, Abos et al. (2018) reported that amotivated teachers were at greatest risk of burnout, while those with controlled motivation were at high risk also. Moreover, they found that the quality of teachers’ motivation not only affects their own well-

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being at work but, predictably and as some of these studies show, also how they interact with their students. While these studies test statistically the strength of relationship between, for example, forms of motivation, burnout, and attrition, they tell us little about the myriad contextual factors that work on teacher wellbeing. Everyone has good days and bad days. Sometimes we know why, sometimes we don’t. Studies of the ecology of teacher stress would offer additional insights that would be valuable grounding for teacher professional learning programs. Emotional labour, trauma, and precarity Another factor influencing teacher burnout and attrition is the amount of emotional labour a teacher must carry out in order to do their job satisfactorily, particularly where they routinely encounter youth who are experiencing trauma in their lives (Caringi et al., 2015). In these circumstances, and like other members of what Lawson (1998) calls the ‘helping professions’ of social workers, counsellors, psychologists, and nurses, teachers may experience secondary traumatic stress (STS). Caringi, Lawson, and Devlin (2012) explain how social workers in child welfare organizations regularly and routinely encounter circumstances in which they must manage their own emotions in order to conduct themselves as professionals and thus support the young people. Some social workers develop professional personae that involve what Caringi et al. (2012) call ‘surface acting’, where they seek to distance themselves from their true feelings. These surface actors resolve, metaphorically and oftentimes literally, ‘to never take their work home’. While surface acting may provide social workers with some protection from STS, over time the cost of this negative emotional labour can lead to burnout since they don’t really believe in what they are doing. Deep acting, in contrast, involves the social worker in behaving in accordance with their beliefs, and thus involves positive emotional labour which, according to Caringi et al., is more likely than negative emotional labour to be sustainable. For members of the helping professions, where encounters with traumatized youth are routine, emotional labour is unavoidable. They elaborate: Emotional labor thus involves self-regulation in relation to organizational rules, professional norms, and personal goals. All in all, it can be classified as a kind of impression management. It takes special effort, often involves stress, and entails special skills and abilities. It is ‘work’ to the extent that it requires special efforts, especially when surface acting is the norm and negative emotional labor is present or highly probable. (Caringi et al., 2012, p.7) Lee (2019) is one of the few researchers in physical education who has studied emotional labour among physical education teachers. In a survey-based

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study in the US, he argued there is potential for emotional labour to occur among physical educators due to the public nature of their work, occupational tensions between teaching and coaching roles, and their marginal status in schools. He found significant relationships between negative emotional labour and teacher burnout and intention to leave teaching. Lee introduces a third construct, in addition to surface and deep acting, that he calls ‘genuine expression’, where teachers internalize organizational values so that they become their own. When teacher behaviour is a result of genuine expression, Lee proposes, teachers are more likely to be empathetic towards misbehaving or aggressive students and to work at building strong relationships with them. This work on emotional labour provides some additional insights into Flory’s claim that physical education teachers who survive in urban schools must have learned to maintain positive emotional labour so that their behaviour genuinely expresses their values. Lee’s account also resonates strongly with that of Hellison (1978) in his work with alienated youth, which we will come to in Chapter 8. Reflecting on the occupational socialization research, we learned recruits enter physical education teaching with strongly grounded biographies of experience, a habitus no less (Brown et al., 2017), a way of embodied being that expresses who they are and what they are about as physical educators. For White, middle-class, and able-bodied teachers to find themselves in schools where precarity is a way of life for many of their students, we can begin to imagine the inevitable challenges they will experience in terms of emotional labour and the clear possibility of STS. Referring to social workers, Caringi et al. (2012) argue that, since the possibility of developing STS can be anticipated within some child welfare settings, it is desirable to prepare workers to manage the inevitable emotional labour their work will entail. Significantly, this positive emotional labor can be facilitated and optimized if workers at all levels of the system are prepared for it (during preservice education and agency training) and when the agency provides follow-up assistances, social supports, and resources. Self-regulatory skills and abilities, for example, can be provided in these education programs with follow-up reinforcements and supports in the organization. (Caringi et al., 2012, p.7) Caringi et al.’s remarks echo Flory’s finding that few new teachers are prepared during their physical education teacher education programs for work in urban schools in the US, and Templin et al.’s (2017) observation that few programs in the US prepared teachers for work in schools as sociopolitical organizations. The extent to which physical education teacher education programs in other countries do attempt this preparation requires careful scrutiny, so that we might consider how best to support physical

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educators to work within the context of precarity (Philpot, Gerdin & Smith, 2019). At the same time, we must consider student teachers’ subjective warrants for teaching physical education, the workplace as a socialization space when they enter schools, the possibility of wash-out of any socially critical initial teacher education preparation, and the relationship between all of these factors and the culture of the schools in which they find employment.

Conclusion I began this chapter with the observation that an increasing prevalence of precarity presents at least two challenges to teachers of physical education. The first is their preparedness and suitability to teach young people experiencing precarity and the second the possible effects of precarity on teachers themselves as workers. The exploration of the research literature on socialization into teaching and teacher stress, burnout, and attrition suggests that collectively physical educators may struggle on both counts. The socialization literature tells us something of who physical educators are as an occupational group, with some features that appear to be consistent across a number of countries of the Global North. Many teachers are attracted to a career in physical education because of a prolonged period of anticipatory socialization in which they experienced success and enjoyment in physical education classes as pupils and often also in youth sports contexts. According to studies of the subjective warrant, their views of their own interests and abilities match closely with their perceptions of the nature of physical education teaching as an occupation. The research shows that the interests and values they hold as they enter the professional socialization phase of initial teacher education are already well-established and stable, and as such difficult to change. The workplace culture of physical education teaching, the staffroom in particular, reinforces these values and interests for many student teachers and newly qualified teachers, resulting in intergenerational reproduction of a particular view of school physical education and its purposes. This line of research thus provides valuable insights into the durability of physical education-as-sport techniques and of the multiactivity curriculum. This suggests that physical educators as an occupational group might not be supportive of a view of physical education-as-health promotion, which deals explicitly with the health and wellbeing of young people and with the particular problems they experience living in precarity. In terms of the first challenge, then, it would appear that many of the individuals attracted to the occupation of teaching physical education may not be well-suited to teach young people experiencing precarity. Most physical education teachers are from affluent backgrounds relative to young people who experience precarity, academically successful and able-bodied, with strong interests in sport and other physical activities. Many young people experiencing precarity live, by definition, in underserved and under

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resourced communities. Depending on specific location, a significant proportion are Black or from an ethnic minority, while the overwhelming majority of physical education teachers, regardless of location, are White. This research shows that physical education teachers as an occupational group not only share little in common with many of the young people they teach or may teach, they also lack the preparation in their initial teacher education to work successfully with such young people. Particularly in the US, teacher education programs have rarely included credits in socially critical studies. Even where university teacher education programs include teaching about social justice and are able to influence student teachers’ interests and values for physical education, the socialization research suggests these are often washed-out during teachers’ early experiences of physical education teaching as work. In terms of the second challenge, physical educators as an occupational group do not appear to suffer high levels of anxiety, STS and attrition compared with other subject areas or other helping professions though, as I noted, there are considerable variations from place to place. The research does show, however, that burnout and attrition are age-sensitive, with more teachers leaving in the first five years of work and then leaving or, more typically, migrating in later career. Reasons for leaving early vary, but the subjective warrant appears to be implicated in most cases. New teachers who begin their careers in the urban schools of the US may leave because their expectations formed on the basis of their anticipatory socialization are not matched in these urban settings. Or it may be, like some of the new teachers in Rossi et al.’s (2014) study, teachers leave early because the social justice principles they learned in their university course are not taken seriously in schools. Physical educators may experience stress due to their marginality in schools, though this appears to be less of an issue in countries of the Global North where university entrance examinations are in place in secondary schools and where physical education departments are well-resourced. The research on teacher burnout regularly mentions disruptive and disengaged student behaviour as a primary source of teacher stress. Certainly, the prevalence of the range of behaviours that fall into this category, from inattention and lack of engagement and effort through to disobedience and disorderly behaviour may be more likely to be found in schools serving disadvantaged and underserved communities (Ennis et al., 1999; Tsouloupas & Carson, 2017). In circumstances of precarity, there may be the potential for a greater prevalence of disruptive student behaviour since young people are alienated, angry, and anxious. Along with Tsouloupas and Carson, Flory’s (2016) research suggests physical educators enter the teaching workforce poorly prepared to manage more serious forms of student misbehaviour and may as a consequence need to engage in considerable emotional labour to get through the working day. Teachers may also meet with greater frequency than hitherto young people who are suffering trauma.

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Here the experience of care workers is revealing of the potential for teachers to suffer STS as they seek to support young people who may be body shape dissatisfied, depressed, bullied or abused, suffering decreased confidence and unhappiness. Teaching young people experiencing precarity is likely to require some highly specialized skills that are rarely if ever included in conventional physical education teacher education programs. Given what we have learned about physical education teachers from the socialization literature, and about the nature of burnout and attrition, some urgent action is required to support teacher professional learning. This will not be a straightforward process given the precarization of physical education teacher education, where physical educators have lost their institutional bases in many universities and control of their programs and, in some cases, whole undergraduate programs. Some rethinking is required to support teacher professional learning in schools where there is a prevalence of young people living in precarity. Initial teacher education also needs to be rethought, as does the issue of the kinds of people who are recruited to physical education teaching (Fitzpatrick & McGlashan, 2017). Reconsideration of teacher professional learning for precarity can only take place, however, in the context of the substance of the work itself. The task in the chapters that follow is to consider what kinds of physical education would be most appropriate and beneficial for young people experiencing precarity, and thus the professional learning teachers will need to implement such programs.

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80 Occupational socialization and precarity Richards, K. A. R. and Gaudreault, K. L. (2017) Future directions for the study of teacher socialization in physical education, pp. 262–273, in K. A. R. Richards and K. L. Gaudreault (eds) Teacher Socialization in Physical Education: New perspectives, London: Routledge. Richards, K. A. R. and Templin, T. J. (2012) Toward a multidimensional perspective on teacher-coach role conflict, Quest, 64, 164–176, doi:10.1080/00336297.2012.693751. Richards, K. A. R. and Templin, T. J. (2011) The influence of a state mandated induction assistance program on the socialization of a beginning physical education teacher, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 30(4), 340–357. Richards, K. A. R., Templin, T. J. and Gaudreault, K. L. (2013) Understanding the realities of school life: Recommendations for the preparation of physical education teachers, Quest, 65, 442–457, doi:10.1080/ 00336297.2013.804850. Rossi, T., Macdonald, D., lisahunter and Christensen, E. (2017) Peering into the physical education office in Australian schools: The departmental office as a socializing space, pp. 226–240, in K. A. R. Richards and K. L. Gaudreault (eds) Teacher Socialization in Physical Education: New perspectives, London: Routledge. Rossi, T., lisahunter, Christensen, E. and Macdonald, D. (2014) Workplace Learning in Physical Education: Emerging teachers’ stories from the classroom and beyond, London: Routledge. Schempp, P. G. and Graber, K. C. (1992) Teacher socialization from a dialectical perspective: Pretraining through induction, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 11, 329–348. Shen, B., McCaughtry, N., Martin, J., Garn, A., Kulik, N. and Fahlman, M. (2015) The relationship between teacher burnout and student motivation, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 85, 519–532. Smith, Y. R. (1993) Recruitment and retention of African-American and other multicultural physical educators, Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 64 (3), 66–70. Sparkes, A., Templin, T. J. and Schempp, P. G. (1993) Exploring dimensions in marginality: Reflecting on the life histories of physical education teachers, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 12, 219–230. Spittle, M., Kremer, P. and Sullivan, S. (2015) Burnout in secondary school physical education teaching, Physical Education and Sport, 13(1), 33–43. Tannehill, D. (1989) Student teaching: A view from the other side, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 8(3), 243–253. Templin, T. J. (1979) Occupational socialization and the physical education student teachers, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 50, 482–493. Templin, T. J. and Schempp, P. G. (1989, eds) Socialization into Physical Education: Learning to teach, Indianapolis, IN: Benchmark Press. Templin, T. J., Graber, K. C. and Richards, K. A. R. (2019) Will PETE survive in the 21st century?, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 38, 68–74. Templin, T. J., Padaruth, S., Sparkes, A. C. and Schempp, P. G. (2017) A historical view of teacher socialization in physical education, pp. 11–30, in K. A. R. Richards and K. L. Gaudreault (eds) Teacher Socialization in Physical Education: New perspectives, London: Routledge. Thorburn, M. and Gray, S. (2010) Physical Education: Picking up the baton, Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press.

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Tsouloupas, C. N. and Carson, R. L. (2017) Catching fire without burning out: Socialization of teacher efficacy in handling student misbehaviour and emotion regulation in physical education, pp. 114–129, in K. A. R. Richards and K. L. Gaudreault (eds) Teacher Socialization in Physical Education: New perspectives, London: Routledge. Whipp, P. R. and Salin, K. (2018) Physical education teachers in Australia: Why do they stay?, Social Psychology of Education, 21, 897–914. Wilcox, K. C., Angelis, J. I., Baker, L. and Lawson, H. A. (2014) The value of people, place and possibilities: A multiple case study of rural high school completion, Journal of Research in Rural Education, 29(9), 1–18. Woods, S. M. and Ayers, S. F. (2019) PETE recruitment and retention: Current state of affairs, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 38, 1–3.

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Chapter 5

Physical education-as-health promotion in precarity

Introduction It is evident from the analysis in Chapters 2 and 3 that precarity and health matters are closely inter-related. In the Global North, in particular, where according Berlant (2011) the ‘fantasy’ of the good life still holds sway, the ill effects of precarity are keenly felt. Sociologists and political scientists have argued consistently since the 1990s that precarity is not only to be understood as a condition of uncertain employment and exploitative working conditions. Hand in hand with impoverished and impoverishing employment goes poor health, and poor mental health in particular. Standing (2016) argues that members of the precariat, a ‘new dangerous social class’ born out of precarity, experience the ‘four As’ of anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation. They live teetering precariously on the brink between just coping and losing everything. As such, uncertainty and insecurity prevail, and expectations morph over time from hope to despair. No amount of hard work can bring its just reward, as expectation would require of the good life. Along with individual health, social relationships too are placed in jeopardy. Precarity damages health, and it also undermines wellbeing. Health and more recently wellbeing have become increasingly visible within physical education discourse globally in the past two to three decades. Historically, health has been present in discourse about physical education since, for example in Britain, at least the beginning of compulsory mass schooling in the late 19th century. This said, what health means and how physical education might contribute to it have changed significantly over time. The emergence of physical education-as-sport-techniques (Kirk, 2010) in the UK in the 30 years period following the end of WW2 resulted for a time in a sport-based rationale dominating arguments for physical education in the curriculum. Since the 1980s, however, the development of a scientific field of exercise science and medicine in universities and the emergence of the ‘new health consciousness’ in society more generally, a healthbased rationale more frequently has been advocated, increasingly within the context of combating the so-called ‘obesity crisis’ and other diseases

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associated with a sedentary lifestyle. As we will see, in many countries across the Global North, health is increasingly becoming the leading justification for physical education in schools, from a policy perspective at least if not in school practice. So it is a matter of some consequence how we think about health within physical education and about the possible contribution physical educators can make to the health and wellbeing of young people. We noted in Chapter 3 concerns for the possible ill effects of digital media use, particularly social media, on all young people, and how social media’s magnification of the present, and obliteration of past and futures, might amplify and exacerbate the ill effects of living in precarity. The very least we can ask is that physical education does no harm, to make worse the already precarious circumstances of vulnerable young people. Unfortunately, there is evidence to suggest that traditional sport-based forms of physical education have not served some young people well. However, we should want more from our field than this minimal requirement. As I noted in the introduction to this book, considerable sums of public money are spent, year on year, by governments around the world on the specialist professional preparation of physical education teachers, and their salaries, facilities, and equipment. I want to argue here that how we think about health matters a lot in terms of where we go pedagogically in our response to precarity. I want to begin this task of understanding how we think about health by providing a brief overview of the trend towards a health-based rationale for physical education since the 1980s, which is a global phenomenon. This trend has accelerated considerably in the past decade. Next, I will consider the changing ways in which physical educators have thought about physical education’s relationship to health. I begin with the early medico-health approach which was in place at the turn of the 20th century and viewed physical activity as therapy for deformities and disabilities. Its successor, physical fitness, became the dominant concept from the mid-20th century, though initially the new scientific knowledge underpinning this notion was more often applied to sports performance than to health. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence of a ‘new health consciousness’ and the New Public Health created the basis for the health promotion movement, and with it advocacy for the idea that physical activity could lower the risk of diseases thought to be related to sedentary lifestyles. I argue that this pathogenic view of physical activity as a disease prevention form of health promotion remains the currently dominant understanding of the relationship between physical education and health. That said, McCuaig and Quennerstedt (2018) among others have recently challenged this dominant view, applying Antonovsky’s (1979) salutongenic view of health. I suggest this important theory of health promotion and its application in physical education, with its emphasis on the whole human being as a complex organism, may well provide the tools for rethinking physical education’s relationship

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to health and wellbeing in precarity. I conclude with some reflections on the continuities and discontinuities in this brief history of physical education’s relationship to health, and their residual effects in the present.

Physical education and contemporary interest in health and wellbeing A trend over at least the past two decades has been towards linking physical education to or locating it within health as a curriculum area or topic. Some recent examples include the Australian (National) Curriculum, where the subject is known as Health and Physical Education (ACARA, 2015), as it is also in the Canadian State of Ontario (Ontario Public Service, 2015). In Scotland, physical education is located within a larger curriculum area called Health and Wellbeing (Education Scotland, 2017). Even where the title physical education remains, health forms a significant part of the rationale for its place within curriculum documents and policies (SHAPE America, 2014; Ministry of Education Singapore, 2014). In each of these cases, physical fitness and physical activity are the two key health-related concepts that make the connection between physical education and health. In the Australian curriculum, the health-related learning outcomes are located in a sub-strand called Understanding Movement and a further sub-strand, Fitness and Physical Activity. Learning outcomes for Fitness and Physical Activity are stated for pupils from Foundation through to Year 10. In Ontario, Physical Fitness is located in a curriculum strand called Active Living. Physical Fitness is described in relatively specific terms in the Ontario syllabus as follows: Daily physical activity (DPA) is a mandatory component of daily instruction for students in Ontario and is included as a curriculum expectation in health and physical education for every grade within this section of the strand. This learning expectation requires students to actively engage in sustained moderate to vigorous physical activity, including appropriate warm-up and cool-down activities, to the best of their ability for a minimum of twenty minutes every day. All students, including students with special education needs, are required to have the opportunity to participate in DPA during instructional time. The goal of daily physical activity is to instil the habit of activity and enable all elementary students to be active on a daily basis in order to maintain or enhance their physical fitness, their overall health and wellness, and their ability and readiness to learn. (Ontario Public Service, 2015, p.26) In the case of the national Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland, Physical Fitness is one of four Significant Aspects of Learning in physical education. Here the focus is on stamina, speed, core stability and strength, and

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flexibility developed progressively from early years to secondary school. In the US, the Shape America standards include ‘The physically literate individual demonstrates the knowledge and skills to achieve and maintain a healthenhancing level of physical activity and fitness’ as Standard 3 of five standards. Three aspects of this standard are listed for kindergarten through to grade 8: physical activity knowledge; engages in physical activity; and fitness knowledge. In the case of Singapore, two goals of six within a Physical Health and Fitness strand refer to ‘Goal 5: Acquire and maintain healthenhancing fitness through regular participation in physical activities’ and ‘Goal 6: Enjoy and value the benefits of living a physically active and healthy life’ (Ministry of Education Singapore, 2014, p.132). In addition to these national curriculum developments, there has been no shortage of advocacy for a health focus in physical education over the past two decades nor indeed examples of forms of health-related, enhancing or optimizing physical education. McConnell (2005) developed a curriculum model for Fitness Education, while Haerens et al. (2011) propose a pedagogical model for health-based physical education. Metzler et al. (2013) have developed an instructional model for Health-Optimizing Physical Education. Each of these health-related models are proposed to co-exist alongside models with other learning outcomes for skill learning, playing sport, aesthetic movement experience, and so on, as forms of Models-based Practice (Kirk, 2013). In contrast, McKenzie and Sallis, and colleagues (Sallis & McKenzie, 1991; Sallis et al., 2012; McKenzie et al., 2016) have long advocated a sole public health focus for physical education through the development of a range of evidence-based programs, such as SPARK (McKenzie, Sallis, & Rosengard, 2009). Working within a more conventional multiactivity form of physical education within the national curriculum for England, Harris identified seven guiding principles for an inclusive form of health-related physical education. She argues that exercise can be a positive and enjoyable experience, that exercise is for all, and that everyone can benefit from exercise. She writes that everyone can be good at exercise, everyone can find the right kind of exercise for them, exercise is for life, and excellence in health-related exercise is maintaining an active way of life (Harris, 2005). Based on these developments over the past two decades or so, health does currently appear to occupy an important and prominent place within physical education curriculum policy and advocacy. Indeed, it might be argued that physical education is well into a process of being relocated within the curriculum to a health education and promotion context, as a contributor to a public health agenda. While a range of terminology exists, there are common threads in curriculum policy and curriculum development. Commonalities are the use of the same or similar concepts, such as active living, health-related fitness, exercise, and physical activity, to articulate physical education’s relationship with health. Two caveats are nevertheless

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appropriate here before we move on to consider historically how we reached this current position, and how the past has shaped the present. The first is an observation by Kilborn, Lorusso and Francis (2016) of conflict between stated curriculum aims and content. These researchers analysed the curriculum policy documents of all 10 Canadian provinces. The stated aims of all policies are concerned with health and fitness, however, they note that the content is predominantly concerned with movement skills, reflecting the continuing dominance of sports and games in physical education (Kirk, 2010). While their analysis concerns Canada alone, we might wonder whether it has relevance elsewhere. A second is Gard’s (2014) view that the more closely physical educators align themselves with a public health agenda, the more likely they are to be held to account for their claims that physical activity can, for example, reduce the risk of obesity and therefore to be found out to be ineffective in achieving such a health-related goal. Furthermore, when digital technology is added, which he coins ‘eHPE’, physical educators may be venturing down a path that eventually makes them redundant, since machine-based programs (eg. exergames), he argues, may be much less expensive than teachers and much more effective in terms of health-related results. Even if this doesn’t happen, Gard suggests physical educators should be careful what they wish for when they advocate enthusiastically for the use of technology and a health focus in their subject. He points to Fitnessgram as an example of the marriage of state education, public health and private business and the narrowing of the curriculum that only teaches what is easy to measure. This final point is also clearly made by Sallis et al.: Two main goals of ‘health-related physical education’ (as coined in 1991) were to (a) prepare youth for a lifetime of physical activity, and (b) provide them with physical activity during physical education classes. The former goal (…) although important and health-related, is difficult to evaluate and has limited evidence to support its validity (…) The second goal represented an immediate, tangible outcome from participating in physical education. (Sallis et al., 2012, p.126) Pressed to provide evidence of our effectiveness, the implication of Sallis et al.’s observation is that we should prioritize the more easily measured and immediate goal, of optimizing MVPA, while, perhaps, merely hoping for the best for the eventual achievement of the former. As Gard points out, this choice, pragmatic though it may be, sets school physical education in a particular relationship with health, as a means of reducing the risk of sedentariness-related diseases through physical activity. As we will see as this chapter progresses, in conditions of precarity, this may not be the most desirable or beneficial contribution physical education might make to the health and wellbeing of precaritized youth.

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These two caveats qualify the too ready conclusion that physical education is currently framed within a health-related rationale. But the trend nevertheless is clear. In curriculum development, policy and advocacy terms, at least, if not in practice, physical education is viewed as a component of health education and promotion within the school curriculum. As I remarked in the introduction to this chapter, physical education has had a long-standing relationship with health, since at least its consolidation in the school curriculum in the early 20th century in countries such as Britain. So what, if anything, has changed? How has the relationship between physical education and health been conceptualized over time? What are the continuities and discontinuities between past and present, and what might be their residual effects (Williams, 1977)?

Early approaches to health: The medico-health rationale and scientific functionalism Following some 40 years of agitation and advocacy from Her Majesty’s Inspectors, philanthropists and reformers in Britain, physical education finally secured a place in the curriculum of state elementary schools around the end of the 19th century (Kirk, 1992). A common misconception is that it did this based on a militaristic rationale. The misconception is understandable. In the second half of the 19th century, government schools often employed retired Army personnel to run drilling and exercising classes. Additionally, much was made of the high levels of failure of recruits to meet the physical requirements to join the British Army in its war against the Boers in South Africa in the 1890s (Kirk, 1992). There was also a lobby for military training in state schools within the government, as there was among the merchant classes who saw the need for a strong Army to defend Britain’s global trade routes. Moreover, the actual practice of school physical training borrowed heavily from military drill. The three Board of Education Syllabuses published between 1909 and 1933, and built on a platform of therapeutically-oriented Dano-Swedish gymnastics, nevertheless contained scripted lessons with ‘words of command’ (Kirk, 1998). The intention was for children to do exercises en masse and in unison. And there is no doubt that many head teachers saw physical training as a useful way of maintaining order and discipline among reluctant and recalcitrant pupils. The military argument was defeated, however. This is despite the fact that military lobbyists numbered among the supporters of the Royal Commission on Physical Training in Scotland, which reported in 1903 (Kirk, 1992). However, schools impressed the commissioners with their resistance to the idea of compulsory military training. Commissioners were also influenced by the evidence they requested be generated by medical researchers to provide a context for their judgments. They accepted too the idea, current at the time, that while physical exercise could not cure disease, it could have a beneficial

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effect on minor ‘defects and deformity’, either inherited or acquired, as a form of therapy (Kirk, 1992). The commissioners’ report in turn led to a number of further committees before the government of the day was persuaded to enact legislation in 1907, based on the rationale that regular physical training in the school curriculum should be medical, not military. Advocates for a health rationale for physical training had argued for years that children growing up in slums of the newly industrialized cities of Britain suffered from a ‘deteriorated physique’. Eugenicist ideas were at this time within the mainstream of public and professional thinking and the fear was palpable that the physical deterioration of the ‘British race’ was under way (Kirk, 1998). Within this context, the Royal Commission proposed that physical exercise was one of four components of the ‘nutrition’ of state school pupils, the other three being food, clean and warm clothing, and fresh air. Physical education was, then, from its inception in the state school curriculum in Britain located within a medico-health rationale, even though schools used it for other purposes, such as discipline and order. This rationale was institutionalized through the establishment of the School Medical Service within the Board of Education in 1908, with Dr (and later Sir) George Newman as the Chief Medical Officer. Initially the School Medical Service inspected pupils, but by 1912, their work extended to treatment too. Physical training was an adjunct to this work, particularly through the application of ‘remedial gymnastics’ to treat poor posture: “round shoulders, poking heads and flat feet” (Kirk, 1992, p.133). The premises that informed this rationale, first stated in the mid-1800s, remained unquestioned at the time of the publication of the first national Syllabus for Physical Training. These premises were for the most part still in place in 1933 when the Board of Education published the final of three Syllabuses under Newman’s leadership, captured in the widespread view that the ‘posture and the general carriage of the children’ was the ultimate test for the effectiveness of a system of medicalized physical training. I argued in Defining Physical Education (Kirk, 1992) that, for all the 1933 Syllabus had broadened the content of physical education in state schools beyond Dano-Swedish gymnastics, to include games, swimming, folk dancing and athletics, it remained firmly rooted in the medico-health rationale of the 19th century. As such, it barely survived the rest of the decade as a working document. In Australia, new, forward-looking, and local syllabuses, such as the Victorian ‘Grey Book’ replaced the 1933 Syllabus ‘Green Book’ (Kirk, 1998). In the immediate post WW2 years of the late 1940s, the 1933 Syllabus was already dated. In addition to the war itself, several things happened to undermine the medico-health rationale. The first was the flight of female physical educators, the majority of physical educators before WW2, from Swedish to educational gymnastics. The second was a massive influx of men to physical education teaching in the late 1940s in order to staff the new

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secondary schools created by raising the school leaving age initiated by Education Acts in the 1940s. The outcome was the submergence of health as a justification for school physical education for several decades. The men’s influence was profound and soon redirected school physical education. In Britain, by the mid-1950s they outnumbered the women. They also pursued with great vigour new scientific research in skill learning, biomechanics, physiology. The discovery of the principle of progressive overload informed a new technology of physical training that aimed to develop a ‘hard core’ of physical fitness in terms of strength and endurance (Kirk, 1992). Circuit Training was one among other practical applications of these ideas par excellence, based on the work of Morgan and Adamson (1957) at the University of Leeds. Circuit Training received wide exposure with the publication of their book in 1957, based on a decade of practical work with university students. As a result of these scientific achievements, a new view emerged of the relationship between physical activity and health, mediated by the notion of physical fitness. By the end of the 1950s, the notion had gained traction that exercise for fitness was required in order to combat the ills of affluence: automation, mechanization, urbanization, and sedentariness (McIntosh, 1957). The 19th century view of the relationship of physical education to health was, within the medico-health rationale, was one of therapy, an adjunct to the work of school doctors and nurses in the fight against physical deterioration, defects, and deformities. By the middle of the 20th century a recognisably modern view of this relationship had taken its place. In this new view of the relationship of physical education to health, the fight was against coronary heart disease consequent of sedentariness and other ‘risky’ lifestyle activities. Given that the newly established male physical educators and university researchers sponsored this concept of the ‘hard core’ of physical fitness, it was strongly gendered. I showed in Defining Physical Education that applications of this notion in the form, for example, of Circuit Training was seen to be appropriate for boys and men, but not for girls and women. I also showed, though, that there was awareness of this at the time and some critique, with warnings that the more affluent a society becomes, the more physical fitness is an obsession (Kirk, 1992, pp.149–150). Despite the familiarity of this view of fitness and health to those of us living in the early 21st century, a third development in the immediate postWW2 years added to the marginalization of health as a justification for school physical education from the 1950s until at least the 1980s. This was the male physical educators’ support for physical education-as-sport-techniques (Kirk, 2010). As I argue in Physical Education Futures, this was a global development (Pühse & Gerber, 2005, eds), beginning earlier in some places and later in others. Central to this new sport-technique based form of physical education was the idea that young people should experience a ‘broad and balanced’ range of sports and games within a multi-activity curriculum

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so that they could find an activity they enjoyed and that they could pursue into their adult lives. In this ubiquitous aspiration, we can catch a glimpse of health since a physically active lifestyle contributes, at least by implication and anticipation, to a healthy lifestyle. In a relatively short space of time and with the demise of the medico-health rationale, health became at best a muted presence in physical education, a desirable by-product of participation in sports and games rather than a central and intentionally pursued objective.

The ‘new health consciousness’ and health-related fitness In the post-WW2 period, physical fitness had become physical education’s connection to health, but fitness for sport performance rather than health captured the attention and interest of physical educators. Chuck Corbin’s (2012) 50 year overview of fitness and physical activity research in the US shows that many of the fitness tests developed for youth from the 1950s were for sport-related fitness. A problem with the sport-related fitness tests was that they were norm-referenced, and took no account of for example chronological versus maturational age, which had a profound effect on how children scored on the tests. It is important to note too that, even though Morgan and Adamson’s motivation for developing Circuit Training was for university and school students to engage in health-related exercise, sports teams took up this technology of fitness with most enthusiasm (Kirk, 1992). That said, Circuit Training did become popular in physical education classes for older, male high school students (Whitehead & Hendry, 1976). During the 1970s, Corbin in collaboration with colleagues and students, began to bring a concept of health-related physical fitness back into the discourse of physical education. In the Midlands of England, two teachers who had studied with Corbin in the US returned to develop a health-related fitness-based form of physical education (Whitehead & Fox, 1983) which was intentionally designed to challenge the dominant sport-technique based approach (Kirk, 1986). Whitehead and Fox introduced non-competitive exercise and recreational activities and gave classroom-based lessons on healthy eating and lifestyles, an innovation in core physical education programs at this time. Meanwhile, in South Australia and inspired by interventive research at Lyon and Vannes in France and at Trois Rivieres in Canada, Coonan et al. (1984) were completing research that underpinned the Daily Physical Education program. In its original form, this program required a daily lesson of an hour and a quarter of vigorous skill and exercise activities, subsequently reduced in time as it was disseminated to schools during the 1980s. Their original research showed the experimental group developed better cardio-respiratory endurance and lower skinfold measures than the control group while maintaining academic achievement, even though the experimental group had less classroom time (Kirk, 1989).

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The emergence of these explicitly health-focused physical education programs can be understood, at least in part, as responses to what Crawford (1980) called the ‘new health consciousness’. Concerns about the risks of sedentary lifestyles had spilled over from the specialist professional discourse of physical educators and some medical practitioners into wider public awareness. The new health consciousness, centred on physical fitness, sparked a massive boom in recreational running in many affluent countries of the Global North during the 1970s. This interest in running and other fitness activities, such as aerobics, was an expression of a growing population-wide perception of the need to exercise on a regular basis to combat the mal-effects of sedentary behaviour. The focus on daily exercise as a means of health-related risk reduction was, claimed Crawford, tantamount to the medicalization of everyday life. He also coined the term ‘healthism’ to suggest that within this new health consciousness there was a moral imperative and an individual responsibility to exercise and eat healthily in order to keep ‘in shape’. We might with hindsight view this emphasis as presaging the infiltration of neo-liberalism into health, and a precursor of the emergence of particular forms of health promotion in the 1990s in the train of the New Public Health, of which we will learn more shortly. Indeed, a whole industry predicated on a market for services emerged in the 1980s and 1990s devoted to physical fitness, dieting, and cosmetic surgery. Physical educators like so many members of the public were susceptible to healthist messages this industry promoted. The ‘trim, taut, and terrific’ body was becoming a powerful symbol of the morally responsible individual who ‘looked after themselves’ (Kirk, 1993). Fatness, on the other hand, symbolized sloth, greed, weakness. Tinning (1985) argued that a ‘cult of slenderness’ was developing within this context and that physical educators were complicit in its development. Research by Tinning and Kirk (1991) into Daily Physical Education in Australian primary schools in the mid to late 1980s discovered that healthism and the cult of slenderness were present and prominent within the curriculum materials and among both teachers and students. Both did ideological work in proposing the merely contingent relationship between exercise, slenderness, and health was a necessary one, in so far as exercise caused slenderness which in turn was a potent symbol of health (Kirk & Colquhoun, 1989). It was in the interests of the fitness industry and, arguably, physical educators, to promote the exercise=slenderness=health triplex. The development of health-related fitness based physical education in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a sign that health was coming back as a rationale for physical education. The new health consciousness and the cult of slenderness certainly provided popular cultural reference points for physical educators concerned about the risks to health associated with sedentariness. This trend did not gain momentum, however, until two further things happened.

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Corbin (2012) recalls that advocates for health in physical education were becoming uneasy with fitness testing that was sport-based, and agitated for the development of health-related tests to provide a counter-balance. While the first of these appeared by the end of the 1970s, Corbin and his associates increasingly felt that the concept of physical fitness was itself problematic. In the UK, Harris (2005) has been an outspoken critic of fitness testing as a measure of the effectiveness of school health-related exercise programs. And as Hastie (2017) has questioned in a recent review paper, “how fit ‘is’ fit?” when we ask this question of school-age children and youth. In a review of the most recent physical education standards in the US, he goes on to comment that “there is little consensus with respect to the optimal level of physical fitness for young people” (Hastie, 2017, p.8). In its place, Corbin and others, such as Sallis and McKenzie (1991), advocated the replacement of fitness with the concept of physical activity. While physical fitness was an ambiguous concept, physical activity can be quantified by frequency, intensity, and duration. A second event was the emergence of the ‘New Public Health’ (NPH), an approach to the coordination and ‘efficacious balance’ of a range of evidence-based medical, management, technological and policy systems and services to optimize the health of individuals and populations. Tulchinsky and Varavikova (2009, p.27) argue that the NPH was ‘new’ “in that it links health promotion with healthcare access; it is an integration of transdisciplinary and multi-organizational work”. The NPH was given impetus by the Alma-Alta conference of 1978 and the Ottawa Charter of 2006 and is widely regarded as the catalyst for the emergence of the field of health promotion. Simons-Morton et al. (1987) and Sallis and McKenzie (1991) were early advocates for this shift in focus to physical activity as the core concept connecting physical education to the NPH agenda.

Exercise-is-medicine: The New Public Health, physical activity, and obesity Within the NPH, school physical education is viewed as one of a range of public services that can be coordinated to promote health. Sallis and McKenzie (1991) argued that physical education should be reconceptualized within a public health agenda. Physical educators should have a public health role as members of a team alongside health educators, psychologists, dieticians, and exercise physiologists. The main public health goal for physical education is thus to prepare young people for lifelong physical activity. Sallis and McKenzie are correct to acknowledge that this idea, even in 1991, was not new in itself. As I argued earlier, this aspiration has been commonplace since at least the 1940s within physical education programs around the world, and most particularly in countries of the Global North (Kirk, 2010).

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What was new in 1991 was Sallis and McKenzie’s proposal to consider the possibility of positioning physical education as a form of health promotion. The familiarity of their argument today should not cause us to miss its significance in the early 1990s when the sport-technique based rationale continued to dominate school programs. This familiarity rests on their use of the language of risk factors for disease, an important feature of the NPH and the emerging field of health promotion. They argued that regular physical activity could reduce the risk factors for Cardio-Vascular Disease (CVD), and for childhood obesity, which they identified at that time as an emerging problem in the US (Sallis & McKenzie, 1991, p.125). While they saw other health-related benefits from physical activity, the prevention of CVD was in their view the main target for a public health-oriented physical education. As I will argue later in this chapter, this way of thinking about the relationship between physical activity-focused physical education and health rests on the concept of exercise-is-medicine (Jette & Vertinsky, 2001). Sallis and McKenzie’s (1991) mention of obesity is important since this was to become the focus of advocacy for health-related physical education programs over the next two decades (Kirk, 2006). By the end of the 1990s, many physical educators along with other professionals and members of the public had accepted as fact that there was a childhood obesity crisis, with obesity scientists arguing that rates would continue to rise exponentially over time (Gard & Wright, 2005). More than this, the fact of childhood obesity was considered to be incontrovertible, beyond challenge. Governments in Australia, Britain and the US, and elsewhere published major policies in the 1990s and early 2000s focusing on this issue and its potential catastrophic consequences (Kirk, 2006). Obesity experts warned that obese children were not only storing up trouble for themselves, they were also as obese adults going to put great pressure on public health services. They issued the dire warning that they were also likely to die before their parents. In some countries, such as Australia, this emerging crisis was discussed in terms of intergenerational deterioration, with children becoming less physically fit and skilful, as well as more obese, than their older siblings and parents (Kirk, 1998). This notion of deterioration offers an interesting inversion of the term’s use to justify the medico-health rationale a century or more previously, where the concern was for thin and undernourished bodies. Based on a close reading and analysis of the obesity literature Gard (2011) and Gard and Wright (2005) proposed that obesity scientists’ own data did not justify their claims that there was an emerging childhood obesity epidemic. Gard (2011, p.8) suggests that far from childhood obesity being a ‘dangerously out-of-control situation’ as many obesity experts had contended, their argument of an ever-increasing rise was, instead, by 2010, crumbling. Moreover, the data itself is not always what it seemed, with the tendency of many obesity scientists to conflate numbers of children in the overweight category with those who were clinically obese. Overweight and

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obese are different phenomena and cannot be counted together meaningfully (Kirk, 2006). There is also the implication if not the explicit claim that ‘everyone everywhere’ (as Gard put it) is at risk of becoming obese. When sociodemographic information is considered, it becomes clear that obesity is much more prevalent among people living in precarity (Bann et al., 2017). At least one reason for the persistence of these arguments supporting a childhood obesity crisis is, according to Gard (2011), the virulent spread of what he called ‘rhetorical viruses’, like the claim that obese children were likely to predecease their parents. These ‘sound-bite viruses’ have little or no scientific basis but are nevertheless received with solemn concern because they are part of a self-perpetuating set of beliefs. If Gard is right, that far from a continuous rise, the rate of childhood obesity has slowed, plateaued and even declined, how is it possible that scientists could sustain such claims and the general public accept them uncritically? The answer lies, in part, in the symbolism invested in the idea of the obese child and an epidemic of childhood obesity. From the late 1980s, various social commentators made links between the obese child, a faltering economy, personal irresponsibility and intergenerational deterioration (Kirk, 2006). The body of the obese child was intended to give physical proof of perceived social, cultural, and economic decline. This symbolism tapped a deep vein of anxiety in societies of the Global North, where it was widely believed each generation will be more comfortable and affluent than its predecessors. If the future rests on a generation of obese children who may predecease their parents, the ‘fantasy’ of the good life (Berlant, 2011) is fatally undermined. Moreover, Thorpe (2003) noted perceptively that crises justify the intervention of ‘experts’ who claim to be able to provide solutions. In this he prefigures Klein’s (2007) argument in The Shock Doctrine that natural and manufactured crises provide opportunities for rethinking and reorganizing society and the economy, often in radically unjust forms, and justifies the intervention of experts, particularly economists and those informed and inspired by them. Talking up an obesity crisis is, from this point of view, a self-serving act by obesity scientists, whether or not the act is intentional. The thrust of Gard’s critique is obesity experts’ increasingly inflated claims about a childhood obesity crisis go far beyond their data to the extent that they subscribe, unconsciously and unintentionally or not, to a belief system, not to science. Throughout the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, the ‘obesity crisis’ increasingly provided a frame of reference for school physical education and has proved irresistible, with exercise-is-medicine as an underpinning logic. As I argue earlier in this chapter, sport-technique based forms of physical education are now under serious challenge in school systems around the world, at least in terms of curriculum policy. Health has become once again a central and increasingly explicit rationale for the place of

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physical education in schools. The dominant concepts currently connecting physical education to health are physical fitness and physical activity, the latter most often expressed in the notion of MVPA with a recommended ‘dose’ of up to 60 minutes per day. Increasingly over the past decade or more, optimizing MVPA has come to be viewed as something of a gold standard for physical education lessons (Fairclough & Stratton, 2005). Yet, despite almost two decades of advocacy for health-related physical education, McKenzie reported in 2009 that physical education was ‘the pill not taken’ in the fight against diseases relating to sedentary lifestyles (McKenzie & Lounsbery, 2009). McKenzie and Lounsbery’s metaphor comes directly from the notion of exercise-is-medicine. While in this article they express their frustration that the health potential of physical education has not been realised during this time, with an average of only 6% of recommended weekly physical activity for young people’s health coming from physical education lessons, the metaphor is revealing.

Pathogenic and salutogenic approaches to health promotion The metaphor is revealing since we can see health-related or optimizing physical education is located within what Antonovsky (1979) calls a ‘pathogenic’ approach to health promotion. This pathogenic approach is defined by the axiom that the human being ideally exists in homeostasis until a pathogen upsets this equilibrium, sometimes temporarily, sometimes fatally. Curative medicine attempts heroic rescues for those individuals who are ‘downstream’, drowning in the river of life. Disease prevention, meantime, is attempting to find methods to reduce the number of ways those individuals who are ‘upstream’ can be stopped (according to the pathogenic perspective) from falling into the river in the first place, thus maintaining homeostasis. The immunization of babies and young children is a good example of a widely developed and implemented program of disease prevention. The pathogenic paradigm is captured in the World Health Organisation’s famous definition that ‘Health is a state of optimal physical, mental, and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity’. Antonovsky claimed that this definition assumes homeostasis is the natural and ideal human condition. He also claimed that in the absence of a theoretical foundation, health promotion had become a form of disease prevention, concerned in particular with the reduction of various lifestyle factors, often called risk-factors, for specific diseases, such as coronary heart disease. As we noted earlier in this chapter, within the NPH, advocacy for physical activity-based physical education can be understood as a form of health promotion tasked with reducing the risks to health from sedentary lifestyles. A pathogenic view of health promotion informs much of the contemporary interest in health in physical education within curriculum policy and development. As a childhood obesity crisis has emerged, the disease-

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specific nature of much pathogenic health care has become evident, solidified around health-related or optimizing physical education’s role in promoting physical activity. Given this context, Crawford was indeed prescient in the early 1980s in his insight that calls for regular exercise as a central aspect of the new health consciousness was effectively a medicalization of everyday life. If exercise-is-medicine and physical activity-based physical education ‘the pill not take’, then the ‘disease’ it targets and seeks to prevent is obesity. Physical activity-based physical education attempts to prevent those individuals ‘upstream’ and on the riverbank of life from becoming ill. Antonovsky (1979) offers an alternative to this pathogenic view. It is important to note that he at no time denies the importance of both curative and preventative medicine. What he challenges, however, is the suitability of this pathogenic concept of health as a theoretical basis for health promotion. Salutogenesis begins with the observation that human beings live in heterostasis, not homeostasis. No-one is ever completely healthy at any point in time, but is more or less healthy. We are all in the river of life; no-one is on the riverbank. From this starting point, Antonovsky asks, how do we use health promotion to help people to remain as close as possible to the ‘health-ease’ end of the continuum and away from the ‘dis-ease’ end. He asks how we identify salutary factors that actively promote health rather than factors that merely reduce risk. His research on stress and coping informs his response. He argues that those individuals who cope best with challenging events in their lives have access to what he calls Generalized Resistance Resources (GRR). GRRs can take many forms, depending on the nature of the challenge an individual or community faces and the type of resource that is effective in coping with or overcoming the challenge. He asked what GRRs have in common across many different contexts and discovered that they typically “fostered repeated life experiences which, to put it at its simplest, helped one to see the world as ‘making sense’, cognitively, instrumentally and emotionally” (Antonovsky, 1996, p.15). This insight led him to understand that the strongest salutary factor for health was what he called ‘Sense of Coherence’ (SOC), where individuals and communities were able to see the meaningfulness, comprehensibility, and manageability of their situations. Antonovsky argued that the strength of the SOC was decisive in moving towards health-ease and away from dis-ease. He argued that life experiences shape SOC, in so far as individuals and communities experience consistency, a balance between ‘underload and overload’, and being a valued member of one’s community in terms of participating in decision-making. He emphasized the range of factors that positioned individuals within communities, such as the nature of their work and family structures, and also gender, ethnicity, genetics, and chance. SOC is strengthened within this complex, dynamic, and dangerous river of life when individuals and collectives are motivated and can see the point of coping, believe life challenges

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can be understood, and recognize resources are available and can be accessed to support living healthily. For Antonovsky, moving people towards the health-ease end of the continuum required the implementation of programs that support and strengthen SOC amid and within the complexity of everyday life. Since the initial outline of this salutogenic theory in the late 1970s, Antonovsky and others have gone on to develop programs of research that seek to measure the SOC and to develop forms of health promotion in a wide variety of contexts across the globe (Mittelmark et al., 2017). As Kickbush (2017) remarks in the foreword to Mittelmark et al.’s Handbook of Salutongenesis, and despite considerable development and extrapolation from Antonovsky’s initial work, a salutongenic concept of health promotion has yet to become the ‘gold standard’ within a health care system that remains rooted in ‘the medical model’ of disease prevention. Salutogenesis has nevertheless begun to influence thinking about health in physical education. The earliest contributions have come from Sweden. In an empirical study, Sollerhed, Ejlertsson and Apitzsch (2005) found strong correlations between SOC, positive attitudes to physical education and physically active lives among 16–19 year old boys and girls. In an advocacy paper, Quennerstedt (2008) argued that salutogenesis offered health and physical educators a wider and more positive perspective on health, and how movement activities can enrich people’s lives rather than merely reduce the risk of illness. Jakobsson (2014) employed a salutogenic lens to investigate teenagers’ reasons for continuing to participate in Swedish sports clubs. In Australia, McCuaig, Quennerstedt and Macdonald (2013) and McCuaig and Quennerstedt (2018) have investigated the application of a salutogenic approach to the development of the Australian HPE curriculum. In this context, they argue that a salutogenic perspective allows curriculum developers to promote a ‘strengths-based’ in contrast to a pathogenic ‘deficit’ approach to health. Pedagogically, this work has emphasized, consistent with the SOC, problem-solving through inquiry, the identification of resources and assets for healthy living, and empowerment and self-determination by listening to student voices. McCuaig and Quennerstedt (2018) propose that salutogenesis makes possible a focus pedagogically on how young people can come to lead ‘the good life’. These research and curriculum development projects informed by salutogenesis are first steps in offering an alternative to the currently dominant perspective on the relationship of physical education to health. The central place of SOC within salutogenesis would appear to contrast precisely with the situation of living in precarity. As the work of precarity researchers has shown, to live in precarity is to lack a sense of meaningfulness, comprehensibility, and manageability when faced with challenging life situations. There will be much more to say about the substantive relationship of salutogenesis to health and physical education when we consider the development of

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critical pedagogies of affect in Chapter 8. At this moment, however, we might echo Kickbush’s view that it is a pathogenic disease prevention view of health promotion that informs current curriculum and policy developments, with the few exceptions noted here, such as the Australian example. The dominance of the pathogenic view is evidenced in the prevalence of the concepts of physical fitness and physical activity as the links between physical education and health in curriculum policy and advocacy. These concepts place an emphasis on the physical (in terms of movement efficiency) and physiological (cardiovascular efficiency and lean body mass) functioning of the body. While this emphasis is, in philosophical terms, necessary, it cannot be sufficient in an age of precarity, where mental health issues have begun to emerge as matters of at least equivalent priority to CVD and obesity. The question is, what contribution might physical education make to health as it is understood from a salutongenic perspective? We will seek an answer to this question in Chapters 6, 7, and 8.

Conclusion This chapter has taken as its starting point the observation that precarity and health and wellbeing are closely intertwined. It has been important then to examine in some detail physical education’s current relationship to health, which I noted has become increasingly prominent in the past two decades in curriculum development, policy and advocacy. The two key concepts currently linking physical education and health within this context are physical fitness and physical activity. I have argued that the currently dominant understanding of the relationship between physical education and health can be located in what Antonovsky has called a pathogenic view of health promotion. Here, physical education’s focus on MVPA is viewed as a means of disease prevention, specifically the reduction of risk factors associated with coronary heart disease and obesity. Within this view of the relationship, physical education’s main contribution to health is physical and physiological. In the investigation of changing conceptions of this relationship between physical education during the late 19th through to the early 21st century, the discontinuities in this process can be seen particularly at the level of practice. This is evident as physical educators shifted from what I have called elsewhere the ID2 of physical education-as-gymnastics to physical education-as-sports techniques (Kirk, 2010) to a more recent configuration of physical education-as-health promotion. These discontinuities are important to be sure, with each form of practice signalling a particular understanding of the physical education – health relationship, or else a particular view of the value of health within physical education. As interesting and important as these changes in practice are, by far more significant for our purposes here are the continuities between present and

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past. Scientific discoveries have provided new insights into the nature of the physical and physiological effects of physical activity, to be sure. The earlier conceptions of the relationship viewed physical activity as a form of therapy, concerned with movement efficiency, but particularly for those children who showed ‘defects and deformities’. At the turn of the 20th century, physical educators were confronted with undernourished and emaciated bodies and the spectre of intergenerational physical deterioration. As the 20th century unfolded and the curative and preventative arms of medicine became increasingly effective, stunted growth and undernourishment were of diminishing concern in the countries of the Global North. New scientific knowledge about the effects of exercise on bodily strength and endurance opened a new vista for physical educators, beyond the therapeutic role of exercise to a focus on physical fitness. As the challenge shifted in the 1970s and 1980s from under to over nourishment, this knowledge found further application in relation to reducing the risks of coronary heart disease and obesity. Throughout this process, the emphasis on the physical and physiological within the relationship between physical education and health has remained. As therapy, as the hard core of physical fitness, and as a form of disease prevention, physical education’s contribution to health has been embedded in the body’s physical functioning. This is a continuity that is at first look disguised by the discontinuities in practice. It is however of considerable importance in understanding the residual effects of past practices on the present, particularly in terms of resistance to alternative conceptions of the relationship between physical education and health. This inability or unwilling ness to imagine alternative possibilities beyond MVPA, for example, is, in a sense, physical education’s own ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011). It is this continuity that will make it difficult for advocates of a salutogenic concept of health to find acceptance for the new pedagogical strategies that are implicit in this approach. I am aware I have said little about wellbeing in the course of this chapter. This is in part because the notion of wellbeing is a relative newcomer to the discourse of physical education’s relationship to health and indeed within the broader discourse of health promotion. As such, it is only now beginning to be interrogated and better understood (Cassidy, 2018; Kilborn, 2014). As we will see, however, wellbeing is an important notion for a salutongenic concept of health since it prompts us to look beyond the physical and physiological to consider the whole person. In the chapters which follow, a salutogenic concept of health promotion provides a valuable means of rethinking critical pedagogies in physical education as a response to precarity.

References Antonovsky, A. (1996) The salutogenic model as a theory to guide health promotion, Health Promotion International, 11(1), 11–18. Antonovsky, A. (1979) Health, Stress and Coping, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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100 Health promotion in precarity Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2015) Australian Curriculum Health and Physical Education, https://www.australiancur riculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/health-and-physical-education/rationale/. Bann, D., Johnson, W., Li, L., Kuh, D. and Hardy, R. (2017) Socioeconomic inequalities in body mass index across adulthood: Coordinated analyses of individual participant data from three British birth cohort studies initiated in 1946, 1958 and 1970, PLoS Med, 14(1), 1–20. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cassidy, C. (2018) Wellbeing, being well or well becoming: Who or what is it for and how might we get there?, pp. 13–26, in M. Thorburn (ed) Wellbeing, Education and Contemporary Schooling, London: Routledge. Coonan, W., Dwyer, T., Worsley, T., Leitch, D., Hetzel, B., Daw, C. and Maynard, E. (1984) Physical health evaluations of selected Australian school children engaged in programs of daily physical education: Implications for curriculum and action research, Proceedings of the 15th ACHPER National Biennial Conference, Sydney, January. Corbin, C. B. (2012) C. H. McCloy Lecture: Fifty years of advancements in fitness and activity research, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 83(1), 1–11. Crawford, R. (1980) Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life, International Journal of Health Services, 10(3), 365–388. Education Scotland (2017) Curriculum for Excellence, Benchmarks for Physical Education, https://education.gov.scot/improvement/Documents/HWBPhysicalEducationBenchm arksPDF.pdf. Fairclough, S. and Stratton, G. (2005) ‘Physical education makes you fit and healthy’: Physical education’s contribution to young people’s physical activity levels, Health Education Research, 20(1), 14–23. Gard, M. (2014) eHPE: a history of the future, Sport, Education and Society, 19(6), 827–845. Gard, M. (2011) The End of the Obesity Epidemic, London: Routledge. Gard, M. and Wright, J. (2005) The Obesity Epidemic: Science, morality and ideology, London: Routledge. Haerens, L., Kirk, D., Cardon, G. and Bourdeauhuji, I. (2011) The development of a pedagogical model for Health-Based Physical Education, Quest, 63, 321–338. Harris, J. (2005) Health-related exercise and physical education, pp. 78–97, in K. Green and K. Hardman (eds) Physical Education: Essential issues, London: Sage. Hastie, P. A. (2017) Revisiting the National Physical Education Content Standards: What do we really know about our achievement of the physically educated/literate person?, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 36(1), 3–19. Jakobsson, B. T. (2014) What makes teenagers continue? A salutogenic approach to understanding youth participation in Swedish club sports, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 19(3), 239–252. Jette, S. and Vertinsky, P. (2011) ‘Exercise is medicine’: Understanding the beliefs and practices of Older Chinese women immigrants in British Columbia, Canada, Journal of Aging Studies, 25, 272–284. Kickbush, I. (2017) Foreword, pp. v–vi, in B. Mittelmark, S. Sagy, M. Eriksson, G. F. Bauer, J. M. Pelikan, B. Lindstrom and G. A. Espnes (eds) The Handbook of Salutogenesis, Springer Open.

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Kilborn, M. L. (2014) (Re)conceptualizing Curriculum in (Physical) Education: Focused on Wellness and Guided by Wisdom, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Alberta. Kilborn, M., Lorusso, J. and Francis, N. (2016) An analysis of Canadian physical education curricula, European Physical Education Review, 22(1), 23–46. Kirk, D. (2013) Educational value and models-based practice in physical education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(9), 973–986, doi:10.1080/00131857.2013.785352 Kirk, D. (2010) Physical Education Futures, London: Routledge. Kirk, D. (2006) The ‘obesity crisis’ and school physical education, Sport, Education and Society, 11(2), 121–133. Kirk, D. (1998) Schooling Bodies: School practice and public discourse 1880–1950, London: Leicester University Press. Kirk, D. (1993) The Body, Schooling and Culture, Geelong: Deakin University Press. Kirk, D. (1992) Defining Physical Education: The social construction of a school subject in postwar Britain, London: Falmer. Kirk, D. (1989) Daily Physical Education research: A review and a critique, Physical Education Review, 12(1), 21–30. Kirk, D. (1986) Health Related Fitness as an innovation in the physical education curriculum, pp. 167–181, in J. Evans (ed.) Physical Education, Sport and Schooling: Studies in the sociology of physical education, Lewes: Falmer. Kirk, D. and Colquhoun, D. (1989) Healthism and physical education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 10(4), 417–434. Klein, N. (2007) The Shock Doctrine, London: Penguin. McConnell, K. (2005) Fitness education, pp. 262–279, in J. Lund and D. Tannehill (eds) Standards-based Physical Education Curriculum Development, Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett. McCuaig, L. and Quennerstedt, M. (2018) Health by stealth: Exploring the sociocultural dimensions of salutogenesis for sport, health and physical education research, Sport, Education and Society, 23(2), 111–122. McCuaig, L., Quennerstedt, M. and Macdonald, D. (2013) A salutogenic, strengthsbased approach as a theory to guide HPE curriculum change, Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education, 4(2), 109–125. McIntosh, P. C. (1957) From treadmill to springboard, The Leaflet, 58(5). McKenzie, T. L. and Lounsbery, M. A. (2009) School physical education: The pill not taken, American Journal of Lifestyle Education, 3, 219–225. McKenzie, T. L., Sallis, J. F., Rosengard, P. and Ballard, K. (2016) The SPARK Programs: A public health model of physical education research and dissemination, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 35, 381–389. McKenzie, T. L., Sallis, J. F. and Rosengard, P. (2009) Beyond the stucco tower: Design, development and dissemination of the SPARK physical education programmes, Quest, 61, 1–15. Metzler, M. W., McKenzie, T. L., van der Mars, H., Barrett-Williams, S. L. and Ellis, R. (2013) Health Optimizing Physical Education (HOPE): A new curriculum for school programs—Part 1: Establishing the need and describing the model, Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, 84(4), 41–47. Ministry of Education Singapore (2014) Physical Education Teaching and Learning Syllabus, https://www.moe.gov.sg/docs/default-source/document/education/syllabuses/physical-sp orts-education/files/physical_education_syllabus_2014.pdf.

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102 Health promotion in precarity Mittelmark, M. B., Sagy, S., Eriksson, M., Bauer, G. F., Pelikan, J. M., Lindstrom, B. and Espnes, G. A. (2017, eds) The Handbook of Salutogenesis, Springer Open. Morgan, R. E. and Adamson, G. T. (1957) Circuit Training, London: Bell. Ontario Public Service (2015) The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1–8, Health and Physical Education, www.ontario.ca/edu. Pühse, U. and Gerber, M. (2005, eds) International Comparison of Physical Education: Concepts, problems, prospects, Oxford: Meyer. Quennerstedt, M. (2008) Exploring the relation between physical activity and health: A salutogenic approach to physical education, Sport, Education and Society, 13(3), 267–283. Sallis, J. F. and McKenzie, T. L. (1991) Physical education’s role in public health, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 62(2), 124–137. Sallis, J. F., McKenzie, T. L., Beets, M. W., Beighle, A., Erwin, H. and Lee, S. (2012) Physical education’s role in public health: Steps forward and backward over 20 years and HOPE for the future, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 83(2), 125–135. SHAPE America (2014) Grade-level Outcomes for K-12 Physical Education, https:// www.shapeamerica.org/standards/pe/upload/Grade-Level-Outcomes-for-K-12-Physica l-Education.pdf. Simons-Morton, B., O’Hara, N. M., Simons-Morton, D. and Parcel, G. (1987) Children and fitness: A public health perspective, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 58, 300–307. Sollerhed, A-C., Ejlertsson, G. and Apitzsch, E. (2005) Predictors of strong sense of coherence and positive attitudes to physical education in adolescents, Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 33, 334–342. Standing, G. (2016) The Precariat: The new dangerous class, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Thorpe, S. (2003) Crisis discourse in physical education and the laugh of Michel Foucault, Sport, Education and Society, 8(2), 131–151. Tinning, R. (1985) Physical education and the cult of slenderness: A critique, ACHPER National Journal, 108, 10–13. Tinning, R. and Kirk, D. (1991) Daily Physical Education: Collected papers on healthbased physical education in Australia, Geelong: Deakin University Press. Tulchinsky, T. H. and Varavikova, E. A. (2009) What is the ‘New Public Health’?, Public Health Reviews, 32(1), 25–53. Whitehead, J. and Fox, K. (1983) Student-centred physical education, Bulletin of Physical Education, 19, 21–30. Whitehead, N. and Hendry, L. (1976) Teaching Physical Education in England, London: Lepus. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 6

Advocacy, critique and educational action Critical pedagogies of physical education as a response to precarity

Introduction I have argued thus far in this book that precarity presents a challenge to physical education without precedent. It is true that, in times of affluence and of austerity, physical educators across the Global North have worked with young people growing up in poverty and multiple deprivation. Until the past two decades, however, those scholars who have pioneered specialized approaches to physical education for underserved children and youth arguably have been marginalized in the pedagogy field. Moreover, the teaching of poor and deprived young people has been concentrated in urban schools in the US and their equivalents in other countries, undertaken, often unwillingly, by newly qualified and inexperience teachers. There is then no consensus in physical education that working with poor and disadvantaged young people requires specific and specialized programs and forms of practice. Nor is there a common expectation that such programs can benefit both the physical and mental health and wellbeing of young people. There is no shared commitment, either, to take strategic action to direct the resources available in school physical education to serve the interests of young people experiencing precarity. And there has been little appreciation of the dangers precarity threatens for teachers themselves. How is physical education to respond to this challenge of precarity? I have already signalled my commitment in Chapter 1 of this book and in its title to critical pedagogy as an appropriate response to the increasing prevalence of precarity. The particular focus of critical pedagogy on social justice seems to me to offer a good fit with the challenges precarity presents. Critical pedagogy is well-established in physical education and sport pedagogy, with advocacy, critique and action stretching back to the 1930s (Rovegno & Kirk, 1995). Moreover, the specific term ‘critical pedagogy’ has been in use in the physical education pedagogy literature since the mid-1980s (Kirk, 1986). At the same time, there is no ready-made critical pedagogy package to lift from the shelf and distribute to teachers as guaranteed protection against precarity. Critical pedagogy has become, like physical education itself, a

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contested concept (Philpot, 2016; Devis-Devis, 2006). Additionally, although this contested notion is closely associated with social justice, it is yet to be applied, with a few exceptions (Hickey & Mooney, 2019), to the specific challenges of precarity. In a recently published chapter on the possibilities for a new critical pedagogy in physical education that takes precarity as its focus (Kirk, 2019), I proposed that there had been a ‘backlash against’ and ‘flight from’ critical pedagogy, and cited papers by Tinning (2002) and Enright et al. (2014) as, albeit different, examples. I now think that this was a mis-reading of the field and a mis-characterization of these authors on my part, all of whom have in various publications shown themselves to be committed to socially critical work of one form or another. Indeed, far from there being a flight from critical pedagogy, I have been surprised and heartened by the sheer volume of activity that has been taking place in the name of socially critical work in physical education, especially in the last decade. In the last four years we have seen the publication of edited books by Pringle, Larsson, and Gerdin (2019), Robinson and Randall (2016) and Flory, Tischler, and Sanders (2014). There has been a special issue of Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy on social justice (Walton-Fisette & Sutherland, 2018), an editorial for a special issue in Sport, Education & Society by Leahy, Wright, and Penney (2017), a major study by Philpot (2016), and review papers by Fitzpatrick (2018), FelisAnya, Martos-Garcia, and Devis-Devis (2018), Ovens et al. (2018), and Hickey and Mooney (2019). There has, moreover, been a considerable volume of papers and book chapters published on critical pedagogy and related themes in the past decade, as we will see in this chapter. While there has also been no ‘backlash against’ critical pedagogy, there has nevertheless been considerable criticism of the concept, and what it might stand for (Devis-Devis, 2006). All of this has been generative in so far as it has prompted advocates as well as critics to reflect and consider carefully what can be claimed for critical pedagogy. However, in my view, some criticism has been misdirected, and in the section that follows, I will specify where my concerns lie. One of the most important issues this criticism of critical pedagogy has revealed is the range of terminology in use. To paraphrase Shelley and McCuaig (2018), within physical education alone there is ‘critical pedagogy, critical inquiry, critical education, critically oriented, inquiry-oriented, socially critical research/work/discourse, critical thinking, reflective teaching, and transformative pedagogies’. Philpot (2017), based on his experience in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where critical pedagogy has been established in school physical education for over 18 years, has argued that teachers’ understanding of what critical pedagogy is varies considerably, and suggests that it is not the widely held notions among Aotearoa/New Zealand teachers of ‘critical thinking, an instructional model’, nor ‘just a perspective on health’.

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This range of terminology is, on the one hand, a source of confusion and, as Philpot, Gerdin, and Smith (2019) note, potential misunderstanding. These critiques of the proliferation of terminology highlight an important distinction I want to make, between socially critical scholarship and critical pedagogy. These terms are closely related but they are not interchangeable, with the former referring to a broader category of analytical activity and the latter a more specific range of educational actions. Socially critical scholarship is concerned primarily with analysing and troubling the normative order of physical education. Using a variety of theories and methods, it seeks to grasp and render comprehensible the complexity of life in physical education classes and teacher education programs. It also seeks to uncover vested interests, unfair, and inequitable practices (Kirk, 2010). We can take an example from the literature on girls and physical education. The works of Vertinsky (1992), Flintoff and Scraton (2001), Garrett (2004), and Azzarito (2009) provide socially critical analyses of gender identity, inequity, and its intersections with race and class. This socially critical scholarship may hold implications for and indeed make explicit recommendations for pedagogy, but these authors are not primarily concerned with educational action. Critical pedagogy more specifically is concerned with the organization and alignment of curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment in ways that render physical education inclusive, fair, and equitable as an embodied experience for young people (Standal, 2015). Through this experience, critical pedagogy seeks to empower young people (Oliver & Kirk, 2015). The activist work of Oliver, Hamzeh and McCaughtry (2009), Enright and O’Sullivan (2010), and Fisette and Walton (2014) provide examples of critical pedagogy in this same field of girls and physical education. The activist projects these authors have undertaken draw on socially critical scholarship to frame and inform this educational action and also recruit critical inquiry to assist in the pedagogical process. At root, both socially critical scholarship and critical pedagogy share a concern for social justice (McCuaig, Atkin & Macdonald, 2019; Macdonald, 2002). This shared commitment to social justice means there are areas of overlap and complementarity. As we will see in this chapter, it is understandable that some of the criticisms of critical pedagogy are actually criticisms of socially critical scholarship. On the other hand, as Rovegno and Kirk (1995) argue at considerable length, there are pedagogies of physical education that do not use any of the terminology listed above but are, nevertheless, concerned at heart with the organization and alignment of curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment to make physical education inclusive, fair, and equitable (Macdonald, 2002, p.184). This is a crucially important point for two reasons. First, it opens up the range of pedagogies that can be consider ‘critical’. And second, by including forms of physical education that do not use the words ‘critical pedagogy’ to describe

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themselves, we can more sharply define the nature of pedagogies of social justice in physical education, and the distinction I have just made between socially critical scholarship and critical pedagogy. The purpose of this chapter is to assess and establish the suitability of critical pedagogy as physical education’s response to precarity. In order to do so, and since it is a contested concept, we need to explore what critical pedagogy is and what is might possibly achieve as an educational practice. In this chapter, I seek to provide an answer to the vexed question, ‘What is critical pedagogy?’ by examining the criticisms and advocacy for this concept. In the next two chapters, which are companions to this one, I explore the forms critical pedagogy has taken in physical education teacher education and in school physical education, and some examples of critical pedagogies of affect. In so doing, I am aiming to explore critical pedagogy’s possibilities as a response to precarity, and also its limits in terms of what we can ask of it as an educational practice within the school and the university as institutions.

What is critical pedagogy? In order to provide an answer to the question, ‘What is critical pedagogy?’, some level of reflection and analysis is required. It is important then that critical pedagogy is itself subject to criticism. An early critique by O’Sullivan, Siedentop, and Locke (1992) argued that critical pedagogy inappropriately took the moral high ground, was over zealous, and lacked evidence for many of its claims. At the time, O’Sullivan et al. were right. They were referring specifically to a new wave of socially critical scholarship and critical pedagogy that emerged from the early 1980s in the US, the UK, and Australia. While the critique of the normative order in physical education was sometimes confrontational (McKay, Gore & Kirk, 1990), it was also asking questions about power and privilege that at that time had been relatively muted in the physical education pedagogy literature. Nevertheless, O’Sullivan et al. were correct to caution against certainty and overzealousness. Their challenging critique opened up a conversation that was essential to critical pedagogy’s development. Burbules (2016) has argued that by taking the moral high ground, critical pedagogues risk putting themselves beyond criticism. After all, who will watch the watchers? In a rejoinder to a paper that had offered a critique of his work in the journal Democracy & Education, Burbules reflected on a previous publication on the relationship between critical thinking and critical pedagogy, which made three points. One was that the critical thinking and the critical pedagogy traditions each offer a valuable critical perspective on the other; while there are some areas of overlap, their real benefit is dialectical: The critical

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pedagogy tradition highlights how critical thinking analyses neglect issues of power; the critical thinking tradition highlights how critical pedagogy assumes certain political stances that, because they are unquestioned, can lead to a kind of indoctrination. The second concern was that each of these traditions is insufficiently self-critical – That a thoroughgoing criticality is willing to pull up its own roots, and to question its own elisions (as any theory or world view has). This produces a critical stance that is more provisional and less authoritative, grounded in an attitude of questioning and doubt rather than an assertion of a superior epistemic (or political) standpoint (…) The third is that our notion of criticality includes the capacity for thinking differently, putting one’s self outside of any potential hegemony (of the right or of the left). (Burbules, 2016, p.1) Burbules highlights the dangers of critical pedagogy becoming a belief system that is ideological, closed to alternative points of view and unwilling to consider contradictory evidence of its effects. These three points echo a number of the criticisms that have been made of critical pedagogy in the physical education and sport pedagogy field. In their insightful and incisive critique of Fitnessgram, Gard and Pluim (2017) ask why there is so little critical physical education scholarship centred on this program in the US. They provide an account of their view of ‘the critical’ which is consistent with Burbules’ three points. They see being critical as interchangeable with being sceptical. They explain that this notion of critical scholarship: Is particularly concerned with epistemology and the politics and practices of knowledge production. For various material and symbolic reasons, what counts as ‘official’ knowledge is (a) contested issue, even within the academy. However, healthy inquiry necessitates grappling with tensions around differing notions (of) ‘official’ knowledge, standards, quality and rigour in research (…) Cultivating the ‘critical’ means working towards a rigorously wise, open minded and ethical approach to the knowledge that we produce as researchers and advocate from as teachers. (Gard & Pluim, 2017, p.604) Gard and Pluim’s socially critical scholarship unearths several closed circles of self-interest centred on Fitnessgram, in which certainty that the program is ‘right’ puts it beyond criticism. Moreover, while they see value in committed action on behalf of young people, their scepticism towards the unquestioning use of Fitnessgram and the apparent indifference to its effects prompts them to caution researchers and teachers to guard against missionary zeal and the quest to ‘save’ young people from themselves and ills of the world.

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In a similar vein, Fitzpatrick and Russell (2015) claim there is a potential for some advocates to believe that their way is the best and perhaps only form of critical pedagogy, and that this is moreover a gendered position. Such approaches assumed there to be a ‘correct’ critical pedagogy, advocating certain political positions as superior to others. Lather (…) described this as the ‘masculinist voice of abstraction and universalisation, assuming the rhetorical position of “the one who knows”’. This is a key tension in critical work more generally; the potential tendency for critical pedagogy to become another imposed method of teaching which marginalises those it seeks to emancipate; or, perhaps worse, a method of ‘saving’ the marginalised and thereby ignoring the complexity of localised cultural identities, including student perspectives. (Fitzpatrick & Russell, 2015, p.161) Each of these authors recognize the balancing act that is required of critical pedagogues. Having learned from the labours of socially critical scholars, we want to act with conviction to change what we believe to be ineffective and possibly harmful forms of physical education. In doing so, we must, at the same time, remain open to the possibility that our own preferred response to this situation may itself be inadequate. Both Gard and Pluim and Fitzpatrick and Russell point out, too, that critical pedagogues cannot presume to know what is best for young people, at least, not without consulting them and, perhaps, bringing them into the process of co-constructing their own physical education programs as is commonplace, for instance, in activist work (Oliver & Lalik, 2004). Robinson and Randall (2016) voice another common criticism of critical pedagogy which echoes the early critique of O’Sullivan et al. (1992), who had argued that critical pedagogues were long on criticism but short on practical solutions. In their edited collection Social Justice in Physical Education: Critical reflections and pedagogy for change Robinson and Randall (2016, p.4) comment that, “critical pedagogy in physical education has encountered considerable critique for a number of years. Some of the more familiar critiques have focused upon critical pedagogy’s abstract and Utopian transformation claims”. Writing in the early 1990s, O’Sullivan et al. were correct when they made these same criticisms. At that particular time there were few examples of pedagogies for social justice as forms of educational practice, with some exceptions we will come to in Chapters 7 and 8. However, to make this point in 2016 that critical pedagogy is not grounded in practice, is abstract and Utopian, is an odd one, according to the definitions I offered earlier of socially critical scholarship and critical pedagogy. One possible explanation is that Randall and Robinson are referring to and repeating criticism of socially critical scholarship rather than criticism of critical pedagogy. Perhaps there has been a case of mistaken identity?

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Robinson and Randall (2016) are not the only scholars to draw attention to this criticism, however. Another example comes from Shelley and McCuaig in their ‘close encounters’ with critical pedagogy in health education. They cite Jennifer Gore who they say claims: scholarship on critical/radical pedagogies is crowded with repeated calls to ‘translate their visions into practice’ (…), and fails to identify the specific alternative practices that are to be employed. And she is not alone in her criticism, with HPE scholars questioning the field’s understanding of critical pedagogy and citing limited evidence of its success in PETE. (Shelley and McCuaig, 2018, p.153) Again, it seems to me that if critical pedagogy is already an educational practice, this criticism only makes sense if in a particular instance there has been a failure to align curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment in ways that render physical education inclusive, fair, and equitable as an embodied experience for young people. Or to over claim what might be achieved through this educational action. But this is not what Robinson and Randall, Gore, and the physical education scholars cited by Shelley and McCuaig actually write. They write instead about ‘abstract’ and ‘Utopian’ claims and the need to move from vision to practice, which suggests the target of criticism is actually socially critical scholarship, not critical pedagogy. A third example of this particular line of criticism appears in McMillan’s (2017) report of his excellent empirical study of teachers’ day-to-day practice in Scottish schools. He argues: We have yet to capture a sufficiently detailed picture of teachers’ day-today practice in physical education let alone interrogating these practices to instigate emancipation and change. (p.159) […] Tinning’s (2002) view was that the language used by these scholars was overtly forceful in describing the limitations of current practices and their visions for change were not always corroborated with empirical evidence. More recently, in reviewing the findings of studies using a ‘critical’ lens (…) Enright, Hill, Sandford and Gard (2014) observed that what is shared across this research is a ‘preoccupation with failure’ (…) rather than broadening our conceptions of teaching, there is a strong move to inform us of ‘what’s broken’ (…) These studies use sophisticated theoretical ideas to bring negative constraints into view but, in attempting to make a case for emancipation and change, there is a tendency to overemphasise these constraints as part of the critique. (McMillan, 2017, p.163) McMillan attempts a spirited defence of teachers’ practice against what he sees as the ‘critical’ perspective’s negativity. The ‘critical’ for McMillan

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undermines practice he later in his chapter shows to be rich and complex, while itself lacking grounding in the ‘real world’ of schools. While this sentiment is understandable, this may be yet another case of mistaken identity. As I noted earlier, not all socially critical scholarship wears this label. From the physical education pedagogy research literature, some of which I have personally undertaken or have been associated with, I can cite many examples that do provide detailed pictures of day-to-day practice in physical education while at the same time offering criticisms of the normative order. Here is a small sample from a substantial body of literature that troubles the normative order of physical education without necessarily describing itself as socially critical (Brooker et al., 2000; Enright & O’Sullivan, 2012; Fisette, 2013; Goodyear, Casey & Kirk, 2014; Kirk & Macdonald, 2001; Kirk & Colquhoun, 1989; Kirk et al., 2018; Luguetti et al., 2017; MacPhail, Kirk & Griffin, 2008; Oliver et al., 2009). Tinning’s ‘Modest Pedagogy’ McMillan is one of many physical education researchers to cite Richard Tinning’s (2002) paper ‘Towards a Modest Pedagogy’ to support their criticisms of critical pedagogy. Invariably such citations accept Tinning’s arguments for a modest pedagogy without a murmur of dissent, with only a few exceptions (Fitzpatrick, 2018; Philpot, 2017). Tinning has throughout his career provided thoughtful and innovative reflections and commentary on the conduct of socially critical scholarship generally and critical pedagogy more particularly (Tinning, 2019, 2010, 1988). I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter that I also cited his 2002 paper as an example of a ‘backlash against’ and a ‘flight from’ critical pedagogy, and that this was a misreading on my part. However, I think Tinning’s advocacy for modest pedagogy in this paper makes explicit a number of important issues for understanding what critical pedagogy is and might be. The paper is important, too, given its frequent citation and clear influence in the physical education pedagogy field. In offering answers to the question, ‘What is critical pedagogy?’, I want to take time here to elaborate on the key issues the notion of a modest pedagogy raises. There are three points of interest for me: what use of the term ‘modest’ implies; the impossibility of a critical pedagogy; and Tinning’s criteria for inclusion in the critical pedagogy ‘big tent’. Before going on to look at these points of interest in detail, it is important to understand the context of Tinning’s argument in this paper. Some of the key sources he uses to build his case for a modest pedagogy were contributors to a special issue of the journal Educational Theory published in 1998. Peter McLaren and Ilan Gur-Ze’ev provided two quite contrasting accounts of critical pedagogy that a number of other invited authors responded to, including Gert Biesta and Patti Lather. My reading of Tinning’s paper is that in setting up his argument for

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a modest pedagogy, he was influenced by positions these authors took on the McLaren and Ze’ev pieces. The first point of interest is Tinning’s use of the term ‘modest’. The need for a modest pedagogy, according to Tinning, reflects the two lines of criticism already discussed above, in terms of a lack of reflection on critical pedagogy’s own limits and blind spots, and on its abstraction and celebration of Utopian visions. The certainty advocates for critical pedagogy demonstrate leads them to over-claim what they might achieve, while promising too much and failing to deliver. Tinning expressed concern, citing Biesta’s reading of McLaren, was that these fault-lines in critical pedagogy made it vulnerable to appropriation by neoliberal factions. Commenting on possible consequences of this neoliberal appropriation for a new, socially critically inspired curriculum in Australia, he wrote: In the case of the current KLA for HPE, the principles of social justice are, in practice, in danger of meaning nothing of substance. But the mainstreaming of the discourse is not my only source of ambivalence regarding critical pedagogy today. I have also become concerned over the claims made on its behalf, which have been, on reflection, often overstated, utopian, and perhaps even wrong-headed. (Tinning, 2002, pp.225–226) The notion of a modest pedagogy was intended by Tinning as a counterfoil to these problems. A possible implication in his use of this notion is that some critical pedagogy in physical education was immodest. Apart from mentioning the technocratic physical education paper by McKay et al. (1990), a piece of socially critical scholarship which was the catalyst for O’Sullivan et al.’s critique, Tinning does not disclose to readers who he thinks the immodest critical pedagogues are. In so doing he may have been well-intentioned, but this is an unhelpful omission. Since we don’t know who he means, we cannot examine these works for ourselves and reach our own conclusions. We just have to take Tinning’s word for it, that there are ‘wrong-headed’ critical pedagogues in our midst. It seems to me that this is what most scholars who cite this paper have done. A second point of interest touches on critical pedagogy’s ontological status, and concerns a somewhat technical play on the word ‘impossible’. Tinning wrote: “Biesta (1998) reminds us that since critical pedagogy is founded on the Enlightenment ideal of emancipation through critical reflexivity, fundamental questions about the possibility of a critical pedagogy are raised by poststructuralist critiques of the Enlightenment project” (Tinning, 2002, p.227). The idea that emancipation can be achieved through critical reflection requires assumptions about the nature of truth and certainty that poststructuralist theories had, arguably, fatally undermined. Tinning next quotes Lather, who wrote: “I am entirely persuaded by poststructural theory that

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(…) implementing a critical pedagogy in the field of schooling is impossible” (Tinning, 2002, p.227, Lather’s emphasis). This use of these two writers is quite appropriate in terms of building an argument. However, when Biesta (1998) argues for “the importance of the recognition of the impossibility of critical education” (Biesta’s emphasis), he is using the word impossible in a very precise way. He goes on to clarify in parenthesis “which is not what is not possible but what cannot be foreseen and calculated as a possibility” (Biesta, 1998, p.500, his emphasis). Although Tinning does not quote what Lather wrote next, her text is revealing of what she thinks it means to say that critical pedagogy is impossible. Implementing critical pedagogy in the field of schooling is impossible. That is precisely the task: to situate the experience of impossibility as an enabling site for working through aporias. Ellsworth calls this “coming up against stuck place after stuck place” as a way to keep moving within “the impossibility of teaching” in order to produce and learn from ruptures, failures, breaks and refusals. (Lather, 1998, p.495) Are these uses of impossible by Biesta and Lather to describe critical pedagogy the same? My reading is that they are related by the critique of the idea that enlightenment can be achieved through critical reflection in a purely cognitive sense, and that ‘truth’ can be the result. In this sense their two uses of impossible may make them family members. But it seems to me they are using the term impossible with different emphases to make quite different points. Neither uses the word in the sense Tinning seems to imply in his paper, that (as Biesta puts it) critical pedagogy is not possible. For most readers who have not taken the trouble to consult Tinning’s sources, questioning the ‘possibility’ of a critical pedagogy is likely to be interpreted much more literally than either Biesta’s or Lather’s uses intend. This play on the notion of possibility has, in my view, the potential to mislead some readers. Since Tinning’s stated task in the paper is to problematize ‘knowledge and schooling yet avoid the pitfalls of Enlightenment thinking’, the implication that a critical pedagogy is impossible is an important aspect of the frame he builds to support the argument for a modest solution. At the same time, it should be said both uses of impossible by Biesta and Lather are important contributions to answering the question ‘What is critical pedagogy?’. For Biesta, it is impossible to know the future and indeed how our educational actions might affect our students, and this tempers any statement of intent by educationalists. For Lather, the contradictions and disjunctions of everyday life mean that learning can only occur as teachers and learners work through ‘stuck places’. Tinning, I think, clearly communicates these messages in the 2002 paper, as he does elsewhere in his work. The implication that critical pedagogy is impossible in a literal sense potentially obscures this clarity.

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A third point of interest is in what kinds of physical education practices can be included in the critical pedagogy ‘big tent’. Commenting that in his view concepts, such as conscientization, ideology, and emancipation were unknown to physical education teachers of the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote: Although Rovegno and Kirk (1995) claim that “socially critical work has shown that empowerment and emancipation are central goals of physical education” (p.453), in my view, physical education has been more concerned with a rather more restricted and individualized notion of emancipation. The concern has been more with the freedom of an individual to participate in the movement culture, become self-reliant or independent rather than with the broader sense of emancipation underpinning critical pedagogy. Physical education teachers have arguably been more concerned with matters of lifestyle than with matters of life chances. (Tinning, 2002, p.228) This statement provides a particular view of the size and inclusivity of the ‘big tent’ of critical pedagogy. The Rovegno and Kirk paper sought to broaden the agenda of socially critical scholarship in several ways. One was to show that, historically, physical educators have long been concerned with social justice. We wanted to show not only the longevity of physical educators’ interest in social justice but also what this work had achieved. For the purposes of this 1995 paper, the socially critical scholarship we included in our analysis had two features. The first is an unwillingness to accept without question or to take for granted the underlying premises and conventions of physical education. The second is an attempt to locate these concerns about physical education within the social, cultural, and temporal contexts from which they arise. In other words, those physical educators who have been merely critical of physical education in its existing forms without positioning the subject historically and culturally – at least substantively if not at the level of formal theory – have not been included. (Rovegno & Kirk, 1995, p.448) We provided some detailed examples in the paper, citing individuals, such as Maja Carlquist, L. P. Jacks, and Rudolf Laban. We noted Sheila Fletcher’s study of Women First, which showed that women led the development of physical education in countries of the Global North from the 1880s until the 1950s, developing radical and liberating forms of movement education. We recorded several achievements of this historical and more recent socially critical scholarship. We noted that “physical education is socially and historically constructed and constituted, that physical education is a specialized set of practices within the broader physical culture of societies, and that physical education has been a site of social oppression, but it also can be a medium of empowerment and

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emancipation”. Inez Rovegno brought her expertise to the paper through the addition of an ethic of care to the ethic of social justice that typically informed socially critical scholarship. She wrote: “an ethic of care would join a focus on relationality, connection, and responsibility to one’s community with the current focus on autonomy, emancipation, and individual rights” (Rovegno & Kirk, 1995, p.447). She also brought to the agenda for critical pedagogy the idea that knowledge of how children develop and learn is of crucial importance, proposing developmental, ecological/situated, and constructivist perspectives. We closed the paper with three examples of physical education pedagogies we believed exemplified the broader socially critical agenda we wished to promote, meaningful movement (Hoffman, Young & Klesius, 1981), critical and responsibility models (Hellison & Templin, 1991), and child-designed games (Rovegno & Bandhauer, 1994). According to this account by Rovegno and Kirk, physical educators did not need to be familiar with Paolo Friere’s writing or terms like ideology to be advocating for and practising critical pedagogy. Additionally, considering the historical evidence, Tinning’s argument that physical educators had traditionally been more concerned with lifestyles than life chances may be hard to sustain. Here is just one example among many. Writing the foreword to a new curriculum guide for school physical education in the Australian state of Victoria in 1946, the Medical Inspector of Schools H. P. Kelly claimed: Formal exercises are artificial, unrelated to life situations, and generally lacking in interest; they also completely ignore the very important influence that the emotions exert on the physical well-being of the individual. Enjoyment and enthusiasm are necessary if the exercise is to have a stimulating and beneficial effect. We therefore insist that every child has the right to play, and this right must be restored to all children who have lost it. (Physical Education for Victorian Schools, 1946). In its context and in its time, this is a radical statement indeed, one that is underpinned by an ethic of social justice. In it is a clear critique of the normative order of what can be called physical education-as-gymnastics (Kirk, 2010), as well as an assessment of this form of physical education’s fitness for purpose for ‘life situations’. Even though we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that the form of physical education it enabled, physical educationas-sport-techniques, had many shortcomings, this takes nothing away from the empowering intent of the statement. Kelly is not concerned merely with lifestyle but very much with the life chances of every child.

What critical pedagogy might be I believe, on the basis of this examination of these three points of interest, that the notion of a modest pedagogy is unnecessary. Indeed, it may

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persuade physical educators to be too limited in their aspirations given the challenges presented by precarity (Fitzpatrick, 2018). Nevertheless, we learn much from Tinning’s 2002 paper as we do from the whole corpus of his work. He moves us closer to an answer to the question ‘What is critical pedagogy?’, particularly in the current context of precarity where uncertainty, instability, and insecurity are defining features. As a form of educational practice, critical pedagogy necessarily seeks to bring about change, in social justice terms, for the better. But the nature of that change cannot be specified in abstract terms. Moreover, there is no one critical pedagogy; indeed, it may at this point be appropriate to write only in the plural, of critical pedagogies? Following Burbules (2016) and Gard and Pluim (2017) we understand too the danger of seeking the moral high ground. Critical pedagogies must be open to critique if they are to be adapted and improved to meet changing circumstances. In precarity, this is an essential feature. At the same time, we recognize that teaching is a moral act. Hellison (1995) drew explicit attention to the moral basis of physical education teaching by posing a leading question for his work, ‘What’s worth doing?’. We cannot assume, either, that teachers and researchers know, with certainty, what is best for young people. As Gard and Pluim put it, critical pedagogies cannot be implemented with a missionary zeal to save young people from themselves and, in this case, precarity’s mal effects. Along with Fitzpatrick and Russell (2015), we cannot say with certainty that young people will understand and appreciate their physical education experiences in the same terms as their teachers intend. This means that typically critical pedagogies are student-centred. For example, Oliver and Kirk’s (2015, p.3) account of activist work with girls takes, as a first principle, the idea that “valid knowledge is produced only in action: action with, not on or for, but action with participants”. In activist forms of critical pedagogy, young people co-construct their physical education programs with their teachers (Kirk et al., 2018; Luguetti et al., 2017; Oliver et al., 2009). Critical pedagogies of physical education as experience: rethinking ‘straight pedagogy’ I have argued that critical pedagogies are concerned with the organization and alignment of curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment in ways that render physical education inclusive, fair, and equitable as an embodied experience for young people and, through this experience, they seek to empower young people. I use the term experience here consistent with Dewey’s (1938) principles of continuity and interaction. An experience is educationally beneficial when it affords continuity that leads to the further growth of the individual. Interaction refers to the relationship between an individual in terms of their capabilities, intentions and desires, and the immediate environment. According to Dewey, it

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is the teacher’s responsibility to create a learning environment in which an individual’s continuity of experience is possible. A good example of the application of this principle in physical education can be seen in Oliver’s activist work in ‘Building the Foundation’. Here the teacher and students discuss, negotiate, and reach agreement on how they will work together in physical education, through coming to better understand all students’ interests and needs (Oliver & Kirk, 2015). Building on this concept of embodied experience as we seek to develop critical pedagogies that can empower young people living in precarity, what is it possible to claim for school physical education? In their study of gender relevant physical education, Gorely, Holroyd, and Kirk (2003) observed that if the social construction of the habitus is co-extensive with an individual’s life experience, then is it conceivable that school physical education could make an impact on such a complex process? Young people arrive at secondary school physical education lessons at around age 12 with already well-developed embodied capabilities, intentions and desires in relation to the physical cultures of a society. Even in education systems that provide the most generous amounts of time of up to two or more hours per week through the first three or four years of secondary schooling, is it possible for teachers to construct the learning environment in such a way that benefits the experiences of classes of up to 30 young people with a potentially wide variety of embodied capabilities, intentions, and desires? This has been a chronic challenge for physical educators. In Ling gymnastics, where all pupils were organized into ranks and performed in unison precisely the same movements as the teacher, the argument could be made that everybody was being treated equally. But not equitably. Difference was not recognized. Ling gymnastics may have benefitted some children, but not others. Ling gymnastics is, as Standal (2015) has remarked, a hyper-normative form of physical education. In physical education-as-sport techniques, this same idea of a normative order is applied in so far as all children are required to participate in the same activities, though it is somewhat disguised by a looser and less uniform organization. Nevertheless, equality of treatment does not make these practices equitable. Responding to Gorely et al.’s observation about the credibility of physical education influencing the habitus of all children favourably, Fitzpatrick and McGlashan (2016) helpfully suggest: If we accept that (…) school PE will have a difficult time interrupting the habitus, then the answer lies not in seeing PE as an intervention targeting the habitus, but in seeing the field needing to embrace and recognize a more diverse range of habitus. (Fitzpatrick & McGlashan, 2016, p.113) One way to do this, for Fitzpatrick and McGlashan, is to rethink ‘straight pedagogy’. Their use of the term ‘straight’ involves a play on words.

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We want to challenge PE practice here and suggest it is too straight, both in its commitment to certain pedagogies (at the expense of others) and, relatedly, to heteronormative practice. Indeed, we suggest these are interwoven (…) straight pedagogy begets straightness (heteronormativity) and reproduces multiple forms of exclusion. (Fitzpatrick & McGlashan, 2016, p.102) Standal (2015) has used the same concept to claim that traditional forms of physical education incorporate a number of ‘straightening devices’ which have the effect of creating and sustaining a normative order. In developing a concept of ‘critical movement literacy’, Standal argues for forms of physical education that seek to queer normative practices and, in effect, become more inclusive of a range of movement capabilities. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, Standal argues that critical movement literacy would seek to extend the body and its repertoire of capabilities, in much the same way as Dewey’s concept of continuity of experience fosters growth. However, this can only be possible when practices are (in Fitzpatrick and McGlashan’s terms) ‘prised open’ to reveal how they privilege particular embodied capabilities. Standal (2015, p.132) argues that “norms and expectations allow certain bodies to move with ease, while others have the experience of continuously noticing themselves and how they deviate from these norms and expectations”. As Landi further clarifies: Being queer is an embodied experience, one that only comes from being entrenched in queer experiences and spaces. In other words, my sexual preference does not make me queer. It is the thousands of hours I have spent in queer neighbourhoods, queer organisations, and experiencing the affects of being queer that have shaped my ‘queerness’ (…) physical education needs to be a place where queers can flourish, experience pleasure, and be successful. (Landi, 2018, p.11) Commenting on the possibility that critical movement literacy might develop what Samuel Todes calls ‘poise’, Standal writes: The contribution of queer phenomenology is to show that pedagogical practices designed to develop poise must build in attention to difference and, specifically, must structure movement environments so that they are responsive and adaptive to a wide range of movers. (Standal, 2015, p.133) Glasby and Macdonald (2004, p.135) echo this point, arguing that “in order to progress the learning of all students, differentiated learning methods and experiences will need to play a central role in our teaching”. Even if this could be done and physical education could become a more inclusive learning environment, Standal argues nevertheless the tendency to ‘straighten’

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pupils will be always present in schools. Thus there will always be ‘queer moments’ in any form of physical education as young people in their diversities of embodiment encounter straightening devices. If critical pedagogies are forms of educational practice that are concerned with the organization and alignment of curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment in ways that render physical education inclusive, fair, and equitable, teachers will need to be alert to tendencies to straighten by using queer moments productively. This is particularly challenging, argues Standal, echoing the analysis in Chapter 4, when many physical education teachers are themselves ‘severely able-bodied’. Consequently, they may have little appreciation of what it feels like for young people to encounter the straightening devices of physical education, and thus how they might assist them to work through straight pedagogy. As part of this process of extending the body of every pupil, Standal notes the importance of fostering pupils’ understanding of their own embodied experiences, a point that chimes with one of the criticisms of critical pedagogy that assume teachers know what is best for young people. It is not enough, however, to take note of an experience and then to reflect on its social construction and potential for oppression. Consistent with Tinning’s (2002) critique of the Enlightenment view of emancipation, Standal again draws on Ahmed and her reversal of the common use of reflection to produce knowledge that leads to social transformation in critical pedagogy to argue that, on the contrary, transformations lead to knowledge. Situations in which we confront obstacles that prevent us from advancing in the direction we are going or compel us to stop can generate insight. Becoming aware of queer moments and experiences of exclusion provides both teachers and pupils with opportunities to generate knowledge about inclusion and the processes that might have generated these moments. (Standal, 2015, p.135) This process of productive or practical labour to overcome the barriers to learning that straightening devices represent resembles Lather’s comments on ‘stuck places’. A pedagogical example can be found in activist work with girls, where identifying, naming, and negotiating or transforming barriers to physical activity is an integral aspect of this critical pedagogy (Oliver & Kirk, 2015). I return to look at these notions in detail in Chapter 8.

Conclusion My purpose in this chapter was to assess and establish the suitability of critical pedagogies as physical education’s response to precarity. I made a distinction between socially critical scholarship and critical pedagogy. This distinction is intended to provide clarity in discussions about socially critical

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work in physical education. It also allowed me to expose some of the criticisms of critical pedagogy as, possibly, cases of mistaken identity. I will use this distinction in the next chapter too, in order to clarify the extent to which approaches to teacher education and to curriculum developments in schools are indeed critical pedagogies, according to my definitions. In approaching an answer to the question ‘What is critical pedagogy?’, I have attempted to take account of and learn from criticisms that have been made of socially critical work. While I have argued some of this criticism may have been misdirected, nevertheless, the lessons from these critiques have been helpful in thinking through and outlining what critical pedagogies in physical education might look like, what they might aspire to and what they might reasonably hope to achieve. This exploration of the scholarly literature provides a sense of the concept of critical pedagogy and its potential suitability as a response to precarity. The chapter has been concerned then to establish some clarity around the contested concept of critical pedagogy. I have offered a particular account of how we might think about critical pedagogies in physical education, which are underpinned by a concern for inclusion, fairness, and equity. These three social justice concepts imply recognition of and educationally productive work with difference among young people who attend school physical education classes. I note that critical pedagogies of physical education offer profoundly embodied experiences that are empowering for young people. By drawing on the assistance of Standal’s use of queer phenomenology, I have attempted to provide the embodied equivalent of troubling the normative order of physical education that is so often practiced in socially critical scholarship. Fitzpatrick and McGlashan’s, and Standal’s mentions of ‘straight pedagogy’ in physical education help to show how the normative order of physical education practice might be disrupted and thus made more inclusive through the unstraightening effects of queer moments. It is in this queering of physical education that makes critical pedagogies an appropriate and necessary response to precarity since it seeks to use difference, uncertainty, and instability as opportunities for learning and thus, following Ahmed, for transformation. While we might have achieved some level of conceptual clarity through this discussion, of critical pedagogy as a form of educational action, this account of the concept necessarily remains abstract. Our next task is, then, to move to a much more substantive level. Socially critical work has been advocated for and (arguably) practiced in teacher education programs and in schools for some time. In the next chapter, I explore the forms this work has taken in these two settings in order to judge the extent to which this practice is aligned to the concept of critical pedagogy outlined in the chapter. My intention is to identify if any of this work, first, can be described as critical pedagogy as I have defined it here, and second, whether any of it is suitable as a response to precarity.

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References Azzarito, L. (2009) The panopticon of physical education: Pretty, active, and ideally White, Physical Education & Sport Pedagogy, 14(1), 19–39, doi:10.1080/17408980701712106. Biesta, G. (1998) Say you want a revolution…: Suggestions for the impossible future of critical pedagogy, Educational Theory, 49(4), 499–510. Brooker, R., Kirk, D., Braiuka, S. and Bransgrove, A. (2000) Implementing a Game Sense approach to teaching year 8 basketball, European Physical Education Review, 6 (1), 7–26. Burbules, N. (2016) Being critical about being critical, Democracy & Education, 24(2), 1–5. Devis-Devis, J. (2006) Socially critical research perspectives in physical education, pp. 37–58, in D. Kirk, D. Macdonald and M. O’Sullivan (eds) The Handbook of Physical Education, London: Sage. Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and Education, New York: MacMillan. Enright, E. and O’Sullivan, M. (2012) Physical education ‘in all sorts of corners’: Student activists transgressing formal physical education curricular boundaries, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 83(2), 255–267. Enright, E. and O’Sullivan, M. (2010) ‘Can I do it in my pyjamas?’ Negotiating a physical education curriculum with teenage girls, European Physical Education Review, 16(3), 203–222. Enright, E., Hill, J., Sandford, R. and Gard, M. (2014) Looking beyond what’s broken: Towards an appreciative research agenda for physical education and sport pedagogy, Sport, Education and Society, 19(7), 912–926. Felis-Anya, M., Martos-Garcia, D. and Devis-Devis, J. (2018) Socio-critical research on teaching physical education and physical education teacher education: A systematic review, European Physical Education Review, 24(3), 314–329. Fisette, J. L. (2013) ‘Are you listening?’: Adolescent girls voice how they negotiate self-identified barriers to their success and survival in physical education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 18(2), 184–203, doi:10.1080/17408989.2011.649724. Fisette, J. L. and Walton, T. A. (2014) ‘If You Really Knew Me’… I am empowered through action, Sport, Education and Society, 19(2), 131–152, doi:10.1080/ 13573322.2011.643297. Fitzpatrick, K. (2018) What happened to critical pedagogy in physical education? An analysis of key critical work in the field, European Physical Education Review, 1–18, doi:10.1177/1356336X18796530. Fitzpatrick, K. and McGlashan, H. (2016) Rethinking straight pedagogy: Gender, sexuality and physical education, pp. 102–121, in D. B. Robinson and L. Randall (eds) Social Justice in Physical Education: Critical reflections and pedagogy for change, Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Fitzpatrick, K. and Russell, D. (2015) On being critical in health and physical education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 20(2), 159–173. Flintoff, A. and Scraton, S. (2001) Stepping into leisure? Young women’s perceptions of active lifestyles and their experiences of school physical education, Sport, Education and Society, 6(1), 5–21. Flory, S. B., Tischler, A. and Sanders, S. (2014, eds) Sociocultural Issues in Physical Education: Case studies for teachers, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Gard, M. and Pluim, C. (2017) Why is there so little critical physical education scholarship in the United States? The case of Fitnessgram, Sport, Education and Society, 22(5), 602–617, doi:10.1080/13573322.2016.1213716. Garrett, R. (2004) Negotiating a physical identity: Girls, bodies and physical education, Sport, Education and Society, 9(2), 223–237, doi:10.1080/1357332042000233958 Glasby, T. and Macdonald, D. (2004) Negotiating the curriculum: Challenging the social relationships in teaching, pp. 133–144, in J. Wright, D. Macdonald and L. Burrows (eds) Critical Inquiry and Problem-solving in Physical Education, London: Routledge. Goodyear, V. A., Casey, A. and Kirk, D. (2014) Tweet me, message me, like me: Using social media to facilitate pedagogical change within an emerging community of practice, Sport, Education and Society, 19(7), 927–943, doi:10.1080/ 13573322.2013.858624. Gorely, T., Holroyd, R. and Kirk, D. (2003) Muscularity, the habitus and the social construction of gender: Towards a gender relevant physical education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(4), 429–448. Hellison, D. (1995) Teaching Responsibility Through Physical Activity, Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Hellison, D. and Templin, T. J. (1991) A Reflective Approach to Teaching Physical Education, Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Hickey, C. and Mooney, A. (2019) Critical scholarship in physical education teacher education: A journey, not a destination, pp. 147–159, in R. Pringle, H. Larsson and G. Gerdin (eds) Critical Research in Sport, Health and Physical Education, London: Routledge. Hoffman, H. A., Young, J. and Klesius, S. E. (1981) Meaningful Movement for Children: A developmental theme approach to physical education, Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Kirk, D. (2019) A new critical pedagogy for physical education in ‘turbulent times’: What are the possibilities?, pp. 106–118, in R. Pringle, H. Larsson and G. Gerdin (eds) Critical Research in Sport, Health and Physical Education, London: Routledge. Kirk, D. (2010) Physical Education Futures, London: Routledge. Kirk, D. (1986) A critical pedagogy for teacher education: Towards an inquiry-oriented approach, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 5(4), 230–246. Kirk, D. and Colquhoun, D. (1989) Healthism and physical education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 10(4), 417–434. Kirk, D. and Macdonald, D. (2001) Teacher voice and ownership of curriculum change, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 33(5), 551–567. Kirk, D., Lamb, C. A., Oliver, K. L. with Ewing-Day, R., Fleming, C., Loch, A. and Smedley, V. (2018) Balancing prescription with teacher and pupil agency: Spaces for manoeuvre within a pedagogical model for working with adolescent girls, The Curriculum Journal, 29(2), 219–237. Landi, D. (2018) Toward a queer inclusive physical education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 23(1), 1–15, doi:10.1080/17408989.2017.1341478. Lather, P. (1998) Critical pedagogy and its complicities: A Praxis of stuck places, Educational Theory, 48(4), 487–497. Leahy, D., Wright, J. and Penney, D. (2017) The political is critical: Explorations of the contemporary politics of knowledge in health and physical education, Sport, Education and Society, 22(5), 547–551, doi:10.1080/13573322.2017.1329141.

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122 Critical pedagogies in response to precarity Luguetti, C., Oliver, K. L., Kirk, D. and Dantas, L. (2017) Exploring an activist approach to working with boys from socially vulnerable backgrounds in a sport context, Sport, Education and Society, 17(4), 493–510. Macdonald, D. (2002) Critical pedagogy: What does it look like and why does it matter?, pp. 167–189, in A. Laker (ed.) The Sociology of Sport and Physical Education: An introductory reader, London: Routledge. MacPhail, A., Kirk, D. and Griffin, L. (2008) Throwing and catching as relational skills in game play: Situated learning in a modified game unit, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 27, 100–115. McCuaig, L., Atkin, J. and Macdonald, D. (2019) In pursuit of critically oriented physical education: Curriculum contests and troublesome knowledge, pp. 119–133, in R. Pringle, H. Larsson and G. Gerdin (eds) Critical Research in Sport, Health and Physical Education, London: Routledge. McKay, J., Gore, J. and Kirk, D. (1990) Beyond the limits of technocratic physical education, Quest, 42(1), 52–76. McMillan, P. (2017) Understanding physical education teachers’ day-to-day practice: Challenging the ‘unfair’ picture, pp. 159–175, in M. Thorburn (ed.) Transformative Learning and Teaching in Physical Education, London: Routledge. Oliver, K. L. and Kirk, D. (2015) Girls, Gender and Physical Education: An activist approach, London: Routledge. Oliver, K. L. and Lalik, R. (2004) ‘The Beauty Walk, this ain’t my topic’: Learning about critical inquiry with adolescent girls, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 36(5), 555–586. Oliver, K. L., Hamzeh, M. and McCaughtry, N. (2009) Girly girls can play games/Las niñas pueden jugar tambien: Co-creating a curriculum of possibilities with fifth-grade girls, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 28, 90–110. O’Sullivan, M., Siedentop, D. and Locke, L. (1992) Toward collegiality: Competing viewpoints among teacher educators, Quest, 44, 266–280. Ovens, A., Flory, S. B., Sutherland, S., Philpot, R., Walton-Fisette, J. L., Hill, J., Phillips, S. and Flemons, M. (2018) How PETE comes to matter in the performance of social justice education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 23(5), 484– 496, doi:10.1080/17408989.2018.1470614. Philpot, R. (2017) What critical pedagogy is possibly becoming and why this is not the preferred outcome, Aotearoa/New Zealand Physical Educator, 50(1), 12–13. Philpot, R. (2016) Kicking at the habitus: Exploring staff and student ‘readings’ of a socially critical physical education teacher education (PETE) programme, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Auckland. Philpot, R., Gerdin, G. and Smith, W. (2019) Socially critical PE: The influence of critical research on the social justice agenda in PETE and PE practice, pp. 134–146, in R. Pringle, H. Larsson and G. Gerdin (eds) Critical Research in Sport, Health and Physical Education, London: Routledge. Pringle, R., Larsson, H. and Gerdin, G. (2019, eds) Critical Research in Sport, Health and Physical Education, London: Routledge. Robinson, D. B. and Randall, L. (2016, eds) Social Justice in Physical Education: Critical reflections and pedagogy for change, Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Rovegno, I. and Bandhauer, D. (1994) Child-designed games: Experience changes teachers’ conceptions, Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 65(6), 60–63. Rovegno, I. and Kirk, D. (1995) Articulations and silences in socially critical work on physical education: Toward a broader agenda, Quest, 47(4), 447–474.

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Shelley, K. and McCuaig, L. (2018) Close encounters with critical pedagogy in sociocritically informed health education teacher education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 23(5), 510–523, doi:10.1080/17408989.2018.1470615. Standal, O. F. (2015) Phenomenology and Pedagogy in Physical Education, London: Routledge. Tinning, R. (2019) Critical pedagogy in physical education as advocacy and action: A reflective account, pp. 93–105, in R. Pringle, H. Larsson and G. Gerdin (eds) Critical Research in Sport, Health and Physical Education, London: Routledge. Tinning, R. (2010) Pedagogy and Human Movement: Theory, practice and Research, London: Routledge. Tinning, R. (2002) Toward a ‘modest pedagogy’: Reflections on the problematics of critical pedagogy, Quest, 54(3), 224–240. Tinning, R. (1988) Student teaching and the pedagogy of necessity, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 7(2), 82–89. Vertinsky, P. A. (1992) Reclaiming space, revisioning the body: The quest for gendersensitive physical education, Quest, 44(3), 373–396. Walton-Fisette, J. L. and Sutherland, S. (2018) Moving forward with social justice education in physical education teacher education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 23(5), 461–468, doi:10.1080/17408989.2018.1476476.

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Chapter 7

Critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education and school physical education

Introduction In Chapter 6 I considered a range of issues around the advocacy for and critique of critical pedagogies in physical education. As a means of clarifying the concept of critical pedagogy, I made a distinction between two related forms of socially critical work in educational institutions, socially critical scholarship and critical pedagogy. Both are informed by principles of social justice, and both aim to trouble the normative order of physical education and young people’s experiences of it, though in different ways. Socially critical scholarship emphasizes analysis and critique, while critical pedagogy is focused on inclusive, fair, and equitable embodied educational experience. I noted that it is possible for critical pedagogy, for example in activist work, to include some aspects of socially critical scholarship, such as critical inquiry. I will apply these definitions to the task in this chapter, which is to explore existing socially critical practice in physical education teacher education and in school physical education. I noted in Chapter 6 that physical educators have had a long interest in matters of social justice stretching back to the 1930s (Rovegno & Kirk, 1995). The focus in this chapter is a more recent period of the last 40 years. Interest in the concepts of social critique and critical pedagogy appeared in physical education teacher education research literature in the mid-1980s (Kirk, 1986, Lawson, 1984, Tinning, 1984), at first as advocacy and then later as reports on teacher educators’ practice as it began to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Hickey & Mooney, 2019). In school physical education, socially critical perspectives began to attract notice in Spain, the US, and Australia in the early to mid-1990s (Devis-Devis, 2006). There is a strong coincidence between this rise in interest in socially critical work and the increasing visibility of the effects of neoliberal practices in education specifically and in many other aspects of life more generally. It took some time, however, for socially critical scholars in physical education to begin to name and theorize this relationship in these terms (Macdonald, 2011).

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Nonetheless, much of the early socially critical scholarship was united in its focus on social justice issues and can be located within the context of more recent scholarship on the influence of neoliberalism in physical education (Azzarito et al., 2017). Early advocacy for critical pedagogy in physical education teacher education drew on arguments about the technicization of everyday life and the loss of a moral perspective in teaching (Charles, 1979; Kirk, 1986), the ideological work done in and through physical education (Tinning, 1990), such as the ‘cult of slenderness’ (Tinning, 1985), and the influence of positivism in undergraduate teacher preparation (Lawson, 1990). Gender, and the underserving of girls in particular, provided the basis for strong social critiques of school physical education (Griffin, 1984; Scraton, 1992; Vertinsky, 1992) as well as teacher education (Dewar, 1990). Healthism (Kirk & Colquhoun, 1989), the hidden curriculum (Bain, 1990), ability (Evans, 1990), the social construction of school physical education (Kirk, 1992), and the possibility of a socialist physical education (Evans, 1988), all featured as topics in socially critical scholarship. There is an important relationship between this socially critical scholarship and pedagogical practice in teacher education and in schools. Ovens et al. (2018) argue that physical education teacher education operates within socio-political networks, with three interacting levels. These are curriculum policies in national and state jurisdictions, physical education teacher education program philosophies, and the activism of teacher educators prepared to put critical agendas into practice. In order for critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education to exist, these three levels within the sociopolitical network need to be in alignment. In other words, it would be unlikely that a critical pedagogy of physical education teacher education could be practiced successfully unless there is space within university regulations for teacher educators to be able to determine their own program philosophies. Additionally, curriculum policy must allow critical pedagogies of school physical education to be practiced, at least potentially, for teacher education programs to have a clear point of reference in schools. However, Ovens et al. caution that even when a ‘perfect storm’ of conditions exist in any specific education jurisdiction, the synergies between the three levels will always be temporary, fluid, and subject to change, and in constant need of maintenance and adaptation to new circumstances. The best examples of critical pedagogies within such socio-political networks in operation at all three levels are in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Cliff (2012) refers to a range of national and state curriculum policy initiatives in both countries that have been informed by ‘socio-cultural perspectives’ from the mid-1990s. Meanwhile, the physical education teacher education programs at the University of Queensland and the University of Auckland have had long-standing commitments to socially critical philosophies of physical education teacher education and teacher educators who have been active in practicing critical pedagogies of physical education

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teacher education. The continuity at Queensland from the mid-1980s and at Auckland from at least 2005 to the present is impressive. What is more, these teacher educators have written about their work. The purpose of this chapter is to explore recent and current critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education and school physical education to provide substance to the analysis conducted in Chapter 6. I am interested not only in answering the question ‘What is critical pedagogy?’ more fully, but also in discovering what these programs claim to have achieved in the name of socially critical physical education. I consider too the extent to which these programs at university and school levels may form the basis of physical education’s response to precarity. I begin in the first section of the chapter with the exploration and examination of the forms that critical pedagogies of teacher education have taken mainly in these two Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand universities. In the second section I turn my attention to curriculum policy and to evidence of its application in school practice in each country. In the final section I draw on this analysis to consider physical education’s response to precarity.

Critical pedagogy in physical education teacher education More has been written about advocacy for critical pedagogy than on how it might be operationalised (…) there are few published accounts of critical pedagogies in PETE, leaving teacher educators with little idea of the tactics, strategies, structures and organisational frameworks that could be used in the name of socially critical PETE. (Philpot, 2016, p.65) I think Philpot is right in his claim that advocacies outnumber actual examples of critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education in practice. Since the first advocacies appeared in the mid-1980s, there have been a number of published accounts by teacher educators of their attempts to implement such an approach in their own teaching. These accounts offer insights into the forms these pedagogies have taken and what they have attempted to achieve. Indeed, following the social epistemological principle (Kirk, 1992, 2010), we can discover something about the nature of a school or university subject through what people do in their names. Critical pedagogy in physical education teacher education is, then, what critical pedagogues practice. However, applying this principle may not provide a definitive answer if, as Philpot’s comment seems to suggest, there is a lack of clarity over what practices constitute critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education. Applying the definitions I offered at the beginning of Chapter 6 to the examples that are available, we can ask whether student teachers experience and learn to use pedagogies concerned with the organization and alignment of curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment in ways that render

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physical education inclusive, fair, and equitable as an embodied experience. Or do they experience pedagogies of social critique that seek to analyse and trouble the normative order of school physical education? Or, given that they are embedded in university programs, are critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education some combination of both? To be sure, a critical pedagogy of physical education teacher education will not take precisely the same form of a critical pedagogy of school physical education. It can be regarded as an educational practice even if its main focus is on socially critical scholarship, which would seem to be a necessary condition, though may not be sufficient in itself to constitute good practice. Given the constellation of forces acting on teacher education, as Ovens et al. (2018) reveal, it would make sense that teacher education is more likely to be a preparation for school practice where critical pedagogies of physical education exist in schools or, at least, the possibility is created by curriculum policy. Critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education at the University of Queensland Gore (1990) provides one of the earliest examples of a critical pedagogy of physical education teacher education. She reports on her attempt in 1986 to implement a socially critical approach to a unit ‘Introduction to Movement Education’ as part of the four-year Bachelor of Human Movement Studies (Education) (BHMS (Ed)) degree at the University of Queensland. Forty-six students, 23 female and 23 male, took the unit in the first semester of their second year of the program, with 90% of the students planning to become teachers of physical education. This introductory unit was one of a series of socially critical experiences offered within the BHMS (Ed). I was also teaching at the University of Queensland at this time and led socially critical curriculum studies units in years 3 and 4 of the program. Gore utilized a number of strategies in the unit, including peer teaching sessions, a personal journal, and a series of lectures, seminars, videos, and readings. Reflection played an important role in Gore’s practice, as a starting point for ‘reflective teaching’. Gore identified three student responses to this unit, ‘recalcitrance’, ‘acquiescence’, and ‘commitment’. The recalcitrant group rejected the need to reflect on teaching and were disinterested in and even hostile to the unit content. Most of the members of this group were males who did not plan to teach. Gore found in these students an instrumental attitude where effectiveness was prized over moral issues. The acquiescent group was the largest of the three and the most diverse in their responses. Members of this group saw reflection as hard work, and risky in terms of success or failure on the unit. They were uniformly concerned about assessment and tended to only complete work that was assessable. As such, according to Gore, most were externally motivated. The committed group, in contrast to their recalcitrant

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and acquiescent peers, enjoyed the intellectual challenges of the unit and were enthusiastic diarists. They tended to be unconcerned about assessment and focused instead on the process of learning. All of the committed group were planning to be teachers. In terms of their orientations to reflection, Gore found the recalcitrant group tended to be concerned with technical matters in teaching, with a little interest in educational goals. The acquiescent students were also concerned with technical skills and with educational goals, but with a little interest in socio-critical purposes of teaching. The committed students’ reflections revealed concerns across this whole spectrum. She noted, at the same time, that group membership was not entirely fixed, and there was some shifting membership over the course of the unit in terms of the nature of students’ reflections. Indeed, reflecting on her own teaching of the unit, Gore questions her categories, suggesting they somewhat simplify what were complex responses from the students. She also wondered about the extent to which her own values and commitments led her to ‘preach’ to the students, when such certainty, she reflected, was unwarranted. The students’ privileged backgrounds and overwhelmingly positive view of sport and academic achievement, she realized, were unlikely to be dented by her teaching about children who were unsuccessful in learning new skills, who were obese, or who were always chosen last in team games. She also reflected that despite its limited perspective on teaching, the recalcitrant group’s view of the importance of technical matters was justified since this is ‘how things get done’ and perhaps, therefore, undeserving of her criticism. Working in the same program at the University of Queensland a decade later, in the mid to late 1990s, I described in some detail what I called a ‘taskbased’ approach to a critical pedagogy of teacher education (Kirk, 2000). I explained the strategies used in an introductory level subject with over 400 students, a second year subject with just over 100 students, and in an advanced level professional studies subject with around 40 students. The taskbased approach was underpinned by four principles of learning, that it is an active process, it is developmental, it is multi-dimensional in the sense that students learn more than one thing at a time, and that learners learn in different ways and have preferred learning styles. These principles informed a move towards a more student-centred approach within large class teaching. The examples given in the 2000 chapter were centred on gender and sport, the social construction of bodies, and the educational status of physical education, drawn from a companion textbook written to support the program (Kirk et al., 1996). The tasks themselves involved students reading short excerpts from the textbook, discussing issues with other students, watching and analysing videos, and occasionally listening to mini-lectures. This multiformat approach centred on activities embedded in the tasks was aimed at troubling the normative order through conscientization, raising student

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awareness, assisting them to ‘see beyond the obvious’, identify and engage with issues as ‘sites of contestation’ (Kirk, 1988), and to provide a vocabulary to assist analysis and discussion. As might be predicted, anonymous student evaluations of the classes produced a variety of responses ranging along Gore’s continuum from recalcitrant to committed, with a majority somewhere in the middle. A minority of students in the introductory level unit resented having to work in class, while others seemed to enjoy the variety of formats in contrast to their usual experience in large classes of being ‘lectured at’. The extent to which the objective of conscientization was achieved we were less certain about. Macdonald (2002) describes an action research project to develop a critical pedagogy, also within the physical education teacher education program at the University of Queensland, in this case in a year three unit called Curriculum Issues in Health and Physical Education. Over three cycles, she explains how she and a colleague reflected on feedback from students (who volunteered to participate in the project) to make adjustments to improve the unit. The focus of the teaching, in similar fashion to Gore and Kirk, was to question taken-for-granted assumptions and dominant practices in HPE, in other words, to trouble the normative order. Macdonald used research literature but also newspapers and videos to assist students to deconstruct messages in these texts. Negotiation between the lecturers and students was an important feature of this approach to critical pedagogy, centred on the assessment profile for the unit. During the first year of the unit, students kept journals to support their critically reflective inquiry. Another important feature of this unit, and a development from the work Gore and Kirk describe, was an attempt to move towards praxis. Macdonald did this through discussions with students of their teaching in a unit that was running concurrently, task-based learning, such as a situational analysis of a school in which students were teaching, and role play. In the second year, in response to student feedback, the lecturing team made changes to various aspects of the unit, strengthening the praxis feature by eliminating the reflective journal and replacing it with structured writing tasks based on the students’ teaching in the companion unit. Reflecting on these changes, Macdonald (2002, p.175) wrote, “Throughout the refining of the subject we were constantly faced with the dilemma of balancing utilitarian knowledge with socially critical emphasis and meeting the organisational requirement of the university”. In other words, what was possible in this socially critical teacher education unit was shaped by an assemblage of factors, including the particular configuration of university regulations for human movement science degrees (Ovens et al., 2018). While each of these critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education just described included explorations of student biographies, the thrust of such work was most often to connect abstract issues, such as social class, inequality, and equity to students’ own lives, as a form of personalization of

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the topics being critiqued. More recently, a concern has been to raise student teachers’ awareness of their own privilege, particularly when teaching in urban schools or their equivalents. We noted in Chapter 4 increasing diversity in schools in parts of the US and other countries of the Global North and the predominance of White teachers from relatively affluent backgrounds (Flory, 2015), and the implications of this trend for precarity. Developing this theme, Azzarito and Simon argue: To prepare prospective teachers to teach in increasingly diverse schools, PETE has a responsibility to help prospective teachers reconceptualize and deal with ‘difference’ in affirmative ways, while interrogating whiteness. When school norms constructed on white middle-class culture are incongruent with ethnically diverse students’ home culture and ethnic backgrounds, whiteness either stereotypes or denies ‘different’ identities, constraining ethnically diverse students’ learning. (Azzarito & Simon, 2017, pp.184–185) Both Azzarito and Simon (2017) and Flory (2017) advocate for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (or in Flory’s case, Culturally Relevant Physical Education (CRPE)) as a means of addressing this issue in physical education teacher education. Flory proposes three steps in the CRPE process, of knowing the public served, identifying cultural distance, and enacting strategies to bridge cultural distance. In order to embed these steps into physical education teacher education programs, Flory recommends that teacher educators evaluate their programs prior to making changes in order to find spaces for socially critical work while, as Macdonald noted, continuing to meet university and other accreditation requirements. She advises teacher educators to identify and link with partners who have experience of teaching diverse students, consider the approach to be taken, expect to have conversations with colleagues and students around any proposed changes, and to start small. The focus of CRPE applied to physical education teacher education is to assist student teachers to attend to cultural difference, including their own social positioning, as a positive feature of becoming prepared to better meet the needs and interests of the young people they teach. McCuaig (2013), also writing about her practice as a teacher educator at the University of Queensland, provides one of the few accounts of this process described by Flory and Azzarito and Simon. Reflecting on her mission as a socially critical teacher educator “to save HPE from the grips of the ‘isms’: positivism, elitism, individualism, sexism, racism, homophobic-ism, bored-ism”, McCuaig (2013, p.18) points to some unsettling issues that arose for her in this process of facilitating students’ recognition of their own privilege. She discusses what she calls ‘disruptive pedagogies’ she employs, seeing them as somewhat akin to the Christian practice of the confessional. While these strategies were successful in provoking student teachers to

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reflect on and acknowledge their privilege, McCuaig asks herself, are there some things about her students she has no right to know? In addition to the potential for these strategies to be part of what Evans (2014) calls ‘intrusive pedagogies’, Shelley and McCuaig (2018) argue that the process of ‘interrogating’ student teachers’ privilege had become the ‘white elephant in the classroom’. Students were willing to acknowledge privilege, but unwilling or unable to explore problematic implications for their future teaching. (…) The suite of pedagogic strategies (…) involved a combination of traditional didactic lessons, student-focused inquiry-based approaches, reflection tasks and more radical pedagogies such as Vogue-ing in full body lycra, dressing as the opposite sex and engaging students in arts-based assessment tasks (…) It is our argument, however, that what makes Sally’s pedagogy critical in nature is the overarching telos or objective to reveal students’ privileged biographies and for students to consider the possible associated dangers: the positive and negative impacts of this privilege on future students. (Shelley & McCuaig, 2018, p.519) Not only was McCuaig plagued by a growing disquiet about her use of these disruptive pedagogies, she was constantly aware of [t]he need to push students to this point of dissonance is to walk a paradigmatic and pedagogical tightrope: push too far and students disavow both the message and the messenger, failure to push far enough results in the acceptance and perpetuation of existing beliefs and business as usual! (Shelley & McCuaig, 2018, p.520) This dilemma Shelley and McCuaig expose is not merely pedagogical. McCuaig’s disquiet is surely justified if her efforts to interrogate student teachers’ privilege also risks their wellbeing. This would be somewhat ironic for a program with responsibilities to model pedagogies for health. In addition to the delicacy and fine judgement required to walk ‘the pedagogical tightrope’, there is also the question of whether this task is possible at all, since to interrogate student teachers’ privilege, as White, relatively affluent, and severely able-bodied (Standal, 2015), is to attempt to disrupt the habitus. As we commented in Chapter 6 with reference to the limits of critical pedagogy’s aspirations in school physical education, and as we noted in consulting the occupational socialization literature in Chapter 4, this is a monumental task, given the tendency of many physical education teacher education programs to recruit students directly from schools following 18 or more years of anticipatory socialization. Indeed, many of the difficulties and dilemmas encountered by socially critical physical education teacher education seem to stem from the mismatch exposed in Chapter 4 between the

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backgrounds and skill sets of physical education teachers and young people living in precarity. The University of Queensland’s physical education teacher education program has since at least the late 1980s been strongly framed by a socially critical perspective. The accounts by Gore, Kirk, Macdonald and McCuaig provide evidence of the use of a range of tactics and strategies for critical pedagogical work with student teachers. These teacher educators have been able to implement their own philosophical perspectives on physical education teacher education over a sustained period of time. As McCuaig (2013) notes, however, the teacher education strand of the degree program is only one aspect of the student teachers’ experience at the University of Queensland. They also attend classes in the biophysical and social sciences which offer different perspectives on the field and world views more generally. Macdonald noted too the need to balance student teachers’ socio-critical knowledge with university degree requirements. There are socially critical school HPE programs in Queensland, as we will see shortly, and these are reference points for critical pedagogy within the university teacher education program. However, while there is clearly a concern for praxis in Gore’s, Macdonald’s and McCuaig’s papers, there is no evidence in these accounts of student teachers experiencing critical pedagogies of school physical education so that they can learn to use them in their own practice. Critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education at the University of Auckland Philpot’s (2016) study shows that the Bachelor of Physical Education (BPE) program at the University of Auckland was, like the University of Queensland approach to teacher education, underpinned by a socially critical perspective, to the extent that “critical pedagogy sits at the heart of the BPE program philosophy” (Philpot, 2016, p.21). Indeed, a socially critical perspective was part of the official rationale for the four-year degree. The BPE program approval documents (…) state that, “the BPE will foster high standards of scholarship, intellectual inquiry, critical thought and action, which are underpinned by a socially critical orientation” (p. 27). The context for this research is an important feature of the study, as the BPE program structure includes many of the features that researchers of critical pedagogy have suggested are important in developing socially critical pre-service teachers. (Philpot, 2016, p.20) Notwithstanding this formal commitment to critical pedagogy, Philpot seems to suggest that the tension I identified in the University of Queensland program around praxis was also present in the Auckland program. He writes that “critical pedagogy cannot be thought of as an instructional model, that

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is, a rote-learned teaching strategy that is reproduced in multiple settings and contexts” (Philpot, 2016, p.195). As such, the BPE was informed by a set of principles rather than content. However, [t]his uncertainty of a practice based on principles presents a conundrum for ITE and, in my own experience, a sense of frustration for students. For example, teaching strategies used in PETE to forward issues of equity and social justice cannot be taught unproblematically as ‘the’ critical pedagogies for PETE students to replicate in their own classrooms. Critical pedagogy is context-specific and organic in the sense that it adapts and responds to changing environments and social situations. (Philpot, 2016, pp.195–196) We can certainly agree with Philpot’s point about the need for critical pedagogies to be appropriate to the context in which they are employed, which requires analysis of the context and adaptation of potential pedagogies. He is right also, in my view, to say that there are no ‘off the shelf’ critical pedagogies of physical education student teachers can take from their university course and apply unaltered in the school classroom. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, as in Australia, socio-critical perspectives were strongly represented in school curriculum policy and are important point of reference for the teacher educators at Auckland. But as was also the case in Queensland, Philpot’s study suggests that student teachers in the Auckland program did not experience critical pedagogies of school physical education so that they can learn to use them in their own practice. Philpot’s (2016) research provides evidence of a strong critical pedagogy of physical education teacher education that had clear benefits for the teachers it produced. Moreover, Philpot provides evidence that the Auckland program made a difference to its students contrary to research elsewhere; “it appears that few leave the BPE unchanged” (Philpot, 2016, p.205). He noted that: Not all participants graduated from the BPE program with a clear, easily articulated understanding of critical pedagogy. For some, critical pedagogy had become synonymous with constructivist learning theories. These graduates recognise that knowledge claims are contestable, context-specific, socially constructed understandings of the world. Other BPE students have recognised how power can lead to understandings that serve dominant groups while marginalising others. These students locate critical pedagogy as a means of conscientization (…) They have connected their understanding to issues of social justice. (Philpot, 2016, p.193) Philpot adds that the program made a ‘different difference’ to each individual student teacher. He explains that it is policy at Auckland to recruit a diverse student body, though racial diversity was limited. As such, he argues the

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habitus is inevitably a mediator of the program’s messages and what students take away from it. This variability in what students learn from any physical education teacher education program is consistent with the findings at the University of Queensland and should not surprise us, in any case, based on what we discovered in the occupational socialization literature in Chapter 4. Given the length of the anticipatory socialization process and the work of the subjective warrant, the fact that Philpot has evidence of a positive influence on students’ understanding of socially critical issues is noteworthy. The effects of the BPE may not have been consistent across all students, but this is an impressive list of learnings just the same. That said, and to emphasize the point about praxis, Philpot refers to students’ understanding, not to their pedagogical skill set. Praxis in critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education This issue is not confined to Queensland and Auckland. Where teacher educators have been concerned with issues of socially critical praxis, the same tensions have been identified. For example, Gray, McIssac, and Harvey (2018) make a similar point as Philpot in their comparative study of Canadian and Scottish physical education student teachers’ ability to critique healthism, noting there is a crucial difference between ‘being’ critical and ‘doing’ critical. Hickey (2001) points to these same issues in his study of two of his students who were clearly committed to social justice goals but were not equipped by their teacher education program to practice critical pedagogies of physical education that could realize these goals. I submit, then, that the critical pedagogies of teacher education we have explored here have more or less successfully initiated student teachers into the analysis and critique of the normative order of physical education. They have been concerned to raise awareness, demystify and deconstruct, and to expose inequalities and inequities. We also see recognition of a need to assist student teachers to become aware of their own social positioning, where relevant, their own Whiteness, and how this might relate to those of their students. While some of these critical teacher educators have sought ways of moving towards praxis, and have clearly been aware of a need to do so, none appear to have engaged their student teachers directly in critical pedagogies of physical education as I defined this term in the previous chapter. One exception to this claim is the work of Kim Oliver and her colleagues and student teachers at New Mexico State University (NMSU). Building on Oliver’s activist work with adolescent girls, Oliver and Oesterreich (2013) developed a critical pedagogy of teacher education in which student teachers attended co-educational high school physical education classes and learned to use the model in this live setting. Oliver and Oesterreich named the approach ‘Student-Centred Inquiry-as-Curriculum’ (SCIC) and described its

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four features as building the foundation, planning, responding to students, and listening to respond. Oliver planned the course experiences to help pre-service teachers learn how to do student-centered and inquiry-based teaching with high school students in PE in order to identify barriers to adolescents’ physical activity, critically examine these barriers, and imagine and implement alternative types of activity possibilities. (Oliver & Oesterreich, 2013, p.398) As with Oliver’s work with girls, this critical pedagogy of teacher education incorporated critical inquiry into this educative action. In addition to attending and teaching collaboratively in a school physical education program, student teachers completed physical activity biographies, conducted interviews with high school students regarding their perceptions of physical education, read textbooks, fiction, and journal articles, wrote reflective assignments designed to connect texts, student-voice, faculty-modelled instructional teaching units with youth, and personal experiences, to understand processes of teaching and learning, planned lessons, conducted and recorded peer observations, and collected, analysed, and interpreted data. In a publication co-authored with their students, Oliver et al. (2015) claimed that ‘we became a real community of learners’. Extending this work to other teacher educators through building a community of practice, Oliver et al. (2018) reported: The main challenge that emerged for us was learning how to move from a theoretical understanding of student-centered pedagogy to the practice of student-centered pedagogy. This played out in three ways: taking the time to build a foundation that allowed for student and teacher understanding, respect, and comfort; negotiating student and teacher assumptions that were embedded in our status quo of PE; and learning to gather and use meaningful data to guide pedagogical decisions. We discuss how our community of practice helped us to negotiate these three challenges and contributed to our own teacher professional learning. Specifically, the community of practice allowed teacher participants to see, name, challenge, transform, and/or act within the practice of a SCIC approach. (Oliver et al., 2018, p.162) Oliver and her colleagues’ provide a rare example of a physical education teacher education program that is focused on student teacher experience of a critical pedagogy of physical education, since it seeks to model in practice and in situ a form of critical pedagogy associated with an activist approach to working with girls in school. In the context of this approach to teacher education, the student teachers work with co-educational classes in high school physical education, similar to the sites in which they will most likely

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be employed. As with the other teacher education programs we have discussed here, Oliver’s program at NMSU is located within an assemblage of factors that both constrain and enable this particular approach. For example, Oliver is the sole physical education teacher educator in her university, has a class of 11 students in the case of the 2013 paper, and has relatively limited contact with those students throughout their degree compared with the other universities discussed here. Strong relationships with a local high school were also necessary to run a mostly school-based unit, as well as Oliver’s degrees of freedom to teach the class as she considers most appropriate. So necessity as much as opportunity, as well as Oliver’s commitment to pedagogies of social justice, were working in the creation of this approach. Other teacher education programs will operate within different configurations of factors. Replicating this example may not be possible. But there may be other means of embedding critical pedagogies of physical education within teacher education programs that we will consider in the next two chapters.

Critical pedagogies of school physical education Following Ovens et al.’s (2018) analysis of the socio-political networks in which teacher education programs exist, with curriculum policy one of the three elements within this network, and Cliff’s (2012) observation that ‘sociocultural perspectives’ were well-established in school curriculum policies from the 1990s, I remain with Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand in this section of the chapter. I examine these policies for traces of critical pedagogies of physical education. Developments in Australia McCuaig, Atkin, and Macdonald (2019) note that the 1994 National Statement on Health and Physical Education for Australian Schools, part of the Australian government’s first attempt at establishing national curricula, placed a firm emphasis on the promotion of social justice. The document was intended to form the basis for the development of state-specific curricula. They wrote: HPE teachers in the state of Queensland were expected to explicitly model and foster principles relating to a social view of health, social justice, and a dynamic and multi-dimensional model of health (…) Yet, designers of the Queensland HPE curriculum warned that ‘teacher attitudes and concerns’ (…) could be an impediment. (McCuaig et al., 2019, p.121) In the event, the curriculum designers were correct, and the implementation of this curriculum for the compulsory years of schooling ‘was a negative

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experience for teachers’. Around the same time, another curriculum was being developed in Queensland which was to have greater success. The Senior Physical Education Syllabus created by (what was then) the Board of Senior Secondary School Studies (BSSSS) in 1998 also adopted a socially critical perspective. Some context is important before we look in detail at the pedagogical form this perspective took (BSSSS, 1998). In Australia, each state has jurisdiction for school education independent of the Federal Government. Even though there is now a ‘national’ curriculum in Australia, which we will consider shortly, each state makes its own interpretation of this curriculum. Beyond the compulsory years of schooling, at senior high school level, states also have control of the curriculum, which provides students with qualifications to access tertiary education. In Queensland, reviews of high school examinations in the 1970s led to a system of school-based assessment. The subject area Health & Physical Education (HPE) was part of this system from its inception. Thus, in the mid-1970s, HPE became a senior high school subject that counted towards university entrance on an equal footing with other senior high school subjects. Within this school-based assessment system, a Queensland Government body produced the Syllabus. Schools then created a school-based curriculum that met the requirements of the Syllabus, gaining accreditation for a five years period from peer review panels at district and state levels. The same review panels validated samples of assessed student work. This approach to high-stakes assessment meant that while all school-based curricula had to follow the rules set out by the Syllabus, no two schools had the same curriculum (Macdonald & Brooker, 1997). As an aside, this is a good example of the intent behind pedagogical models as design specifications (Kirk, 2013). By the 1990s, however, Queensland HPE teachers were seriously dissatisfied with the senior high school form of the subject and, in particular, a perceived split between ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ work. There was, as well, concern about the weak relationship between ‘health’ and ‘physical education’ within the Syllabus. The BSSSS HPE Advisory Committee, of which I was a member in two spells, from 1985–1988 and 1995–1998, determined to separate HPE into two subject areas, Physical Education and Health Education. The Queensland system at this time required a draft Syllabus to undergo a two years trial in a small number of schools (around eight) which was evaluated independently, and then a two years pilot in up to 20 schools, again evaluated independently (Penney & Kirk, 1998). The BSSSS eventually published the new Senior Physical Education Syllabus in 1998. It is worth noting that the HPE Advisory Committee had a good number of teacher representatives, and the review panels consisted entirely of teachers. Three main principles informed the Syllabus, integration, personalization, and social justice and equity. Integration referred to the subject matter of physical education, conceptualized by Peter Arnold’s scheme of education

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in, about and through the physical. The Syllabus sought to integrate physical education content through planning and assessment of physical, written, and oral tasks, in which content relating to learning physical activity, physiological dimensions of physical activity, and socio-cultural dimensions of physical activity was cross-referenced with a range of categories and types of practical physical activities. Personalization referred to the extent to which new information was meaningful to the individual. Personalization involved reflecting critically on the process of learning in physical education, as students experienced it. Social justice and equity referred to fairness, dignity, respect, and responsibility, and involved the analysis of a range of social issues in the physical cultures of Australian society. In a textbook written to support students and teachers undertaking Senior Physical Education (Kirk et al., 1999) two chapters, on theories of learning and psychological factors affecting learning, provide students with concepts to reflect on and better understand their own experiences. Additionally, four socio-cultural chapters were concerned with equity, the body and culture, lifestyle and leisure, and money, media and power in sport. Notwithstanding the Syllabus’s requirement that this conceptual information be integrated with the practical experience of physical activities, and for reflection on learning and the commitment to social justice and equity, I think the most we can claim for Senior Physical Education is that it required students to engage in socially critical scholarship. Consideration for the highstakes assessment aspects of this approach meant that neither students nor teachers could prioritize the organization and alignment of curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment in ways that render physical education inclusive, fair, and equitable as an embodied experience for young people. Significantly, for our purposes here in considering the Syllabus as a critical pedagogy, the ‘through’ aspect of Arnold’s scheme, covering the ‘affective domain’, was included in planning of learning tasks but not assessed. This, I think, was entirely appropriate; teachers acknowledged the importance of interest, motivation, and resilience, but knew that attempting to assess learning in the affective domain would be highly controversial as well as technically challenging. However, it meant that some key aspects of the principles of personalization and social justice and equity understandably and unfortunately fell outside the frame of students’ and teachers’ attention. Moreover, teachers were challenged, and were not always successful, to find ways to integrate the socio-cultural content of the Syllabus with students’ practical experiences of physical activity (Penney & Kirk, 1998). Socially critical perspectives have, as Cliff (2012) points out, also informed curriculum developments in other Australian states. The published conversation chaired by Chris Hickey at an ACHPER conference in 2013 provides insights into the prevalence of these perspectives and the people who have been advocates for them (Hickey et al., 2014). A recent manifestation of this interest in socially critical perspectives is the Australian Curriculum: Health & Physical

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Education (AC: HPE), which was the main topic of the Hickey et al. discussion. Five key ideas underpin this curriculum framework: educative outcomes, strengths-based approach, valuing movement, health literacy skills, and a critical inquiry approach. The inclusion of strands for ‘personal, social and community health’ and ‘movement and physical activity’ provided the curriculum writers with an opportunity to include the physical education focus areas within an overarching salutogenic framework (McCuaig, Quennerstedt & Macdonald, 2013) in which the question ‘What keeps me healthy and active?’ can be applied across the entire curriculum area. The key idea of a strengthsbased approach, which derives from salutogenesis, is to focus on what keeps people well rather than a preoccupation with what makes them ill. The critical inquiry key idea suggests that this framework may enable the construction and implementation of critical pedagogies in physical education. In a forensic critique of the AC: HPE during its consultation and drafting phases, Leahy, O’Flynn, and Wright (2013) set out in detail the various ways in which ‘the critical’ is positioned in the documentation as it evolved over time. They are particularly critical of an individualism they claim is evident in the documentation, reflecting neoliberal influences in society broadly, and in the curriculum construction process specifically. By way of illustration, they focus on the ways in which the critical element of the curriculum were softened during the consultation and re-drafting. In thinking specifically about the place of critical, the ongoing tension between a more socio-critical approach which takes into account social and cultural contexts and an inquiry-based pedagogical approach is made evident in several comments by respondents to the first consultation on the directions of the Draft Shape (March 2012) Paper (…). In the first Draft Shape Paper, the perhaps more confronting heading sociocritical had been dropped in the process of reviewing the draft internally (…) a compromise was reached by changing the heading to ‘critical inquiry’, but at the same time, replacing some of the more possibly confronting socio-critical language. (Leahy et al., 2013, pp.178–179) Three sub-strands of movement and physical activity offer obvious opportunities for critical inquiry, ‘cultural significance of physical activity’, ‘critical and creative thinking in movement’, and ‘ethical behaviour in movement settings’. Moreover, McCuaig et al. (2019, p.129) confirm Leahy et al.’s point that even though the term socio-critical was replaced with critical inquiry, and some of the language of content descriptions changed, the socially critical aspiration of the curriculum was maintained. For example, the achievement standard statement for year 10 states: By the end of Year 10, students critically analyse contextual factors that influence identities, relationships, decisions and behaviours. They

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analyse the impact attitudes and beliefs about diversity have on community connection and wellbeing. They evaluate the outcomes of emotional responses to different situations. Students access, synthesise and apply health information from credible sources to propose and justify responses to health situations. Students propose and evaluate interventions to improve fitness and physical activity levels in their communities. They examine the role physical activity has played historically in defining cultures and cultural identities. (ACARA, 2015) This statement brings together learning in both main strands of the AC: HPE and indicates an intent on behalf of the writers for students to be able to trouble the normative order and to have the capability of taking appropriate actions based on this critical analysis. Nevertheless, Leahy et al. argue: In the current draft curriculum this commitment to health as an individual responsibility is also evident in the commitment to a ‘strengths-based curriculum’ (…), which is described in terms which place considerable emphasis on the individual (the student) to use their capacities to change themselves and others. (Leahy et al., 2013, p.178) Neither in the Year 10 statement nor elsewhere in the documentation is Leahy et al.’s main criticism supported, that the curriculum promotes a neoliberal individualistic view of young people. However muted the notion of ‘the critical’ became through the consultation and re-drafting process, this is a very particular reading of the AC: HPE. At the same time, their claim that different versions of ‘the critical’ appear in different places in the documentation, each with “different epistemological and theoretical understandings of education, (health) knowledge, the individual and society” (Leahy et al., 2013, p.176) may be a reason why the curriculum does not explicitly argue for critical pedagogies in physical education. That said, the final version of the AC: HPE lists ‘a critical inquiry approach’ as its fifth key idea. At best, like the 1998 Queensland Syllabus, the critical perspective here supports a form of socially critical scholarship, albeit with some action orientation to challenge and change the normative order. Alfrey, O’Connor, and Jeanes’s (2017) Participatory Action Research project with three secondary specialist physical education teachers provides some insights into how the critical aspects of the AC: HPE has been interpreted in schools. The study investigated the teachers’ implementation of a 12 lessons unit titled ‘Take Action’ with two year 7 (age 12) classes and one year 10 (age 15) class. Alfrey et al. tell us that the study schools were located in ‘low economic status areas’ of Melbourne. Working with the AC:HPE and the fifth key idea of a critical inquiry approach, Take Action offered students opportunities to consider what movement meant to them, where they move, and then to plan actions for those settings to make them more

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inclusive and accessible. The researchers found issues, such as time and support, were common to all three teachers and consistent with what we know from other studies about teachers and innovation. Beyond these common challenges, the teachers experienced teaching the same unit differently. Drawing on Ball’s categories of teachers as policy actors, Alfrey et al. identified a male teacher as a ‘policy receiver’. They report that this teacher struggled to move beyond his own deeply socialized view of sport-based physical education and failed to complete the community-focused action part of the unit. They claim that he felt uncomfortable with the subject matter of Take Action and his students became demotivated as a result. One female teacher, who they also identified as a policy receiver, was in contrast enthusiastic about the unit but lacked experience of alternative pedagogies involving student-centredness, and this limited her effectiveness. A third teacher, also female, took what Alfrey et al. describe as an ‘entrepreneurial’ approach, where the unit “served to legitimise and support a broadening of focus and pedagogical approaches that resulted in some consciousness raising, capacity building and meaningful action for her and her students” (Alfrey et al., 2017, p.113). Notwithstanding their enthusiasm and success respectively, both female teachers found community engagement challenging, particularly in terms of time and stakeholder contacts. Alfrey et al. suggest this failure to engage with community stakeholders would likely have affected the sustainability of any benefits to students. This study shows that it is possible for the AC: HPE to be interpreted as supporting forms of critical pedagogy and socially critical scholarship. However, Alfrey et al. (2017, p.118) concluded “Interpreting and enacting Take Action challenged the teachers’ perspectives on their role in the learning process, it challenged what they viewed HPE to be, and it also challenged them to develop a broader pedagogical repertoire”. As the research literature on teachers’ participation in curriculum innovation has shown consistently, no curriculum document can ‘stand-alone’. Teachers need support through professional learning opportunities to develop the new skill sets that accompany genuinely innovative pedagogies, a point to which we will return in the final chapter. Developments in Aotearoa/New Zealand Culpan and Bruce (2007) explain that critical pedagogy was first introduced into Aotearoa/New Zealand physical education in 1999 through government curriculum policy. Four key concepts organized the HPE curriculum document, wellbeing (based on the Maori concept of hauora), health promotion, socio-ecological perspective, and attitudes and values that promote wellbeing. They wrote:

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The pedagogy inherent in the Aotearoa/New Zealand curriculum statement positions physical education so that it has the potential to promote more meaning around physical activity, the importance of deliberate exercise, how people use, shape and view their bodies, and how sport influences and reproduces power relations and privileges dominant groups in society. In essence, the curriculum adopts a pedagogy that encourages and empowers students not only to experience and learn through physical activity, games and sports, but also to ask critical questions about physical activity in society, to locate themselves in their community. This pedagogy also seeks to develop individuals and groups who can critically reflect on their actions and their likely effects. (Culpan & Bruce, 2007, p.5) This description suggests the 1999 policy had the potential to support school programs that include socially critical scholarship and critical pedagogies. Notwithstanding this potential, Culpan and Bruce remarked that a challenge for teachers was to move from consciousness raising to praxis, echoing the issue we identified in the previous section on physical education teacher education. Writing from a teachers’ perspective a decade later, Smith (2016) reinforced this point, suggesting that where socially critical work is done in school physical education it has remained a mainly ‘theoretical’ pursuit. He sees the challenge of ‘keeping students moving’ and integrating this with socially critical perspectives could be one reason why he sees so much traditional practice continuing in Aotearoa/New Zealand schools, despite support within curriculum policy for critical pedagogies. In a detailed discussion of the 1999 HPE curriculum policy and its replacement in 2007, Fitzpatrick (2013, pp.191–192) suggested that the critical content was ‘significantly marginalized’ in the most recent edition. Commenting on Fitzpatrick’s (2013) analysis, McIntyre, Philpot, and Smith (2016) wrote: She argued that any critical intentions are subsumed by the prevalence of a language that seeks to address individual student behaviours rather than the social structures that influence these behaviours (…). As a result, HPE teachers may feel that they are enacting a socially critical pedagogy when they are in fact using a form of liberal humanistic pedagogy directed towards social responsibility. Liberal humanistic education seeks to cater to the needs of the individual in a way that helps young people to interact with others in society in a holistic way (…). Liberal humanistic approaches do not seek to question or change social structures that maintain inequalities and therefore are not consistent with the intentions of socially critical pedagogy. (McIntyre et al., 2016, p.8) I wrote in Chapter 6 that individual young people and their learning is of central importance within critical pedagogies, and so a focus on ‘individual

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student behaviours’ is not for me problematic. What is essential in any socially critical work is the analysis and questioning of the normative order, where the focus is on social justice. In a more recent paper, Philpot, Gerdin, and Smith (2019) propose that the issue for physical education in Aotearoa/ New Zealand is that there is, among teachers, a lack of understanding of critical pedagogy, a lack of pedagogical practice for social justice, and lack of interest in and commitment to social justice. Gillespie (2013) argues, in contrast, that ‘the criticals’ (critical thinking, reflection, analysis) are embedded in policy in Aotearoa/New Zealand physical education. She echoes Philpot and colleagues, though, in her claim that some teachers are challenged by this policy and demonstrate a complete lack of criticality, while others have ‘the criticals’ well established in school curricula. Gillespie comments that for students, becoming critical and criticality are complex processes. Many students have investments in the status quo, she claims, as do teachers. She notes the emergence of compliance to particular interpretations of criticality, such as ‘leadership’, while to be critical is to be ‘negative’. Moreover, pressure of work particularly in senior high school leaves teachers scrambling for survival, and criticality suffers. In these circumstances, Gillespie argues there is considerable policy slippage, particularly where high stakes assessment is involved, since energy gets directed to meeting the requirements for passing exams, a situation which mirrors the Queensland experience of Senior Physical Education. Nevertheless, Gillespie concludes optimistically that where teachers do succeed in teaching for criticality: Becoming critical, and criticality are complex processes and developing ‘fresh eyes’ for seeing the world in new ways is a simple first step that many teachers (and students) use successfully. This appears to provide a basis for broadening meaning-making and moving from the position of a single meaning. (Gillespie, 2013, p.20) Fitzpatrick’s (2013) critical ethnography of physical education within a Aotearoa/New Zealand high school shows what is possible within existing government curriculum policy. The school was located in South Auckland and served a community of mainly Maori and Pasifika students. By all accounts, according to Fitzpatrick, this was a ‘tough’ school. Indeed, Fitzpatrick had been a teacher in the school herself, this familiarity with the local context an important prerequisite for an ethnographer. She discovered a physical education teacher, Dan, who was engaged in critical pedagogical work with his students. There were five key features of Dan’s approach outlined by Fitzpatrick. The first was building the environment, which involved nurturing a strong network of relationships among the students in his class, akin perhaps to Oliver’s notion of Building the Foundation in activist work (Oliver & Kirk,

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2015). A second was deconstructing power. Dan used many and varied practices to expose his pedagogic authority in order to subvert it, such as giving students choices, and drawing attention to own Whiteness. A third was playfulness, involving a playful attitude, making jokes, acting goofy, and avoiding taking an authoritative approach with students, a strategy that echoes Hellison (1995). Fitzpatrick relates an example of Dan’s playfulness, when he had the whole class, himself included, dress in skirted netball uniforms. He used this as an opportunity for a discussion of sexism and body exposure. A fourth feature was studying critical topics, such as body image, showing bodies to be racialized, sexualized, and gendered. Fifth was embodied criticality, focused on different ways of moving in class, variations and unconventionality in how he dressed, disrupting the ‘sex-gender-sexuality constellation’ and the hetero-masculine male form of physical education teacher. Dan’s unconventional behaviour led his students to assume he was gay, an assumption Dan then casually disrupted in the course of the year. All five features were, according to Fitzpatrick, interrelated and interdependent, reflecting a commitment to social justice for the students Dan taught. Fitzpatrick concludes that in the hands of teachers such as Dan, physical education can be a space for fostering hope and achievement among young people living in challenging circumstances. She had no doubt that the young people in the class she studied benefitted from Dan’s teaching, despite the negative portrayals of their school by people outside their community. She wrote: These young people hold a high view of themselves and their cultural backgrounds. Despite the real social and economic challenges and deprivations they experience, they take great strength from their families and the forms of cultural capital they possess in their communities. They are familiar with, and comfortable in, multiple cultural contexts. In shifting between such contexts, they ‘see’ the cultural arbitrary unapparent to many. They also play with and play up to cultural norms, refusing to accept as sacred the taken-for-granted practices of the White middle classes. Dan’s critical approach to HPE contributed to this. (Fitzpatrick, 2013, p.228) We might take note that Fitzpatrick writes nothing here about Dan’s students becoming more skilful games players or more physically active. To do so would be to miss the point, I suggest, of critical pedagogies in such communities, where physical activity is the powerful medium for learning. However, learning is not confined to, nor is it primarily concerned with, physical skills and fitness, important though these are. This, I will argue, is a key insight and will be prominent in considering physical education’s response to precarity, and the kind of critical pedagogies this entails. As she

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reflected on the possibilities and limits of critical pedagogy, Fitzpatrick also notes there are personal costs to carrying out socially critical work in schools, citing Dan’s failure to secure a promotion in the school due to other teachers’ perceptions of his unconventional behaviour. As I have commented elsewhere in this book, the nature of the school as an institution is a vital consideration for any teacher contemplating practicing pedagogies for social justice in physical education. Enabling and limiting socially critical scholarship and critical pedagogies in schools The embedding of socially critical perspectives in government curriculum policy is an important achievement. As these examples from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand show, at their best these curriculum policies enable socially critical scholarship and critical pedagogies of physical education. While high stakes examination forms of physical education may not be ideal environments for such socially critical work (Bowes & Bruce, 2011), nevertheless such examples offer useful lessons around what is possible for critical pedagogies in practice. The examples from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand also show the limits of policy. For schools and teachers who have a commitment to social justice and who see the need for critical pedagogies to benefit their students, as Dan’s case exemplifies, this policy becomes enabling. But for teachers who either lack the skills and pedagogical repertoires for this kind of work or who are hostile to it, policy slippage may be inevitable. We can also see in this analysis the complexity of the socio-political networks Ovens et al. (2018) identify. In Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, all three network levels appear to be in place, and yet reports by Alfrey et al. (2017), Gillespie (2013), and Philpot et al. (2019) suggest that teachers are challenged by the possibility of both ‘being’ and ‘doing’ critical. At the same, even in the two universities that have a clear and sustained commitment to socially critical work in physical education, there is little evidence in teacher educators’ accounts that their student teachers directly experience critical pedagogies of physical education with a view to learning to use them, in the way exemplified by Oliver’s work at NMSU. Developing an ability in student teachers to trouble the normative order of physical education seems to be a well-established practice in critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education, though teacher educators at Queensland and Auckland report variable success. It is no surprise then that similar skills of social critique have appeared in school curriculum policy in both countries. While equipping young people with these mainly cognitive, analytical skills is undoubtedly important, this may not be the most appropriate response physical education can make to precarity. As we see in Chapter 3, precarity has its most devastating effects on young people’s mental as well as

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physical health. This suggests the need for particular forms of critical pedagogy in physical education that not only match the definition set out in Chapter 6 and applied here to existing practice, but with a focus on the affective domain and such matters as values, motivation, interest, happiness, resilience, and perseverance. As I argued in Chapter 5, all of these affective matters are strongly associated with Sense of Coherence (Antonovsky, 1979).

Conclusion My purpose in this chapter has been to explore recent and current critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education and school physical education to provide substance to the analysis conducted in the previous chapter, Chapter 6. The examples I explored I limited to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand since it is in these countries that the three levels of the socio-political networks in which physical education teacher education is practiced appear to be in place and, moreover, to have some degree of congruity. My conclusion is that, even in these countries, the particular ways in which the notion of critical pedagogies of physical education are interpreted do not match my definition. There are many possible reasons for this. University regulations and the degrees of freedom available to teacher educators were mentioned. The location of socially critical pedagogies in examination forms of physical education in senior high school sets limits on what can be achieved pedagogically, as well as raising questions about the young people who would undertake such courses and their interest in social justice. Likewise their teachers. Teacher preparedness to implement critical pedagogies the literature reviewed here suggests is clearly a major issue, but one that is entirely consistent with the analysis in Chapter 4 of teachers’ occupational socialization. However, the presence of socially critical perspectives in national and state level curriculum policy is, I think, a major achievement in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The activism of teacher educators at the universities of Queensland and Auckland, as well as elsewhere (Devis-Devis, 2006; Hickey, 2001; Gray et al., 2018) to take forward critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education is equally impressive, particularly the continuity over time. While the story told in this chapter is not one of unqualified success, it does show what is possible. It also provides a strong platform for further developments. What should those developments be? What should physical education’s response to precarity consist in? If the critical pedagogies of teacher education and school physical education reviewed here are insufficient, where else might we look for an answer to these questions? In the Chapter 8 I propose that physical education’s response to precarity should be, consistent with the definitions I’ve offered, the development of critical pedagogies of affect.

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Kirk, D., Burgess-Limerick, R., Kiss, M., Lahey, J. and Penney, D. (1999) Senior Physical Education: An integrated approach, Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Kirk, D., Nauright, J., Hanrahan, S., Macdonald, D. and Jobling, I. (1996) The Sociocultural Foundations of Human Movement, Melbourne: Macmillan. Lawson, H. A. (1990) Beyond positivism: Research, practice, and undergraduate professional education, Quest, 42(2), 161–183. Lawson, H. A. (1984) Problem-setting for physical education and sport, Quest, 36(1), 48–60. Leahy, D., O’Flynn, G. and Wright, J. (2013) A critical ‘critical inquiry’ proposition in Health and Physical Education, Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education, 4(2), 175–187, doi:10.1080/18377122.2013.805479. Macdonald, D. (2011) Like a fish in water: PE policy and practice in the era of neoliberal globalization, Quest, 63(1), 36–45. Macdonald, D. (2002) Critical pedagogy: What might it look like and why does it matter?, pp. 167–189, in A. Laker (ed.) The Sociology of Sport and Physical Education: An introduction, London: Routledge. Macdonald, D. and Brooker, R. (1997) Assessment issues in a performance-based subject: A case study of physical education, Studies in Educational Evaluation, 23(1), 83–102. McCuaig, L. (2013) The Strong are the Lonely: A reflection on the ‘mission’ of the HPETE pedagogue, Journal of Physical Education New Zealand, 46(2), 18–20. McCuaig, L., Atkin, J. and Macdonald, D. (2019) In pursuit of critically oriented physical education: Curriculum contests and troublesome knowledge, pp. 119–133, in R. Pringle, H. Larsson and G. Gerdin (eds) Critical Research in Sport, Health and Physical Education, London: Routledge. McCuaig, L., Quennerstedt, M. and Macdonald, D. (2013) A salutogenic, strengthsbased approach as a theory to guide HPE curriculum change, Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education, 4(2), 109–125. McIntyre, J., Philpot, R. and Smith, W. (2016) HPE teachers’ understanding of socially critical pedagogy and the New Zealand Health and Physical Education curriculum, Journal of Physical Education New Zealand, 49(2), 5–9. Oliver, K. L. and Kirk, D. (2015) Girls, Gender and Physical Education: An activist approach, London: Routledge. Oliver, K. L. and Oesterreich, H. A. (2013) Student-centred inquiry as curriculum as a model for field-based teacher education, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45(3), 394– 417, doi:10.1080/00220272.2012.719550. Oliver, K. L., Luguetti, C., Aranda, R., Nuñez Enriquez, O. and Rodriguez, A-A. (2018) ‘Where do I go from here?’: Learning to become activist teachers through a community of practice, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 23(2), 150–165, doi:10.1080/17408989.2017.1350263. Oliver, K. L., Oesterreich, H. A., Aranda, R., Archeleta, J., Blazer, C., de la Cruz, K., Martinez, D., McConnell, J., Osta, M., Parks, L. and Robinson, R. (2015) ‘The sweetness of struggle’: innovation in physical education teacher education through student-centered inquiry as curriculum in a physical education methods course, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 20(1), 97–115, doi:10.1080/17408989.2013.803527. Ovens, A., Flory, S. B., Sutherland, S., Philpot, R., Walton-Fisette, J. L., Hill, J., Phillips, S. and Flemons, M. (2018) How PETE comes to matter in the

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150 Critical pedagogies of physical education performance of social justice education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 23 (5), 484–496, doi:10.1080/17408989.2018.1470614. Penney, D. and Kirk, D. (1998) Evaluation of the Trial-pilot Senior Syllabus in Physical Education in Queensland Secondary Schools, Brisbane: Queensland Board of Senior Secondary School Studies. Philpot, R. (2016) Kicking at the habitus: Exploring staff and student ‘readings’ of a socially critical physical education teacher education (PETE) programme, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Auckland. Philpot, R., Gerdin, G. and Smith, W. (2019) Socially critical PE: The influence of critical research on the social justice agenda in PETE and PE practice, pp. 134–146, in R. Pringle, H. Larsson and G. Gerdin (eds) Critical Research in Sport, Health and Physical Education, London: Routledge. Rovegno, I. and Kirk, D. (1995) Articulations and silences in socially critical work on physical education: Toward a broader agenda, Quest, 47(4), 447–474. Scraton, S. J. (1992) Shaping up to Womanhood, Buckingham: Open University Press. Shelley, K. and McCuaig, L. (2018) Close encounters with critical pedagogy in sociocritically informed health education teacher education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 23(5), 510–523, doi:10.1080/17408989.2018.1470615. Smith, C. (2016) To be critical or not to be critical – that is the question: A look at whether socio-critical thought has a practical place in the curriculum HPE, New Zealand Physical Educator, 49(2), 23–25. Standal, O. F. (2015) Phenomenology and Pedagogy in Physical Education, London: Routledge. Tinning, R. (1990) Ideology and Physical Education: Opening Pandora’s box, Geelong: Deakin University Press. Tinning, R. (1985) Physical education and the cult of slenderness: A critique, ACHPER National Journal, 108, 10–13. Tinning, R. (1984) Social critique in physical education, ACHPER National Journal, 103, 10. Vertinsky, P. A. (1992) Reclaiming space, revisioning the body: The quest for gendersensitive physical education, Quest, 44(3), 373–396.

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Chapter 8

Critical pedagogies of affect for physical education A response to precarity

Introduction I have defined critical pedagogies for school physical education as the organization and alignment of curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment in ways that render physical education inclusive, fair, and equitable as an embodied experience for young people, in order to empower them. So far, I have said little about what empowerment means in this context except in the abstract terms of Dewey’s notion of experience as continuity and integration. In this chapter I seek to provide substantive examples of forms of empowerment that fit with Dewey’s concept and also with the notion (from Standal, and Fitzpatrick and McGlashan) that critical pedagogies embrace queerness. They do so in the sense that they seek to trouble the normative order of physical education experientially, to challenge forms of straight pedagogy in physical education that ignore difference (in its many forms) and seek to mould bodies that conform to particular (dominant) ideals, some of which are oppressive. Each of the examples I provide details its own aspirations for young people’s learning and it is in these statements of educational intent that we can seek concrete examples of what empowerment might mean. An important and shared feature of the all critical pedagogies of affect is that they provide young people living in precarity with access to cultural and social capital that may not available to them in other life contexts. I also suggested at the end of the previous chapter that the challenges precarity present requires a response from physical education in the form of critical pedagogies of affect. I use this term affect to refer to the ‘affective domain’, of (among other things) interest, motivation, perseverance, valuing, caring, resilience, and joy. Given the pernicious effects of precarity on the mental health and wellbeing of those in its grip, I propose critical pedagogies of affect as a point of focus and emphasis, not as a criterion for the exclusion of other educational benefit young people may derive from physical education. Indeed, as we will see in some of the examples in this chapter, sociocultural critique is combined with the experience of physical education to trouble the normative order of the physical cultures of society in ways that

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equip young people to see beyond the obvious, to raise awareness through conscientization, and to expose inequitable and oppressive practices. One of the criticisms of critical pedagogy from poststructuralist positions is that it is insufficient to merely be critical, and essential to also do critical. The focus on affect, which I think is clear in each of the examples in this chapter, can be thought of as the leading edge rather than the whole of these approaches. These pedagogies are empowering because through them young people become disposed to question the taken for granted, to care about injustice and unfairness, for themselves and others, to be bothered to take action. This focus is also appropriate to a salutogenic concern for Sense of Coherence (SOC) (Antonovsky, 1979). According to my analysis in Chapters 2 and 3, coherence is one of the casualties of precarity. For life to make sense, some degree of self-direction, self-awareness, and self-understanding is important. As we saw in Chapter 5, SOC applies equally to collectives as it does to individuals. Thus, a concern for the self needs to be matched by a concern for others, and indeed communities for individuals. The abandonment by the state of its responsibilities for the welfare and wellbeing of its population, particularly those living in precarity, is one of the shameful effects of neoliberal practices on government (Judt, 2010). In a democracy, governments that give up on those who struggle to care for themselves should be held to account by its citizens. But in order to do this, people need to care enough to exercise their right to vote, and this disposition has been seriously eroded in the leading democracies of the Global North (Runciman, 2018). Helplessness, alienation, and feelings of hopelessness feed this crisis in democracy. Thus, pedagogies of affect, as we will see in this chapter, seek small wins (Weick, 1984) to assist young people to build and maintain a SOC in their everyday lives. The medium of physical activity, the queering of straight pedagogy, and a focus on embodiment in physical education are of crucial importance in this process because the self-body-world connection (Hellison, 1978), physical competence, and physical fitness are Generalized Resistance Resources that help maintain the SOC and thus help people remain healthy. People can see the point of caring about injustice, and of taking action against it, when this action is a small win. Given the focus in the previous chapter on Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand developments of critical pedagogies of teacher education and school physical education, it is not without irony that the examples of critical pedagogies of affect I provide in this chapter each have their origins in the US. Moreover, and to add to the irony, none have labelled themselves as critical pedagogies, though two have drawn on its literature. There are reasons to explain this lack of self-identification as critical pedagogies, I think, to do with political, academic, and professional cultures and traditions in the US. However, we should nevertheless not be surprised at this situation. As a leading exponent of neoliberal capitalism, many of the mal effects of precarity have been evident in the US in a form that has only more recently

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become noticeable in other countries of the Global North. The great and wonderful diversity of the population of the US has also been a factor in the development of these pedagogies, as their originators have sought to respond to the situations and experiences of young people who have been marginalized, oppressed, and in some cases abandoned by society. The three critical pedagogies of affect I will describe here in some detail are Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) and its influence of Positive Youth Development (PYD), forms of Sport Education, such as Sport for Peace and the Cultural Studies Curriculum, and activist approaches to physical education. There are other examples of critical pedagogies of affect in physical education I regard highly, such as Dan’s work in Aotearoa/New Zealand that we encountered in Chapter 7 (Fitzpatrick, 2013) and Gard’s (2004) uses of dance to trouble the normative order of physical education. My selection of these three examples was guided by the fact that there has been a critical mass of work undertaken not just by the originators of these approaches but by other scholars. As such, and even though they may not be widely recognized as critical pedagogies of physical education, they are nevertheless well represented in the research literature. There are particular teacher-scholars who have pioneered these pedagogies of affect. I use this terms teacher-scholar because the people who have undertaken this work have not, like myself for instance, been researchers and university teachers only. They have in addition spent many hours in schools and other sites working with and for young people, doing the pedagogical work on the ground in ways that critics of critical pedagogy have sometimes overlooked. Indeed, some of these pioneers are regularly ignored, their work passed over when reviews of literature are conducted. This, I suspect, is in the nature of the work they do and have done. Also, it is important to note that although there are individuals who have been the originators of these critical pedagogies of affect, all have worked collaboratively with, been supported by, and in turn have inspired, other colleagues, as will become clear in this chapter. I describe TPSR, forms of Sport Education and activist approaches in some detail. This is necessary because, while many readers may be familiar with some features of these critical pedagogies, they may not have considered them in this light before, as critical pedagogies of affect. I need to demonstrate then what it is about these pedagogies that suits them as physical education’s possible response to precarity. I begin with TPSR, then segue to Sport Education, and end with activist approaches.

Life skills education: Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) The TPSR model is widely recognized as a means of providing young people living in disadvantaged and underserved communities with access to learning

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life skills, with sport and physical activities as a medium for this work (Pozo, Grao-Cruces & Perez-Ordas, 2018). Nevertheless, Hellison’s work is sometimes omitted from accounts of critical pedagogy in physical education, perhaps in part because he himself never used the term to describe what he did. His early work he called humanistic (Hellison, 1973) and he was ambivalent about the label critical pedagogy being attached to TPSR (Hellison & Martinek, 2006). He certainly worked with individual young people, but this should not lead us to assume that he saw individuals in isolation or as solely responsible for changing themselves and others. Quoting Bronfenbrenner in his book Teaching Responsibility Through Physical Activity, he made this point explicitly: “There is no such thing as an individual. We have an illusion of self-sufficiency, but actually other people support us throughout the entire process of our development” (in Hellison, 1995, p.vii). Exemplifying the strategy of small wins (Hellison, 1995, p.94), he cites a superintendent of schools in California who identified three levels of causes of social problems, root, intermediate, and immediate. Hellison claimed he was focused on intermediate causes, “including the need for skills in and a disposition toward social competence, problem-solving, autonomy, and a sense of purpose and future” (Hellison, 1995, p.8). He saw TPSR as one small contribution to resolving root causes, such as poverty, racism, and lack of opportunity, but only as one of many pieces in a larger puzzle. TPSR is framed within a ‘social problems perspective’ which reveals Hellison’s awareness of the bigger picture, while throughout his 1995 text he uses the word empowerment frequently. Hellison’s writing conveys his uncertainty, caution, and pragmatism in a way that suits TPSR well as one response to precarity. One of his favourite sayings (usually accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders) was ‘you can only do what you can do’. Hellison’s early work with alienated youth in the multiply-deprived areas of Portland and then Chicago, such as his 1978 book Beyond Bats and Balls, shows the specialized skills and dispositions required of a physical education teacher to work with young people growing up in difficult circumstances. Hellison (1978) developed three goals for working with alienated youth: to help young people make their own self–body–world connection; to provide a sense of community; and to facilitate an active playful spirit. These goals and the strategies he devised for pursuing them, show that this politically aware program of work involves the teacher in activism on the ground, with individual youth, and with clear pedagogical intent. Note that while Hellison was engaged in a form of critical pedagogy, there is no overtly ‘political’ content in his work. But there is no question that he was guided, fundamentally, by a concern for social justice for the young people he worked with. In order to reduce what he called the ‘fuzziness’ of this student-centred pedagogy, Hellison (1978) developed initially four levels of individual awareness he saw emerging from his work with alienated youth. The first

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level was no awareness at all (or as he described it, ‘spaced’). The second level was self-body awareness, focused on the question ‘who am I?’. The third level, self-other awareness, signals the beginning of a sense of community, of shared experience, and the understanding that I can learn better with other people’s help, and also that I can help them. A fourth level, which Hellison calls ‘integration’, brings these previous three levels together into spontaneous and interdependent engagement in physical activity, though he confesses to not fully understand how this level works. In his later work, these levels were developed further (Hellison, 1995). The level he referred to as ‘spaced’ became level zero, irresponsibility. Level 1 is respect, where a student may not be participating but at least is not interfering with the right of others to play. Level 2 incorporates level 1, and also involves a willingness to participate and work under the teacher’s supervision. Level 3, self-direction, is where students show respect and participate, and can also work on their own program without the teacher’s direct supervision. Level 4, caring, incorporates levels 1, 2 and 3, and in addition the extension of a sense of responsibility beyond themselves, to assist and support others. Hellison proposed a fifth level in this later work, where caring was transferred beyond the gym, into a young person’s everyday life. He saw this as the ultimate goal of his work, and transference has as we will see become a topic of research by others working with the TPSR model. Hellison’s goal was for the young people he worked with to internalize this structure of personal and social responsibility. The levels were posted on the wall of the gym, and regular reference made to them. Students were encouraged to use them to self-evaluate, and they thus create a vocabulary for sharing how they feel about themselves and others. In order to embed the levels, Hellison employed a number of strategies, including awareness talks, levels-in-action built into the physical activity content of lessons, individual decision making and group meetings to respond to in-lesson incidents, and reflection time, usually at the end of the lesson, led by the teacher. He commented (Hellison, 1995, p.34) students should be at least ‘reasonably honest’ in their responses, examining “the reasons for, and consequences of, their attitudes and behaviors”. The physical activity content of TPSR lessons is important in a number of ways. First, Hellison (1995, p.1) argued physical activity settings are wellsuited to personal and social development because “they are very emotional, interactive, and, for some kids, attractive (…) kids ‘show more of themselves’ in physical activity settings”. For young people experiencing alienation, this is crucially important. Second, different forms of physical activity offer different opportunities for this work. Basketball was included because young people want to play, volleyball because “it is more cooperative than most other team sports”, and fitness activities because these can be individualized (Hellison, 1995, p.53). Third, even though the program’s primary purpose is personal and social development, Hellison argued that teaching of

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these activities had to be competent in order to be credible, as much for stakeholders as for students. And fourth, the TPSR framework, with its five levels, has to be integrated into the physical activity content in every lesson. Hellison estimated he made that connection around 70% of the lesson time (Hellison, 1995, p.52). Teacher qualities are also an important consideration. The bottom line for Hellison (1995) was that the teacher must embody the levels of responsibility. The quality of teacher–student relationships is, in his view, at the core of this kind of work. We saw this in the previous chapter in the case of Dan in Fitzpatrick’s (2013, p.193) ethnography. Building and sustaining these relationships is not easy. Hellison commented: There are many barriers between me and my students, and each one makes our relationships harder. Differences in age (I keep getting older yet they stay the same age), gender, education, socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity combine to form a high wall between us. I try to poke little holes in that wall by talking to each student individually for a few seconds each time the program meets. (Hellison, 1995, p.55) Caring about the young people he taught was a fundamental requirement for him to make any kind of worthwhile contribution to their lives. Part of this was the ability to be genuine, to be oneself. It was also vital to believe “in their essential dignity and worth” (Hellison, 1995, p.55). Revealing his own vulnerability was also a feature of being genuine with young people, another characteristic of Dan’s pedagogy (Fitzpatrick, 2013, p.204). In Beyond Bats and Balls, Hellison sums up the nature of the challenge of working with troubled young people. He wrote: Alienated youth have learned that school doesn’t make sense, that the here-and-now is most important, that saving money doesn’t pay off, that the future is dreaming about being a star in the NBA. As a result, encouraging alienated youth to plan for their future by sorting themselves out and putting together an ideal self is a difficult venture. (Hellison, 1978, p.12) This description of alienation has clear resonance with growing up in precarity, characterized as it is by uncertainty, a lack of coherence, and the importance of living in the immediate present (Standing, 2016). Throughout Beyond Bats and Balls, Hellison’s account of his teaching strategies reflect this uncertainty as he discusses openly and frankly the regular setbacks and failures as well as the modest successes with individual youth. We are left with the conviction that to do this kind of work requires teachers who are disposed to being committed, to caring, to being resilient, and to being persistent. There has to be, unquestionably, a firm commitment to and awareness of issues relating to social justice and

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equity. Working with alienated youth and, by extension, with young people growing up in precarity, requires political awareness of the situations of such young people. Political activism is expressed in the teaching-learning encounter itself, in the daily face-to-face engagements of teachers and students. Hellison was concerned to teach in ways that alienated youth learned skills and improved. Achievement was central to his approach because it was through achievement that young people’s sense of their own self-worth and identity emerged. Positive Youth Development Positive Youth Development (PYD) through sport and physical activity emerged from a rapidly growing field of youth development in the US in the 1990s. Hellison’s approach predates this newly emerged field and much of its work in physical activity and sport owes him a debt of gratitude (Ward & Parker, 2013). Hellison and colleagues closely identified with the goals of PYD (Hellison, Martinek & Walsh, 2008). Consistent with the philosophy behind TPSR, Holt (2008, p.1) argues that PYD starts from a view of “all young people as having the potential for positive developmental change, and regard youth as a resource to be developed rather than a problem to be solved (…) Thus, PYD represents a strength-based conception of development rather than a deficit-reduction approach”. There is important resonance here between this notion of PYD as ‘strength-based’ and a salutogenic approach to health as discussed in Chapter 5. Fraser-Thomas, Côté, and Deakin (2005) proposed the creation of an applied sport-programming model built on a number of theoretical perspectives to foster young people’s positive experiences of sport. They noted that for such as the PYD program, Hellison [p]rovides a framework for teaching personal and social responsibility through physical activity, which can begin to guide positive youth development coaching. He highlights the roles of integration, transfer, empowerment, and coach–athlete relationships in leading youth from irresponsibility, to respect, participation, self-direction, and caring. He also provides preliminary teaching strategies including counselling time, awareness talks, group meetings, and reflection time. (Fraser-Thomas et al., 2005, p.33) Social and emotional development of young people is a central feature of PYD programs in physical activity and sport (Fraser-Thomas et al., 2005; Mandigo, Corlett & Anderson, 2008). Gordon, Jacobs, and Wright (2016) studied the social and emotional learning of a group of up to 14 disengaged middle school boys in an afterschool ‘leadership club’. The school had a population of just over 60% Caucasian and proportions of Hispanic (19%),

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African-American (13%), multi-racial (4%), and Asian (4%) students, with just under half of the whole school population identified as low-income. Students invited into the program were at risk of not graduating, had no stable friendship group, experienced stressful home situations, had low academic scores and high levels of behaviour referrals. Once invited into the program, students’ attendance was voluntary. They met with the university coaches twice a week for 75 minutes over two school years. Following the TPSR model closely, the researchers examined the extent to which students’ social and emotional learning could be attributed to TPSR. They found evidence, for students who attended regularly, of increased self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, relationship skills, and positive decision making. One limitation of this study was the voluntary nature of attendance, where the impact of the intervention on some boys whose attendance was irregular was not known. Although not a focus of the study, Gordon et al. cite anecdotal evidence of transfer of learning from the program to student conduct elsewhere in the school environment. Walsh, Ozaeta, and Wright (2010) located a study of the transference of responsibility model goals within a youth development context which, as I noted, Hellison saw as the ultimate goal of his work. Working over two years with 13 African-American and Pacific Islander students in an underserved elementary school and their two teachers and extended day program director, Walsh et al. found evidence of transfer of the TPSR goals from an afterschool Coaching Club to the wider school environment. The Coaching Club was a sport-based vehicle for teaching life skills. The four TPSR goals were respecting the rights and feelings of others, effort and teamwork, self-direction and goal-setting, and leadership and helping. The study stopped short of exploring the influence of the Coaching Club on young people’s behaviour at home and in the neighbourhood, though Walsh et al. see this level of transference as worthy of future research (see also Gordon & Doyle, 2015). Ward and Parker (2013) modelled activities in an after school club on TPSR within a study of atmosphere in PYD. Compared with activities and goals, atmosphere in PYD programs has been least studied. The setting for the study was an after-school club catering for 23 4th and 5th graders, 86% of whom were Hispanic. The researchers tell us few of these children lived within typical nuclear families, many had fathers who were in jail or who had been deported, and some lived with members of their extended families. Ward and Parker employed self-determination theory and the young people’s needs of relatedness, autonomy, and competence as indicators of the nature of atmosphere. The researchers identified four themes that contributed to the positive atmosphere of the club from the participants’ perspective. These were relatedness among friends and adults who can be counted on, a desire to learn, a relaxed climate, and enjoyment linked to feeling safe. The facilitation of student voice, where they could express their ideas and desires, was a key aspect of the positive atmosphere.

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Safe spaces to learn is an important feature of all of these TPSR-inspired PYD programs. Marttinen et al. (2019) report on an intervention called REACH implemented in a K-8 school in Harlem, New York. Notably, Marttinen and colleagues cite Hellison and Oliver (whose work we consider later in the chapter) as sources of inspiration for the research reported in this paper. The aims of the REACH program were to improve student literacy, teach fitness and nutrition concepts, and promote character development. The program met weekly for two and a half hours following the school day throughout the 2014–2015 academic year, with the gym offering a safe place for young people to play and learn. Up to 20 boys were enrolled, with a core group of eight to ten students attending regularly. The researchers report that this program provided young Black males with opportunities for physical activity, positive relationships with each other and adults, and to demystify professional sports that were not available to them in the general community due to high levels of violence and gun crime. Moreover, the students were able to develop life skills and to act as role models for younger peers and siblings. The PYD research in physical activity and sport, as we have seen in these examples, is strongly influenced by Hellison’s TPSR approach. They represent consolidation and elaboration of this work, and its location within a broader framework of youth development. The focus on social and emotional development is an important feature, as is the notion of transference of learning from the specific program of activity, whether this be in curriculum time of after school. The strengths-based philosophy is another important feature that, along with the life skills that are at the centre of many of these programs, make the link to social justice. Again, as with Hellison’s work, the politics is not in the content of these programs but in the pedagogy, in the detailed work over time with disadvantaged youth, and in the intent. Through the focus on life skills, these programs provide young people with access to cultural and social capital that they may otherwise not have. These studies and many others that build on TPSR are developing an evidence base of what works and what is possible through this critical pedagogy of affect.

Fair play, inclusion, and enthusiasm: Sport Education Sport Education was developed by Daryl Siedentop (1994) and colleagues through school-based experimentation in the 1980s and early 1990s. While this approach has been widely researched in physical education, it is probably not, at first glance, associated with critical pedagogy. As Hastie, Martinez de Ojeda, and Calderón Luquin (2011) note, however, fair play is one of the structural features of Sport Education. Another structural feature is inclusion, where all students are members of a persisting group (a team) for the duration of a season. Communication, cooperation, and positive social interaction are, therefore, essential aspects of Sport Education. A third

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structural feature is a learning aspiration that students become enthusiastic players (as well as competent and literate), and as such is concerned with personal and social development, attitudes, and values. A closer look at Sport Education, then, reveals a pedagogical model that has considerable potential to meet the definition of a critical pedagogy of physical education provided in Chapter 6. In a review of Sport Education research from 2004 to 2010, Hastie et al. (2011) note that research on personal and social development issues, such as cooperation, empathy, and self-discipline reported some success. For example, students talked about how being a member of a team increased their motivation, while feeling included was a factor in enhancing their team’s performance. Other research, however, showed that the allocation of roles, a key feature of Sport Education, could result in some students’ voices being silenced during social interaction, with popular, sporty, and attractive students dominating the main roles. With respect to student attitudes, such as enthusiasm and enjoyment, research reports mainly positive findings, with students seeing Sport Education as more serious than multi-activity physical education since they are held accountable by peers. As well as being fun and enjoyable, research also reported a sense of affiliation among students, and students’ perceptions of their autonomy also increased. Values, such as affinity and equity, were also researched, particularly in relation to fair play. Even though this is a structural feature of Sport Education, Hastie et al. highlight research that suggests fair play needs to be taught explicitly and intentionally. Due to these features and apparent success in relation to personal and social development, attitudes, and values, this potential in Sport Education as a pedagogy suited to physical education in for example urban environments has been recognized by at least three groups of researchers. Ennis (1999) and Ennis et al. (1999) developed a critical pedagogy called Sport for Peace on the basis of the Sport Education model. Following extensive ethnographic fieldwork over a period of years in urban high schools in a school district on the East of the US, this research team chose six high schools and ten teachers to implement Sport for Peace. The schools were serving a predominantly African-American population with between 45–60% receiving free or discounted lunches. Ennis et al. noted the schools had a proportion of disruptive and disengaged students. Moreover, echoing the situation of precarity, they wrote: Teachers and principals reported that more frequent weapons possessions were increasingly disrupting the school day, and student pregnancies negatively affected girls’ abilities to focus academically (…) student awareness of lower school completion rates and the poverty and unemployment experienced by young adults, many of whom represented minorities, negatively influenced their effort optimism (…) and

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willingness to engage academically. They reportedly held little hope that education would improve their life chances or career opportunities (…) (Ennis et al., 1999, p.274) Sport for Peace adopted the structures of Sport Education, but built in additional components, such as strategies for conflict resolution that could be taught to and used by students. Teachers were also taught strategies for sharing class management and content decisions with students. The program was implemented in three phases. In phase 1 teachers provided their own baseline by teaching a normal unit. In phase 2, they received seven hours of staff development to learn how to use Sport for Peace. In phase 3, they implemented the program of up to 45 lessons in a block design. Teachers were encouraged to design programs that they felt best met the needs of their students, while adhering to the structures and principles of Sport for Peace. In so doing, Ennis and her colleagues used Sport for Peace consistent with the concept of a pedagogical model, as a design specification for the development of school-based curricula (Kirk, 2013). Summarizing their results, Ennis et al. noted considerable change in both teachers and students between the phase 1 unit, which involved teaching and class management typical of multi-activity designs, and the phase 3 implementation of Sport for Peace. They reported that students felt affiliation with their team and described it like a family. “Similar to a family environment, they felt responsible to their teammates, showed them respect as individuals, and developed a sense of trust that is unusual in these urban schools” (Ennis et al., 1999, p.280). A shared responsibility for learning emerged which featured trust and respect. Ennis (1999) reported, additionally, that girls benefitted from Sport for Peace, with a sense of ownership for the program through team affiliation, authentic cooperative team environment, and what the students called ‘second chances’, where mistakes did not result in a failing grade or other negative consequences. Ennis also shows that Sport for Peace required boys to change their behaviour towards girls. They were required to share ownership of sport and cooperate with girls. By subtly manipulating the Sport Education structures of rewards, boys quickly came to see that success for their team required all team members to be included and supported to be the best they could be. Co-education is an important feature of Sport for Peace, where boys as a typically dominant group in physical education classes are required to experience and learn about equity and inclusion. This issue is also highlighted by Walseth, Engebretsen, and Elvebakk (2018) later in this chapter with reference to activist approaches. O’Sullivan and Kinchin (2015) provide a second example of the adaptation of Sport Education to match my definition of a critical pedagogy of physical education. In this case, in some ways similar to activist approaches, their Cultural Studies Curriculum has a physical activity component, organized around the Sport Education structures, and a socio-cultural critique

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component. Their aspirations for student learning are strongly linked to social justice and to young people’s development of cultural and social capital. We want students who can question and challenge the status quo related to access and influence of the physical activity and sport infrastructure. We want students who can unravel the hidden agendas and complexities and make known/ public who is potentially being oppressed and silenced in the physical activity, sport and movement culture. We want students to see themselves as part of diverse cultures and to be able to both connect school-to-home learning and reflect critically on this learning. We also hope for students to be Cultural Studies connoisseurs (…) of local and national physical activity and sport infrastructures. These are huge challenges requiring ‘risk-taking’ students who will also act. (O’Sullivan & Kinchin, 2015, p.334) Implementation of the Cultural Studies approach in an urban high school focused on student engagement with issues of gender, the body, and ways the media influences sport (Kinchin & O’Sullivan, 1999). As with the Sport Education model generically, the Cultural Studies approach selects forms of physical activity that have relevance for young people in specific locales and that offer themselves as vehicles for socio-cultural critique. The meaningfulness of this integration of experience and critique is crucial to the model’s success in realizing the learning aspirations O’Sullivan and Kinchin detail above. Strategies that can be utilized for this purpose, integrated into the Sport Education season, include student posters, individual presentations, individual and group journaling, team portfolios, autobiographical assignments, and community mapping. O’Sullivan and Kinchin (2015) list three benefits of this approach. One is that teachers may find the socio-cultural critique element intellectually stimulating. Second, personalization and integration of curriculum content can make physical education more meaningful for students. And third, students can potentially become better informed and critical consumers of sport and physical activity, enhancing their engagements with their movement culture. Three limitations are curriculum time, teacher expertise and classroom space, though they locate these limitations specifically within a US school context. Another potential benefit of this approach, though not mentioned by the authors given the era in which they were writing, is to build into the sociocultural critique elements of social media. Since media influences already feature, there may be opportunities to provide young people with skills to interrogate messages contained in social media, particularly about physical activity, health and wellbeing, as I discussed at length in Chapter 3.

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A third example provided by Hastie and Buchanan (2000) involves the generation of a new pedagogical model they call Empowering Sport, born out of a coalition of Sport Education and TPSR. The researchers had noticed while working with 45 5th grade boys in a Sport Education unit that they struggled with the fair play aspects of this approach. They decided to engage the same boys in an alternative approach. Most of the students were Caucasian, and the intervention took place in a rural southern middle school. The students participated in a 26 lesson season of a modified version of Australian football, with class meeting three times per week for nine weeks. Hastie and Buchanan used observations, interviews and daily debriefings to generate data. The normal structures of Sport Education were used to frame the unit, while a number of TPSR strategies, such as awareness talks and daily meetings, were integrated into this framework. Hellison’s five levels of personal and social responsibility were also used extensively over the course of the unit. Students were presented with many opportunities throughout the unit for individual and collective decision making. They were also required to demonstrate that they had taken personal responsibility for their conduct and collective responsibility for their team. Hastie and Buchanan reported evidence of very good awareness of the responsibility levels among students. A key finding was the developmental nature of empowerment and responsibility, with a decisive shift for students from merely attending to awareness talks, to decision making that resulted in effective action. Also, the relative contributions of each strategy waxed and waned in the course of the season, their influence dependent on the phase of the season and the conduct of the teams. They argue that problem-solving, individual empowerment and the creation of an environment in which awareness was raised of the effects of individual actions on others were key benefits to students from their engagement in Empowering Sport. The structures of Sport Education supporting fair play and inclusion, and for promoting social and emotional development, lend it well to adaptation for the purposes of critical pedagogy. Reviews of research on Sport Education have shown consistently, where it is implemented faithfully, that it is well received by both teachers and students and provides educational benefits to young people (Wallhead & O’Sullivan, 2005; Kinchin, 2006; Hastie et al., 2011). Suitably adapted, the three studies included here show how it is possible for Sport Education to provide a framework for the organization and alignment of curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment in ways that render physical education inclusive, fair, and equitable as an embodied experience for young people in ways that seeks to empower them. Moreover, as O’Sullivan and Kinchin (2015) demonstrate, it can also provide opportunities for socio-cultural critique and critical inquiry. This integration of experience, inquiry, and critique is also a consistent feature of activist work in physical education.

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Empowering young people through action: An activist approach to physical education I discussed in Chapter 7 Oliver’s school-based approach to physical education teacher education which she and her colleague Oesterreich described as Student Centered Inquiry-as-Curriculum (SCIC) (Oliver & Oesterreich, 2013). This approach is modelled on Oliver’s activist research with girls and effectively teaches student teachers how to use an activist approach within a co-educational high school physical education class. As such, I suggested that in contrast to most accounts of critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education, Oliver’s approach engages student teachers experientially in a critical pedagogy of school physical education. Oliver’s activist work has developed through several phases, beginning with engaging small groups of girls in socio-cultural critique and critical inquiry, then scaling this work up to whole classes, adding physical activity components, then the school-based teacher education with co-education classes, on to further scaling up by focusing on school-based teacher professional learning. Throughout, Oliver has created and developed a range of strategies for engaging young people in troubling the normative order of physical education and physical culture, not as a theoretical or abstract activity, but as locally-focused, personalized, and action-oriented. Some of her earliest work does not feature physical activity experiences and thus does not meet my definition of critical pedagogy of physical education. However, in order to understand how this program developed, it is important to provide an account of its genesis. As we will see, in her more recent work, Oliver combines physical activity experience with socio-cultural critique and critical inquiry, as do others who have developed her approach. We might note too that this program of activist research requires intensive periods of immersion in the field, a signal feature that runs against the grain of some forms of pedagogy research in physical education and the ethos of the neoliberal university. Moreover, this is a characteristic it shares with the other critical pedagogies in this chapter because it takes time to make a difference in young people’s lives. During the earliest phase of Oliver’s research, the main focus is body narratives and the meanings girls constructed of their bodies. Two papers (Oliver, 1999; Oliver & Lalik, 2001) report on a study carried out in 1996 with four 13 year old girls who attended a predominantly Black school in the south of the US. Two girls were Black, one Black/ Indian Muslim and a fourth White. Oliver met with the girls twice per week for 50 minutes each session for 15 weeks. She used a range of tasks, including personal biographies, and personal maps of where they spent their time during a day, who they interacted with, and what they did. This information was important for Oliver to learn a little about the students and start where they are. She engaged the girls in a magazine exploration task where they worked

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collectively to cut out pictures and then categorize them. The girls completed stories and information pieces, and also kept a personal journal. The journal facilitated reflection but it also became a private space for conversations between Oliver and each girl. All of the data generated through these tasks became body narratives, constructing bodily knowledge. In her first paper from this study and subsequently, Oliver takes care to acknowledge that she is an outsider in the worlds of the girls she is working with. As such, she expresses her awareness (eg. Oliver, 1999, p.226) that her work might unintentionally reinforce or reproduce relations of domination. In addition to situating herself within these papers, and stating clearly she has a personal stake in the issues she is studying, Oliver’s strategy to minimize such a risk of imposing an alternative hegemonic discourse is to ensure the girls’ voices are at the centre of her reporting. This is important recognition by Oliver of a challenging issue many critics have levelled at critical pedagogy. This foregrounding of the girls’ voices is clear as Oliver uses girls’ categories of ‘Fashion In’ and ‘Fashion Out’ to structure their body narratives. These two categories emerged in the girls’ conversations while they were engaged in the magazine exploration task. Oliver explained: Through fashion these girls were constructing multiple meanings of their bodies. Their bodies were a central part of how they were learning about normality, their relationships with others, and what society values in women (…) The two predominant criteria for being ‘Fashion In’ were ‘looking right’ and ‘being normal’. According to Nicole, Khalilah, Alysa and Dauntai to ‘look right’ and ‘be normal’ girls need ‘healthy hair’, the ‘right clothes and shoes’, the ‘right body shape’, and they must ‘look feminine’. These girls described others and felt they could be described by other girls, as being ‘Fashion In’ or ‘Fashion Out’ depending on whether they met or failed to meet the above criteria. (Oliver, 1999, pp.230–231) Oliver noted that the girls’ narratives around ‘healthy hair’ and the ‘right body shape’ contained particularly ‘disabling and disempowering’ criteria. For the African-American girls to have ‘healthy hair’, they had to straighten their natural curls. Not only was there a cost to doing this regularly, but the criterion rests on a racist image of normality that the girls accepted as unproblematic. Similarly disempowering were criteria associated with body shape, which Oliver commented could have “potentially devastating health effects”. Here, the girls talked about how some girls didn’t fit fashionable clothes, particularly clothes that revealed their body shapes. Oliver noted that the girls were already beginning to internalize narrowly defined cultural norms of female beauty and how they did or did not measure up to these

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norms. Based on her analysis of these body narratives centred on ‘Fashion In’, Oliver concluded: Many of the cultural stories of women these girls were seeing, hearing and telling did not center on how they function as healthy human beings or develop into whole people, but rather how they can manipulate their bodies to create visual images that conform to cultural norms. (Oliver, 1999, p.240) As such, Oliver was concerned about what teachers, and physical educators in particular, could do to counteract these disabling body narratives. While framing her research within feminist poststructuralist perspectives on identity and subjectivity and also within socially critical education, Oliver demonstrated a strong commitment to the view that knowing is empowering. Until girls can name what oppresses them and prevents them becoming healthy women they remain powerless. If girls can learn to identify the forms of their oppression and name preferred possibilities, they can begin to disrupt the forces of their own oppression. (Oliver, 1999, p.243) This statement forms a basis for much of what Oliver has done subsequently within her research program, as we will see, and provides an important insight into what we might hope for critical pedagogies of affect to achieve in order to benefit young people. In a second paper from this study, Oliver and Lalik (2001) proposed the body as a legitimate integrated curriculum topic, bringing together physical education and critical literacy. The focus of the paper was to assist the girls and the researchers to better understand girls’ embodied experiences and the curricular processes that helped them to engage in critique of dominant narratives of the female body. The girls talked about being noticed because of how they looked, though Oliver and Lalik noted that ideas of beauty were framed within a racialized discourse of Whiteness. With so much at stake for being liked and accepted, body dissatisfaction was shared among all four girls. Moreover, the girls used various strategies to regulate their bodies through monitoring, restricting, and controlling them. Nevertheless, Oliver and Lalik (2001, p.328) found that the “girls were able to express resistance to culturally dominant perspectives”. The curricular processes supporting critique involved tapping girls’ interests to start discussion, listening actively and respectfully, developing strategic questions to prompt elaboration, creating safe spaces for expressing alternative views, and supporting imagination of alternative worlds. We see the development and elaboration of each of these strategies in subsequent work.

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Located again within a feminist poststructuralist frame of reference and a socially critical perspective, Oliver and Lalik (2004a) argue for the importance of girls developing skills of socio-cultural critique, particularly in relation to the body. They reported the findings of a pedagogical intervention with one of two groups of four African-American girls from working class families. This study was conducted in 1998–99 in an 8th grade middle school. Oliver met with the two groups over the course of the school year for a total of 26 sessions each group. Each session lasted 60 minutes. Oliver employed similar pedagogical and research strategies as her previous study, using biographies, personal maps, and magazine exploration. She added disposable cameras which girls were asked to use to take photos of things that made them feel good or bad about their bodies, that sent messages to girls about their bodies, and things that attracted the attention of boys and girls. She included also a critical inquiry task centred on the Beauty Walk. The Beauty Walk, which the researchers describe as like a beauty pageant, was an official fundraising event sponsored by the school. Oliver declares close to the beginning of the paper that she found the idea of this pageant as an official school activity “abhorrent” (Oliver & Lalik, 2004a, p.562). In a departure from the previous study where girls’ interests formed the basis of the pedagogical work, Oliver was determined that the Beauty Walk should be the topic of study for the girls and that over time they would share her sentiment. She was then surprised to discover an initial lack of enthusiasm among the study group, with one girl commenting ‘this ain’t my topic’. Another girl was planning to enter the competition herself, though she was vague about what it entailed. Despite this apparent lack of interest, Oliver persisted and deployed various strategies to entice the girls’ interest. Eventually interest was sparked when Oliver suggested they write a letter to a newspaper about the Beauty Walk, based on inquiry into their peers’ attitudes towards it. Through question and answer, Oliver got the girls to elaborate their criticisms of the Beauty Walk as they constructed questions for the survey of attitudes they were to conduct. Throughout this task, Oliver and Lalik noted the attention to detail in word use, particularly since the girls recognized the possibility of causing offence in questioning an official school activity in terms of its potential to be unfair and discriminatory. Once the questions were devised, Oliver led the girls through a process of learning to conduct interviews as ‘news reporters’, attending the event itself, interviewing peers, and finally drafting a letter to the editor. Oliver reports that a spirit of playfulness among the girls helped to maintain a lighter tone than the subject matter suggests. Oliver and Lalik concluded: In spite of their initial reluctance to consider the Beauty Walk, the girls’ behaviour during several tasks in the inquiry process suggests that they were developing skills of critical inquiry. For example, the girls appeared

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to be learning how to interpret data. They were able to note patterns in the survey responses and relate those patterns to broader issues that influence the ways girls learn to think about their bodies. (Oliver & Lalik, 2004a, p.582) At the same time, Oliver and Lalik came to understand that unlike the previous study in which the girls came to own their project since it built on their own interests, the project in this case remained Oliver’s. Even though the girls went along with the investigation of the Beauty Walk, at times enthusiastically, and the student who had planned to participate changed her mind, they did not own the project. This realization prompted Oliver and Lalik to question whether the imposition of Oliver’s topic and critical agenda undermined their attempts to foreground the girls’ voices. They reflected: By developing a curriculum that focused heavily on a criticism of the Beauty Walk, we wonder whether we did not inadvertently replace one form of hegemonic discourse with another (…) In this case, the hegemonic discourse is the preconceived critique that Kim presented and reiterated for students’ acceptance by engaging them in a succession of strategies and activities. It is a discourse that consistently ignored and downplayed alternative more positive assessments of the Beauty Walk. Our micro-level analysis suggests that our approach may be viewed as an example of how those in power promote their desired discourse (…) In doing so, we may have inadvertently sacrificed the development of the girls’ critical judgement by enforcing a conclusion about the Beauty Walk that grew out of our adult (and earlier acknowledged socially distant) subjectivities, judgements, and experiences. Might we have rather provided instead an example of a discourse that nurtures critical reflection without insisting on a particular critique? (Oliver & Lalik, 2004a, pp.583–584) In another paper published in 2004, we can see the progression of Oliver’s research program. The topic of the paper, critical inquiry on the body, is framed by feminist postructuralism, critical race theory, and critical literacy. The school in which this study was conducted had a population comprising 60% European American students, 38% African-American, and 2% Hispanic, with 40% students receiving free school meals. She co-taught a curriculum strand with a young, White female physical education teacher (Ms. Jamie Lee), as part of the girls’ regular physical education classes. In this school, girls attended physical education as a single-sex class. Oliver and the teacher met each class for 1 hour and 45 minutes 14 times during the academic year. Again Oliver and Lalik recognize an intervention such as this is ‘on dangerous terrain’ and a “decision to persist in these efforts, requires us to keep careful

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vigilance on the practices we pursue, a vigilance that compels us to question and otherwise trouble (…) our practices, especially in relation to the very values to which we claim allegiance” (Oliver & Lalik, 2004b, p.163). Oliver and Lalik (2004b) argued that the physical education curriculum was incomplete without a space for students to reflect. In this 2000–2001 study with three classes of grades 7–12 girls, Oliver scaled up her activist approach from small group to whole class. The curriculum strand built on Oliver’s previous published work, and included magazine exploration, picture categorization and analysis, journaling, an inquiry project, survey development, and a presentation of findings by the girls to peers and teachers. Oliver and Lalik outlined four main findings. The first related to making the curriculum meaningful for girls, using girls’ interests to engage them in critique, preparing them to make meaningful choices of their inquiry project, girls as choice markers, and girls expressing their interests. A second finding was the need to offset task difficulties through scaffolding and support. Oliver and Lalik discovered that some girls struggled with basic literacy and so found the tasks difficult; Oliver had previously selected girls to participate based her analyses of their writing and other data. A third was the process of sustaining ethical relationships between Oliver and the teacher and other school staff. Finally, Oliver found the demands of the research process, given its scale, interfered with her teaching, and this was a source of undue stress. Despite some of the challenges Oliver experienced in this substantial scale-up of her activist approach, in their summing up Oliver and Lalik cited evidence to suggest the intervention had achieved some success. We found that openings were created for small insights that would not have otherwise been explored or shared. Further, the girls seemed to be generally successful in the work we asked them to do. They were able to complete all tasks, sometimes on their own and sometimes with the assistance of Kim and Jamie. They participated eagerly during the frequent discussions and sharing sessions. They produced creative and well-developed artefacts. The older girls produced well-elaborated critiques of cultural messages about the female body, and the younger ones initiated critique. Both older and younger girls recalled much of what we did together throughout the year. Finally, all of the girls described their experiences in generally positive terms. In sum, the curriculum strand allowed girls to develop some insight into the ways that culture influences subjectivity. (Oliver & Lalik, 2004b, p.191) This said, they concluded that the girls did not show an ability to imagine alternative possibilities or practices for themselves. While they were able to offer critique, Oliver and Lalik wonder how the girls might be assisted to move beyond this to envisioning new possibilities.

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In the next phase of her research program, Oliver acted on this self-criticism. In Oliver, Hamzeh, and McCaughtry (2009), the topic is framed within the notion of developing a language of possibility. Through co-creating a curriculum with girls, she sought (in Giroux’s words) ‘integrating critical analysis with social transformation’. Oliver was interested in girls as agents in their own right who with appropriate support could create change. The purpose in this next phase of activist research was to “understand 5th-grade girls’ self-identified barriers to physical activity and to work with them to find ways of negotiating those barriers so as to increase their physical activity participation” (Oliver et al., 2009, p.93). Oliver and Hamzeh worked together with 10–11 year old girls from two elementary schools in the state of New Mexico in the 2005–2006 academic year. Both schools were located in the poorest county of New Mexico. One school, the older of the two, was 94% Hispanic, with poor facilities. The more modern school was 84% Hispanic, with a good environment for physical education. The researchers selected girls for the project who their physical education teachers considered were inactive or disinterested in physical activity. Four girls from the older school were invited to participate, and six from the newer school, with a mix of Mexican-American, Hispanic, and White girls. Oliver and Hamzeh met each group for 45–60 minutes, three times per month from August to May (Oliver et al., 2009, p.96). Oliver utilized personal biographies, photos taken by the girls, and individual and group analyses of the photos to identify issues that influenced their participation in physical activity. Building on these data, the researchers next co-created with the girls ‘a physical activity curriculum of possibilities’ that negotiated and eliminated barriers to their participation. Oliver and Hamzeh planned lessons on a week-by-week basis, informed by data/ experience from the previous lesson. Once again, and further developing her commitment to be vigilant about the effects of her own practice, Oliver noted her social positionality in relation to the girls she was working with and the commitment to foreground the girls’ voices. As the study progressed, “Manal’s act of continually questioning Kim’s racial impressions repeatedly took us back to the girls’ words” (Oliver et al., 2009, pp.98–99). As I noted, a feature of Oliver’s methodology of working with girls in physical education has been long term immersion in the field. It is through this process that she has been able to form strong relationships with the girls and to be able to see beyond surface appearances. A case in point was the core construct in this study, ‘girly girls’. This notion emerged early in the fieldwork, introduced by the girls as an explanation for their physical inactivity. Oliver et al. noted that this girly girl identity was fluid, and that the girls performed it strategically to serve their own purposes. The researchers’ initial analysis was in line with their understanding of the theory around gendered embodiment. On the one hand, it was a performance deployed to get their own way, and was rarely questioned because it fitted the culture of

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heteronormative femininity in this part of New Mexico. On the other hand, since it was a normalized discourse, teachers were disinclined to look beyond it. A breakthrough in the study came when Oliver and Hamzeh began to see that this girly girl identity was mobilized only when girls felt uncomfortable with what they were being asked to do. They wrote: “we began to hear how the girls used their girly girl language of embodiment as a way to express additional barriers that hindered their physical activity participation” (Oliver et al., 2009, p.102). This insight was only possible due to the researchers’ long term presence in the schools. Working from this insight, rather than refusing the legitimacy of the girly girl concept, Oliver et al. instead embraced it. They invited the girls to make up games and activities that girly girls could play. It is at this point Oliver et al. assisted the girls to move beyond the critique of the barriers they experienced to focus on transformation. When we began focusing on what could be, by acknowledging the girls’ desires to be girly girl, and invited them to create games that girly girls would enjoy playing, the barriers they identified were no longer the problem. Once the games became about enacting their subjectivities without outsiders’ (…) judgment, then not wanting to sweat or mess up their hair or nails really did not matter anymore. It was as if the moment we acknowledged their desire to be girly girl and worked with them to co-create games for them that the content of the games they created actually contradicted many of their self-identified girly girl barriers (…) Had we pushed the girls to critique or resist being girly girl, we believe they would not have responded favorably because they showed no signs of not wanting to be girly girl. Further, such a move on our part may have positioned them as deviants within their culture. (Oliver et al., 2009, p.107) This is a crucially important insight into the nature of critical pedagogy in physical education. Oliver and her colleagues reveal the delicate tension at the heart of this work, on the one hand supporting students’ to experience something new while not imposing their own solutions. Not only does this form of critical pedagogy require great sensitivity and anthropological insight from teachers and researchers, it also requires an ethic of care, to do no harm in the name of social justice. Moreover, the action-oriented character of Oliver’s program is clearly demonstrated in a paper (Oliver & Hamzeh, 2010) that draws on data from the same study. Working with five girls from one of the elementary schools and using photos the girls had taken around the school, it became apparent the girls were concerned about how boys dominated the spaces for physical activity and refused to let them play. They decided to set up a critical inquiry into this problem the girls had identified. Oliver and Hamzeh

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worked closely with the girls to formulate questions for other grade five students and to conduct informal interviews then a more formal questionnaire. This process of critical inquiry led to construction of a presentation based on the data. The girls wanted to call out and name/ shame particular boys who were leaders in bullying them. However, Oliver persuaded them against this course of action. Reflecting on this, she realized her “use of her adult racialized and gendered ways of challenging inequity momentarily silenced the girls’ preadolescent racialized and gendered ways” (Oliver & Hamzeh, 2010, p.47). The researchers realized the importance of listening to ‘middle spaces’ where girls were articulate in explaining the crisis around how boys treated them. These middle spaces allowed girls to resist gendered and racialized discourses around physical activity. Despite Oliver’s intervention, the presentation by the girls had positive effects, in so far as their teachers began to pay attention to their critique and to take action over equitable access to physical activity spaces in the school. Oliver and Hamzeh concluded: When girls in the Borderlands have an opportunity to critically study barriers to their physical activity (…) we see that lack of physical activity isn’t because these ‘minority girls don’t like activity’, it is because they have to negotiate and challenge forms of sexism and racism to simply have a chance to be active. (Oliver & Hamzeh, 2010, p.50) Oliver’s critical pedagogical work has continued to develop. In another phase she collaborated with me to produce a pedagogical model for working with girls in physical education (Oliver & Kirk, 2015). Our collaboration was born out of our shared frustration over the ‘same old story’ about girls and physical education which repeated stock criticisms of girls’ ‘bad attitudes’. Meanwhile, among the scholars advocating for pedagogical action to counter this ‘blame the victim’ message, few were engaged themselves in critical pedagogies of physical education in schools. The pedagogical model took as its overarching aspiration and organizing idea that ‘girls learn to value the physically active life’, borrowed from Siedentop (1996). Fitzpatrick (2018) is critical of this focus, suggesting our claim is questionable that the widespread practice of women leading physically active lives has radical potential to improve their health and wellbeing. We did not in the book address the shortcomings of the pathogenic paradigm, and so I can see why Fitzpatrick would claim that we ‘buy into the agenda of health-promoters’. However, located within a salutogenic approach, this focus on the physically active life, as I have argued elsewhere in this book, takes on a different complexion, since physical activity becomes in this context one of the important Generalized Resistance Resources that keep people healthy and being well (McCuaig & Quennerstedt, 2018).

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The pedagogical model has a number of key features that we call critical elements, which provide the broad characteristics of the design specification for developing school-based activist programs. These are student-centredness, pedagogies of embodiment, inquiry-based education centred in action, and listening to respond over time. We can see clearly the continuity of these critical elements with Oliver’s early work, as we can with the learning aspirations for this model. These are that girls learn how to name, critique, negotiate, and transform barriers to their physical activity engagement, enjoyment, and learning. A year-long project was undertaken in the academic year 2015–2016 in four schools in the city of Glasgow in Scotland to test this model. We also wanted to learn if it was possible to upscale the activist approach in two senses, by integrating it into regular school physical education programs, and by using school-based professional learning with five teachers. This study marked an important difference with all of Oliver’s previous research due to the racial homogeneity of girls in these schools. Summary statistics for schools in Scotland published in 2018 showed that 90% of pupils are White, and 92% of their teachers are White. That said, there was a significant minority of Muslim girls on one of the schools, which was Catholic and, unusually for a state school in Scotland, girls only. The schools each had pupils living in multiple-deprivation, in one school as high as almost 90% of the school population. The project was structured around a series of professional learning workshops led by Oliver, with Lamb, a secondary school physical education teacher seconded to the University of Strathclyde, acting as field worker between the workshops. The teachers’ professional learning was also structured around the SCIC approach Oliver and Oesterreich (2013) developed for teacher education, with a Building the Foundations (BtF) phase and a Thematic phase. Results revealed that teachers learned to use the activist pedagogical model to co-construct with their pupils local programs of physical education that better met girls’ needs and interests than traditional multi-activity, teacherled designs. The critical elements of the model were robust enough to stand the critical test of practice (Stenhouse, 1975). The approach was, moreover, well-received by teachers and their pupils. In terms of teacher professional learning and scaling up, we learned with the teachers about which aspects of the activist approach worked for them and which didn’t, about teachers’ learning about their pupils in ways they had not previously, teachers learning from other teachers collaboratively, and finally teachers learning about themselves and the risks associated with trying something new (Kirk et al., 2017). In terms of the girls’ learning, we discovered that an activist approach provided new possibilities for their experiences of physical education through variety and choice, through co-creation of the curriculum with their teachers, through building strong relationships between girls and girls and their teacher, and in terms of girls working together (Lamb, Oliver & Kirk, 2018). In terms

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of the pedagogical model, we learned that an activist approach provided teachers and pupils with spaces for manoeuvre within the National Curriculum in Scotland in order to authorize pupil voice, to provide choice and variety, to create an environment of trust and care, and to rethink all aspects of the traditional multi-activity curriculum (Kirk et al. 2018). Other researchers have taken forward Oliver’s activist approach and developed aspects of it. For example, adopting Oliver’s focus on girls’ experiences of embodiment, and also located in the US, Fisette (2011) explored girls’ navigation of their embodied identities in physical education, reporting that physical appearance was emphasized and that physical education was a space in which physical aspects of the body were made public. She found that girls created individual and collective strategies to feel safe and comfortable in this judgemental and public context. In another study that sought to make spaces for girls to voice their experiences of physical education, Fisette (2013) explored girls’ self-identified barriers to engagement and enjoyment in physical education. She found that girls “exercised agency and empowered themselves by altering their participation (eg. blending in and actively engaged) as they occupied multiple positions of (in)visibility” (Fisette, 2013, p.200). Retaining a focus on the body, Fisette and Walton (2014) engaged 14 year old girls in an activist project to better understand how their embodied identities were mediated. Following an exploration of media use, the girls decided to take action based on a reality TV show, to survey peers about issues and challenges centred on embodiment, relationships, and mediated culture. Fisette and Walton concluded that taking action, as co-meaning makers and interpreters, empowered the girls with new insights they themselves had generated. In Ireland, Enright and O’Sullivan (2012, 2010) took a Participatory Action Research approach to working with 15–19 year old girls in order to understand and transform self-identified barrier to participation in physical activity. Working with five girls, they explored the process of negotiating the school physical education curriculum when the girls took on the role of researcher and engaged in a process of critical inquiry (Enright & O’Sullivan, 2010). As co-constructors and researchers of the curriculum, Enright and O’Sullivan found that with appropriate support and perseverance, the girls took ownership of their physical education experience in ways that were positive and energizing for them and led to deep learning. From the same project, Enright and O’Sullivan (2012) reported how 41 student activists took the initiative, again with support, to establish a sports club external to their school. In the process the girls challenged the boundaries of their school program and created a space outside of formal education that could better facilitate their engagements with physical culture. Enright and O’Sullivan warned that while there were clear benefits to girls of student activism

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in physical education, the work required to support this effort was intensive and time-consuming. Extending activist work to Norway, Walseth et al. (2018) undertook an activist approach within a regular co-education physical education class with 15 year old students. The researchers worked with the class teacher and the students over one semester to co-create the curriculum based on the two phases of BtF and a thematic unit. During BtF, the students experienced a broader range of activities than usual, to which they responded positively. Girls who disliked ball sports, which dominated their program previously, developed a new perspective on physical education. Walseth et al. also reported that the students appreciated the theme of ‘body awareness’, particularly where they were given choices to ‘train on their own’. In this coeducation context and learning from the BtF phase, Walseth et al. organized students into same-sex learning partnerships of two students and mixed sex learning groups of four or five students. The idea behind this strategy was that students could work with others they trusted, so that a safe learning environment could develop. Aware of the public nature of participation in physical education, they wrote: The principle of organizing the teaching so that skills became less visible was enacted in different manners in different activities. For example, in floor gymnastics, all the students worked in smaller groups (two learning partners) at different posts simultaneously so that students had no time to observe one another. In cheerleading, when the learning groups were presenting their routine (show), they all presented the same routine simultaneously. Thus, they presented only for the teacher and the researchers, not the other students. (Walseth et al., 2018, p.242) Walseth et al. discovered that this activist approach influenced students’ sense of the meaningfulness of physical education. Some students appreciated a safer classroom environment that fostered inclusion and social interaction. Most students felt the program had opened up a wider range of possibilities for physical education, to which they responded positively, in particular the girls. Student participation in co-creating the curriculum led to students feeling they increased their personal learning. While reporting that this activist intervention seemed to have a number of benefits for these students inside their physical education class, Walseth et al. (2018) acknowledge that they are unable to tackle the root causes of gender inequity which continued to exist outside of this class. Nevertheless, they argue for the importance of activist work in co-educational classes where boys and girls together are exposed to equitable practices in physical education. A final development of the activist approach to discuss here is the creation of a pedagogical model for working with socially vulnerable youth in Brazil (Luguetti et al., 2017b). I already mentioned this study in Chapter 3 where I

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was interested in the nature of social vulnerability, in this case among a group of 15–17 year old boys from the Brazilian city of Santos who were registered in a community-based soccer program. Luguetti worked with the boys and their coaches for 40 minutes prior to their training session on Wednesdays between July and December 2013, for a total of 18 meetings. The SCIC approach was used to structure this work, employing the BtF phase and a thematic process involving a leadership program. In the first phase, Luguetti worked with the boys and the coaches to identify barriers to sport opportunities in their community. Next, they identified alternatives to these barriers. In a final phase, Luguetti worked collaboratively with the boys to create realistic opportunities for them to better understand, negotiate, and eliminate the barriers. Data were generated from multiple sources, including field observations, audio-recordings, youth generated artefacts, as well as weekly debriefing between Luguetti and Oliver. The pedagogical model was co-constructed with the youth and their coaches on the basis of this work. The resulting prototype model had a key theme of co-constructing empowering possibilities through sport for youth from socially vulnerable backgrounds. Two critical elements from the Oliver and Kirk (2015) activist model for working with girls were incorporated, student-centredness and inquiry-based education centred in action. Three new critical elements were generated for this specific group of socially vulnerable youth, an ethic of care, a community of sport, and attentiveness to community. Like the model for girls, and consistent with the idea developed in Chapter 6 that there can be no certainty in terms of the influence of a critical pedagogical program on the young people who experience it, learning is expressed as aspirations, of what is hoped for. Four aspirations for learning were becoming responsible/ committed, communicating with others, valuing each other’s knowledge, and learning from mistakes. Luguetti et al. (2017a) describe the emergence of these learning aspirations from the thematic phase of the project, in which the boys engaged in a leadership program, working with younger players. Exemplifying again the strategy of small wins (Weick, 1984), they noted: The leadership program offered the youth an additional day each week to work in the soccer project, thus allowing them to manage what they identified as a serious risk (the life of crime). Although it may seem that merely adding 1 day per week for the youth to engage in the sport program was insignificant, what is important to remember when working in activist approaches is that transformation begins at the micro level – small steps toward changing oppressive practices make a difference over time. (Luguetti et al., 2017a, p.69) The development and elaboration of this program of activist work in physical education from the mid-1990s to the present marks a quarter century

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effort to create a critical pedagogy of physical education that troubles the normative order of physical education and physical culture, and embraces queer moments. As we can see, as the activist approach is taken up by other researchers beyond its originator, it is possible to remain faithful to the core premises while adapting and reconfiguring the pedagogy to suit new and different circumstance. Four features stand out across this body of work nevertheless. The first is the combination and integration of embodied experience of physical activities with socio-cultural critique and critical inquiry. A further development of critique and critical inquiry may be to build in skills for young people to deconstruct aspects of social media in the way they do other forms of media as activist strategies. The second is its adaptability, for example to a community setting outside of the school, or to work with boys and its incorporation into co-educational classes. The third is the critical reflexivity so clearly demonstrated by Oliver and present in all of the derivations of activist pedagogy, which is rooted in starting where young people are and centering their voices in all reports of activist pedagogy. The fourth, building on the critique of the normative order, is to cocreate with students curricula of possibility and to focus, in Oliver’s words, on what might be. They all seek, in summary, to empower young people through action.

Conclusion The three pedagogies of affect in physical education highlighted in this chapter have been practiced for some time, in the case of what was to become TPSR since the 1970s, activist approaches and adaptations of Sport Education since the mid-1990s. Together they provide a solid platform for further development of critical pedagogies of affect. These examples show that there is no one answer to the question of ‘What is critical pedagogy?’ in physical education. I have suggested, though, that in the face of precarity, it might be important for critical pedagogies to take a particular form. I have argued in this chapter that a focus on affect may be important, in particular to build and maintain the salutogenic concept of Sense of Coherence. I have emphasized, at the same time, that we can think of this focus as a leading edge for these pedagogies, as a way to directing teachers’ efforts and young people’s attention, but not as a means of excluding other educational benefits. Indeed, as we see in, for example, TPSR, physical competence remains important in forming the self–body–world connection, as does the competence of the teacher. In the Cultural Studies approach to Sport Education and in various versions of activist pedagogy, socio-cultural critique and critical inquiry are key features. However, across the three examples we can see clearly that valuing, interest, motivation, resilience, caring, responsibility, and cooperation, among many other affective learning matters, are leading concerns of the teacher-scholars who practice these pedagogies.

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In all of this work, too, the strategy of small wins (Weick, 1984) is evident time and time again. These critical pedagogies of affective are radical in their intent in so far as they seek to empower young people to develop capabilities, to make responsible and wise decisions, to solve problems that impact them directly, to care enough about injustice to take action, to assist others, to work collectively to achieve shared goals and, indeed, to be enlightened. When faced with uncertainty, instability, and insecurity on a daily basis, this is learning that is valuable and productive, it becomes part of making sense of self and sense of life. None of these critical pedagogies of affect are quick fixes. None are radical in the sense that they will incite revolutions. None by themselves will solve what Hellison described as the root causes of social problems, such as precarity. But this does not invalidate them as critical pedagogies of physical education since the intent of the pedagogy is social justice, through small wins. As the three examples show, this work takes a long time to have any evident benefit at all, and even then set-backs and failures are all too common. We cannot be certain of the effect of these pedagogies on the young people who experience them. The teacher-scholars who have created and practiced these critical pedagogies are at all times cautious in what they think they can achieve and careful not to impose their own solutions on other people’s problems. I hope, at the same time, to have provided an adequate enough account of these critical pedagogies to suggest they are worth persevering with as physical education’s response to precarity. Moreover, I hope the evidence marshalled in the research papers and books explored in this chapter in some detail are enough to convince even a sceptical reader that, faithfully implemented, they provide a basis for working with young people experiencing anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation. I hope, finally, that they might provide the inspiration for teachers to take up one or more of these critical pedagogies of physical education. I hope teacher-scholars will continue to work with and adapt the examples studied here, or to explore other existing critical pedagogies of affect in physical education, and to create and experiment with new approaches.

References Antonovsky, A. (1979) Health, Stress and Coping, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Ennis, C. D. (1999) Creating a culturally relevant curriculum for disengaged girls, Sport, Education and Society, 4(1), 31–49, doi:10.1080/1357332990040103. Ennis, C. D., Solmon, M. A., Satina, B., Loftus, S. J., Mensch, J. and McCauley, M. T. (1999) Creating a sense of family in urban schools using the ‘Sport for Peace’ curriculum, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 70(3), 273–285, doi:10.1080/ 02701367.1999.10608046. Enright, E. and O’Sullivan, M. (2012) Physical education ‘in all sorts of corners’: Student activists transgressing formal physical education curricular boundaries, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 83(2), 255–267.

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Enright, E. and O’Sullivan, M. (2010) ‘Can I do it in my pyjamas?’: Negotiating a physical education curriculum with teenage girls, European Physical Education Review, 16(3), 203–222. Fisette, J. L. (2011) Exploring how girls navigate their embodied identities in physical education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 16(2), 179–196. Fisette, J. L. (2013) ‘Are you listening?’ Adolescent girls voice how they negotiate selfidentified barriers to their success and survival in physical education, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 18(2), 184–203, doi:10.1080/17408989.2011.649724. Fisette, J. L. and Walton, T. A. (2014) ‘If You Really Knew Me’… I am empowered through action, Sport, Education and Society, 19(2), 131–152, doi:10.1080/13573322.2011.643297. Fitzpatrick, K. (2018) What happened to critical pedagogy in physical education? An analysis of key critical work in the field, European Physical Education Review, 1–18, doi:10.1177/1356336X18796530. Fitzpatrick, K. (2013) Critical Pedagogy, Physical Education and Urban Schooling, New York: Peter Lang. Fraser-Thomas, J. L., Côté, J. and Deakin, J. (2005) Youth sport programs: An avenue to foster positive youth development, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 10(1), 19–40. Gard, M. (2004) Movement, art and culture: Problem-solving and critical inquiry in dance, pp. 93–104, in J. Wright, D. Macdonald and L. Burrows (eds) Critical Inquiry and Problem-solving in Physical Education, London: Routledge. Gordon, B. and Doyle, S. (2015) Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility and transfer of learning: Opportunities and challenges for teachers and coaches, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 34(1), 152–161, doi:10.1123/jtpe.2013-0184. Gordon, B., Jacobs, J. M. and Wright, P. M. (2016) Social and emotional learning through a Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility based after-school program for disengaged middle school boys, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 35(4), 358–369, doi:10.1123/jtpe.2016-0106. Hastie, P. A. and Buchanan, A. (2000) Teaching responsibility through sport education: Prospects of a coalition, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 71(1), 25–35, doi:10.1080/02701367.2000.10608877. Hastie, P. A., Martinez de Ojeda, D. and Calderón Luquin, A. (2011) A review of research on Sport Education: 2004 to the present, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 16(2), 103–132, doi:10.1080/17408989.2010.535202. Hellison, D. (1995) Teaching Responsibility Through Physical Activity, Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Hellison, D. (1978) Beyond Bats and Balls: Alienated (and other) youth in the gym, Washington, DC: AAHPERD. Hellison, D. (1973) Humanistic Physical Education, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Hellison, D. and Martinek, T. (2006) Social and individual responsibility programs, pp. 610–626, in D. Kirk, D. Macdonald and M. O’Sullivan (eds) The Handbook of Physical Education, London: Sage. Hellison, D., Martinek, T. and Walsh, D. (2008) Sport and responsible leadership among youth, pp. 49–60, in N. L. Holt (ed.) Positive Youth Development Through Sport, London: Routledge. Holt, N. L. (2008) Positive Youth Development Through Sport, London: Routledge. Judt, T. (2010) Ill Fares the Land, London: Penguin.

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180 Critical pedagogies of affect Kirk, D. (2013) Educational value and models-based practice in physical education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(9), 973–986, doi:10.1080/00131857.2013.785352 Kinchin, G. D. (2006) Sport education: A review of research, pp. 596–609, in D. Kirk, D. Macdonald and M. O’Sullivan (eds) The Handbook of Physical Education, London: Sage. Kinchin, G. D. and O’Sullivan, M. (1999) Making high school physical education meaningful for students, Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 70(5), 40–44, 54. Kirk, D., Lamb, C. A., Oliver, K. L. with Ewing-Day, R., Fleming, C., Loch, A. and Smedley, V. (2018) Balancing prescription with teacher and pupil agency: Spaces for manoeuvre within a pedagogical model for working with adolescent girls, The Curriculum Journal, 29(2), 219–237. Kirk, D., Lamb, C. A., Oliver, K. L. with Ewing-Day, R., Fleming, C., Loch, A. and Smedley, V. (2017) School-based teacher professional learning of an activist approach to working with adolescent girls in physical education, Paper presented to the Instruction and Learning in Physical Education SIG of the American Educational Research Association, San Antonio, US, April. Lamb, C. A., Oliver, K. L. and Kirk, D. (2018) ‘Go for it Girl’: Adolescent girls’ responses to the implementation of an activist approach in a core physical education programme, Sport, Education and Society, 23(8), 799–811, doi:10.1080/ 13573322.2018.1484724. Luguetti, C., Oliver, K. L., Dantas, L. and Kirk, D. (2017a) An activist approach to sport meets youth from socially vulnerable backgrounds: Possible learning aspirations, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 88(1), 60–71, doi:10.1080/ 02701367.2016.1263719. Luguetti, C., Oliver, K. L., Kirk, D. and Dantas, L. (2017b) Exploring an activist approach to working with boys from socially vulnerable backgrounds in a sport context, Sport, Education and Society, 17(4), 493–510, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 13573322.2015.1054274. Mandigo, J., Corlett, J. and Anderson, A. (2008) Using quality physical education to promote positive youth development in a developing nation: Striving for peace education, pp. 110–121, in N. L. Holt (ed.) Positive Youth Development Through Sport, London: Routledge. Marttinen, R., Johnston, K., Phillips, S., Fredrick, R. N. and Meza, B. (2019) REACH Harlem: young urban boys’ experiences in an after-school PA positive youth development program, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, doi:10.1080/ 17408989.2019.1592147. McCuaig, L. and Quennerstedt, M. (2018) Health by stealth: Exploring the sociocultural dimensions of salutogenesis for sport, health and physical education research, Sport, Education and Society, 23(2), 111–122, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 13573322.2016.1151779. Oliver, K. L. (1999) Adolescent girls’ body-narratives: Learning to desire and create a “fashionable” image, Teachers College Record, 101(2), 220–246. Oliver, K. L. and Hamzeh, M. (2010) ‘The boys won’t let us play’: Fifth-grade mestizas challenge physical activity discourse at school, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 81(1), 38–51. Oliver, K. L. and Kirk, D. (2015) Girls, Gender and Physical Education: An activist approach, London: Routledge.

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Oliver, K. L., and Lalik, R. (2001) The body as curriculum: Learning with adolescent girls, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 33(3), 303–333. Oliver, K. L. and Lalik, R. (2004a) ‘The Beauty Walk, This Ain’t My Topic’: Learning about critical inquiry with adolescent girls, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 36(5), 555–586. Oliver, K. L. and Lalik, R. (2004b) Critical inquiry on the body in girls’ physical education classes: A critical poststructural perspective, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 23, 162–195. Oliver, K. L. and Oesterreich, H. A. (2013) Student-centred inquiry as curriculum as a model for field-based teacher education, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45(3), 394–417, doi:10.1080/00220272.2012.719550. Oliver, K. L., Hamzeh, M. and McCaughtry, N. (2009) Girly girls can play games/Las niñas pueden jugar tambien: Co-creating a curriculum of possibilities with fifth-grade girls, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 28, 90–110. O’Sullivan, M. and Kinchin, G. D. (2015) Cultural studies curriculum in physical activity and sport, pp. 333–365, in J. Lund and D. Tannehill (eds) Standards-based Physical Education Curriculum Development, Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett (3rd Edition). Pozo, P., Grao-Cruces, A. and Perez-Ordas, R. (2018) Teaching personal and social responsibility model-based programmes in physical education: A systematic review, European Physical Education Review, 24(1), 56–75. Runciman, D. (2018) How Democracy Ends, London: Profile. Siedentop, D. (1996) Valuing the physically active life: Contemporary and future directions, Quest, 48(3), 266–274. Siedentop, D. (1994) Sport Education: Quality PE through positive sport experiences, Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Standing, G. (2016) The Precariat: The new dangerous class, London: Bloomsbury. Stenhouse, L. (1975) An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development, London: Heinemann. Wallhead, T. and O’Sullivan, M. (2005) Sport education: Physical education for the new millennium?, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 10(2), 181–210. Walseth, K., Engebretsen, B. and Elvebakk, L. (2018) Meaningful experiences in PE for all students: An activist research approach, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 23(3), 235–249, doi:10.1080/17408989.2018.1429590. Walsh, D. S., Ozaeta, J. and Wright, P. M. (2010) Transference of responsibility model goals to the school environment: Exploring the impact of a coaching club program, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 15(1), 15–28, doi:10.1080/ 17408980802401252. Ward, S. and Parker, M. (2013) The voice of youth: Atmosphere in positive youth development program, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 18(5), 534–548, doi:10.1080/17408989.2012.726974. Weick, K. E. (1984) Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems, American Psychologist, 39(1), 40–49.

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Chapter 9

A note on teacher professional learning for precarity

None of what I have proposed in the previous chapter is possible without teachers. None of the analysis in this book matters without teachers. Critical pedagogies of affect, as physical education’s response to precarity, will remain theoretical propositions until teachers implement them. As Hellison (1995) wrote, what teachers teach is important, as is who they teach. But who they are is crucial too. For TPSR, he claimed that the teacher had to embody the whole approach. I believe the same is true of all critical pedagogies of physical education. Such is the challenge precarity presents, and such are its dangers for young people and teachers, anything less has the potential for harm for both the young person and the teacher. My last words in this book, then, concern teacher professional learning for precarity. Given the analysis I undertook in Chapter 4, and now I have completed an analysis of critical pedagogies in physical education in Chapters 6 to 8, it is appropriate to consider how teachers of physical education fit the picture created in the preceding chapters. In Chapter 4 I drew on the occupational socialization literature to provide an account of what we know about physical education teachers, acknowledging that much of this research has been carried out in the US. We discovered, on the one hand, a degreequalified profession who for the most part enjoy parity of pay and conditions with teachers of other areas of the curriculum, who have career advancement prospects in schools, and by virtue of their graduate status have access to higher degree study. There are variations in this narrative in specific and local contexts of countries of the Global North. But in general, all of this is good news and represents progress over the past 50 years, in comparison to previous eras (Kirk, 2010). On the other hand, physical education teachers appear to suffer a marginal status in schools, at least in some countries and education systems. They are, moreover, predominantly White, ‘severely able-bodied’, and come from relatively affluent backgrounds. They seem, too, for the most part, to be resistant to change and somewhat entrenched in the practice of a multiactivity, sport technique-based form of physical education that serves the interests of only a small proportion of their students. They are, as some

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writers put it, both ‘white-washed’ and ‘colour-blind’, lacking cultural sensitivity to difference and responsiveness to diversity. I also considered the literature on teacher stress, burnout and attrition, concluding that while physical educators seem to be less prone to these problems than some of their colleagues in other curriculum areas, they nevertheless are more likely to experience these issues in urban schools and their equivalents since they are ill prepared in many cases to deal with the particular pressures such environments entail. As they face growing diversity in schools, and young people experience anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation, the potential for disruptive behaviour from students and stress and burnout for teachers is high. Even with the most generous interpretation of the evidentiary base set out in Chapter 4, and taking account of the many nuances and caveats required to accommodate local differences and emphases, we cannot avoid the conclusion that urgent and far-reaching reform of physical education teacher education is required. This would be the case even without the growing prevalence of precarity. With the rise of precarity, it seems to me that we as an occupational group are fast reaching a situation, if this hasn’t already occurred in some places (Templin, Graber & Richards, 2019), of decline, irrelevance, and obsolescence. Perhaps worse than this, while traditional forms of physical education continue to be practised in schools, we may be doing harm to young people who are already angry, anxious, and alienated. Lawson, Kirk, and MacPhail (in press) have argued recently that rising to and meeting the teacher professional learning challenge is now a pressing and essential task. They write: Continuing education and professional development of teachers and teacher educators is of paramount importance for PE to survive and thrive in school systems. There is much at stake. Our professional monopoly of provision of school PE is under threat. Changing circumstances in schools require us to respond and adapt to better meet new challenges. Responsive action in the face of challenge and change is a feature of occupations deemed to be professions. In addition to the moral responsibilities professionals value and safeguard, there is an assumption of expertise that can only be acquired through advanced study. A higher education provides the capability to bring into the field of practice new knowledge, to learn from research as well as other practitioners, and to add value to the lives of the young people in our charge. (Lawson et al., in press, p.18) Their comments suggest that our status as a profession is at risk, rolling back the gains made in the past 50 years or more. They propose four principles to inform physical education teacher educators’ and other stakeholders’ responses to this professional learning challenge. The first is that

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whatever form professional learning takes, it must prepare physical education teachers who are adaptive and responsive to changing circumstances and situations. Facing young people living in precarity, this principle is of paramount importance. A second principle is that the professional learning of student teachers, their in-school teacher mentors, and teacher educators needs to be joined up, and undertaken collectively and collaboratively, in contrast to the current silo arrangement that leaves each party unable to communicate with the other. Third, they propose that teachers will need to be incentivized to undertake continuing professional learning, either financially or through enhanced promotion prospects or other means linked to retaining their licence to teach. Fourth and finally, and drawing on the socialization literature, Lawson et al. stress the importance of focusing on the first few years of novice teachers’ induction into teaching. They propose a more systematic approach, drawing on advances in digital technology, for teacher educators to continue to work with novitiates and their colleague-mentors after graduation. Lawson et al. (in press) make these proposals in full knowledge that physical education teacher education has itself fallen on hard times in some countries of the Global North. There are considerable challenges to meet and overcome to reform physical education teacher education, in large part, because teacher educators have lost control of their programs and institutional bases. While some programs in some countries continue to thrive, in Britain (for example) there are far fewer undergraduate programs than there were a decade ago. Templin et al. (2019) have written about a crisis in the supply of physical education teachers to American schools. In Britain, undergraduate degree programs have been replaced with postgraduate certificates and diplomas, usually of one year duration following undergraduate study in a range of fields, such as sport and exercise sciences, physical activity and health, and sport development. There are questions about the fitness-for-purpose of these undergraduate experiences for prospective physical education teachers, and the suitability of one year programs to adequately prepare for work in schools. Along with this demise in the duration and quality of initial teacher education is the erosion of physical education teacher educators’ institutional base to carry out their work. Teacher education has been caught up in the rapid transformation of the physical activity field of study in higher education, and in the increasing scientization, academicization, specialization, and fragmentation of that field (Lawson, 1991; Kirk, 2010). While some benefits, such as degree level qualifications, were gained, marginalization within this field or banishment to departments of teacher education also have been outcomes. Any reform effort of teacher professional learning in physical education must then take place from a position of weakness, both in terms of status as a profession and institutional base. This said, some physical education

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teacher education programs continue to thrive in universities around the world. They need to be vigilant of their institutional survival. As Thomas (1998) noted, while recognition in the national and international field is ‘nice’, recognition for departments and programs within their home university is essential to survival Thus, paying attention to what is going on at home is vital. They need to be looking inward, but also outward at the same time. For in looking outward, it is those thriving programs that may now need to take a leading role in the reform of teacher professional learning, particularly on behalf of colleague teacher educators who have lost their degree programs to certificates and their institutional bases. Where these degree programs continue to thrive, if they are to provide an adequate response to precarity, they must as Philpot (2019) argues take a coherent position on critical pedagogy across the program rather than teach about social justice pedagogies in isolated units of study. Another factor to consider is that the research field of physical education and sport pedagogy is currently growing, and achieving considerable recognition within the academy as it does so (Kirk & Haerens, 2014). More and more papers are being published in specialist journals serving the Anglophone research community, with Sport, Education and Society now publishing nine issues per year and Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy increasing its number of issues from two per year in 2004 to six per year in 2019. Currently, there are at least seven good quality peer reviewed journals now serving the English-reading world of physical education pedagogy scholars, an increase of almost 50% since the early 1980s. This increase in volume of research has been matched by its increasing quality. In 2017–2018, three specialist physical education research journals, the two already mentioned and the European Physical Education Review, ranked in the top 40 of the 238 education and educational research journals. There is then an international community of researchers in physical education who are currently thriving. Most active researchers are working in universities. This is a high prestige resource that is as yet untapped in the cause of reform of teacher professional learning in physical education. I noted Hellison’s comment that who teachers are is important. Part of any reform in the face of precarity, then, must be consideration of who is recruited into initial teacher preparation programs. Diversity among physical education teachers, teacher educators, and researchers is, on the face of it, urgently needed. However, diversification is only a good thing if these physical educators are willing and able to take forward socially critical work in schools and universities. The diversification of physical educators at each of these levels is in any case a long term process. While we must begin the process now, it will be years before a critical mass is in place to bring about desired change, if recruitment into initial teacher education is the sole strategy. We need additional strategies.

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Thus, while this process gets underway, serving teachers’ professional learning needs must be met. Notwithstanding the alleged ‘white-washed’ and ‘colour-blindness’ of physical education teachers, many will be working in school environments that will become increasingly challenging as the prevalence of precarity grows. For such teachers, local action specific to meeting their needs and the needs of the young people in their care may be one way forward, rather than advocacy for more general approaches. So, for example, local school districts or even clusters of schools and their partner universities might work together to provide the professional learning teachers need to develop their skills. Applying Lawson et al.’s second principle is one way to make this happen because collaboration between teachers and teacher educators is essential to relevant and appropriate continuing professional learning. In Chapter 7 I outlined a number of critical pedagogies of teacher education that have focused, in the main, on socially critical scholarship, providing student teachers with the capability to engage in socio-cultural critique and critical inquiry, and to facilitate this learning in their school students. While some teacher educators were clearly aware of the need to move beyond socially critical scholarship towards praxis with their students, my conclusion was that only one such program existed. Building on the account of critical pedagogies of affect in Chapter 8, we might envisage school-based programs for already practicing teachers that are based on learning how to use one or more of these critical pedagogies for physical education. This will not be easy, given the extent to which multi-activity programs are embedded in schools. The three examples of critical pedagogies of affect provided in Chapter 8, TPSR, forms of Sport Education, and activist approaches, offer clear signposts about the nature of professional learning that teachers will require to undertake to meet the challenges of precarity. In addition to the skills of socio-cultural critique and critical inquiry, it is of great importance that physical education teacher education initiates teachers into one or more of these critical pedagogies or other like programs of social justice pedagogy in physical education. Precarity is not a hypothetical future proposition. It is happening now. Physical education is already late to the party. The many physical education teachers who care about the health and wellbeing of the children and young people they work with will also be aware not all are gaining the benefits to which they are entitled. For those teachers who are delivering educational benefits to all of their pupils, the challenge is to provide tangible evidence of these positive effects. We have, so far, been unable to do this. This is a precarious situation in itself given the massive investment of public funds that makes school physical education teaching possible. Our inability to account for the benefits of our work, in so far as there are benefits, has been the elephant in the room for too long.

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I quoted Larry Locke in the Preface to Physical Education Futures who wrote, in the face of our failure over many years to ‘make lemonade’ from our ‘programmatic lemon’ of multi-activity physical education, ‘nobody needs to be blamed … there are no villains’. My thinking now is that we really need to turn this proposition on its head. It is not so much who to blame for chronic failures. It is more a matter of who will shoulder the responsibility to create the right programs for the specific conditions teachers and young people experience in schools and other pedagogic sites? In responding to precarity, who will dress up, show up to the party, and be counted?

References Hellison, D. (1995) Teaching Responsibility Through Physical Activity, Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Kirk, D. (2010) Physical Education Futures, London: Routledge. Kirk, D. and Haerens, L. (2014) New research programmes in physical education and sport pedagogy, Sport, Education and Society, 19(7), 899–911. Lawson, H. A. (1991) Specialization and fragmentation among faculty as endemic features of academic life, Quest, 43, 280–295. Lawson, H. A., Kirk, D. and MacPhail, A. (in press) The professional development challenge: Achieving desirable outcomes for teachers, teacher educators, professional organisations and the profession, in A. MacPhail and H. A. Lawson (eds) School Physical Education and Teacher Education: Collaborative redesign for the 21st Century, London: Routledge. Philpot, R. A. (2019) In search of a critical PETE programme, European Physical Education Review, 25(1), 48–64. Templin, T. J., Graber, K. C. and Richards, K. A. R. (2019) Will PETE survive in the 21st century?, Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 38, 68–74. Thomas, J. R. (1998) Prominence within the university is essential: Prominence in the academic field is nice, Quest, 50, 159–165.

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Index

Abos, A., Haerens, L., Sevil, J., Aelterman, N. and Garcia-Gonzalez, L. 70 ACARA (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority) 84, 139–40 ACHPER (Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation) 138–9 adaptiveness and responsiveness to change, need for 184 advocacy for critical pedagogy 103–4, 106, 107, 108, 114, 119, 126 affinity, value of 160 after school club, Positive Youth Development (PYD) and 158 Ahmed, S. 117, 118 Alfrey, L., O’Connor, J. and Jeanes, R. 140–41, 145 alienation 2, 3, 6, 20, 21, 27, 32, 38, 58, 82, 152; alienated youth, working with 154–5, 156–7 Alma-Alta Conference (1978) 92 alternative worlds, support for imagination of 166–7 Anderson, L.R. 37 Andrews, J. and Lawrence, T. 57 Andsager, J.L. 40, 45 Anglophone notion of precarity 19–21 anthropological perspectives on precarity 19–20 Antonovsky, A. 2–3, 38, 146, 152; physical education-as-health promotion 83, 95, 96, 98 Anyon, J. 26, 27 Apple, M.W. 13, 21, 27, 57 applied sport-programming model 157 Armano, E. 19 Armour, K.M. 42

Armour, K.M. and Jones, R.L. 61 Armour, K.M. and Yelling, M. 61 Arnold, P. 137–8 Atkinson, A.B. 10 attrition 58–9, 183; physical education teachers and 66, 67–8, 69–70, 71, 73, 74, 75 Auckland University, critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education at 132–4 Australia 152; ACARA (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority) 84, 139–40; ACHPER (Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation) 138–9; Australian Curriculum: Health & Physical (AC: HPE) 97, 138–9, 140, 141; Australian (National ) Curriculum 84; Bachelor of Human Movement Studies (Education) (BHMS (Ed)) degree at University of Queensland 127; burnout levels in 70; Daily Physical Education programme in 25; developments in critical pedagogies of school physical education in 136–141; Health & Physical Education (HPE) in 137; high stakes examinations embedded in physical education in 64; HPE Advisory Committee in 137; National Statement on Health and Physical Education for Australian Schools (1994) 136; precarity in 19; Queensland Board of Senior Secondary School Studies (BSSSS) 137–8; recruitment and retention, difficulties with 63; Senior Physical Education Syllabus (BSSSS,

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Index Queensland) 137–8, 140, 143; Tri-Skills programme in 25 autonomy, student perceptions of their own 160 awareness talks 155 Azzarito, L. 44, 105 Azzarito, L. and Simon, M. 66–7, 130 Azzarito, L., Macdonald, D., Dagkas, S. and Fisette, J. 49–50, 125 Bain, L.L. 125 Ball, S.J. 21, 23, 57, 58, 141 Ballafkih, H., Zinsmeister, J. and Meerman, M. 19 Bann, D., Johnson, W., Li, L., Kuh, D. and Hardy, R. 34, 94 Barbules, N. 106–7, 115 Barker, D. 59 Bartholomew, K.J., Ntoumanis, N., Mourtadis, A., Katartzi, E. et al. 70 Beauty Walk 167–8 Behr, R. 10 Bergsma, L.J. and Carney, M.E. 42 Berlant, L. 19, 20, 23, 32, 49; physical education-as-health promotion 82, 94, 99 Beyond Bats and Balls (Hellison, D.) 154, 156 Biesta, G. 110, 111, 112 Black, M., Joseph, V., Mott, L. and Maheswaran, R. 35–6, 41 Blair, Tony 11 body image 42–6; appearance comparisons, social media and 46; attitudes to 42–3; body image shaping 43–4; body size, perceptions of 37; changing rooms, body image disturbance in context of 43; disabling body narratives, counteraction against 166; perceptions of 42–3; positive body image, physical competence and 44; proximal events in class, body image influences of 44; ‘right body shape,’ narratives about 165–6; state components of body image disturbance 43; trait components of body image disturbance 42–3 Body Mass Index (BMI) 34 body narratives and meanings, constructions of 164–5 body schema, interchangeably use of ‘body image’ and 42

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‘body work’ 45 Bourdieu, P. 14–16, 18, 22, 32, 38; précatité for 18–19; social class, perspective on 14 Bowes, M. and Bruce, J. 145 Brady, D. and Biegert, T. 19 Brazil: social vulnerability in community soccer in Santos 46–8; wageless catadores in Rio de Janeiro 20; working with socially vulnerable youth in 175–6 Brimblecombe, N., Evans-Lacko, S., Knapp, M., King, D. et al 36 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 14, 16 British Heart Foundation (BHF) 35 Bromley, C., Tod, E. and McCartney, G. 41 Bronfenbrenner, U. 154 Brooker, R., Kirk, D., Braiuka, S. and Bransgrove, A. 110 Brouwers, A., Tomic, W. and Boluijt, H. 69 Brown, D. 61 Brown, D. and Evans, J. 62 Brown, D., Morgan, K. and Aldous, D. 66, 72 Building the Foundations (BtF) 173, 175–6 bullying, problem of 36–7 burnout 5, 183; physical education teachers and 56, 58–9, 66, 68, 69, 70–71, 73, 74–5 Canada 86, 90; kinesiology faculties in 64–5; Ontario Public Service 84; precarity in 19 Cardio-Vascular Disease (CVD) 93, 98 Caringi, J.C., Lawson, H.A. and Devlin, M. 71, 72 Caringi, J.C., Stanick, C., Trautman, A., Crosby, L. et al. 71 Carlquist, M. 113 Casey, A. 40, 42 Casey, A., Goodyear, V.A. and Armour, K.M. 40 Cassidy, C. 99 Charles, J.M. 125 Childline 36 China, precarity in 19 Circuit Training 89, 90 Clark, T. and Heath, A. 10 class, people’s subjective experience of 18, 26; see also social class

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190 Index Cliff, K. 125, 136 collaboration 90, 153, 172, 173; collaborative teaching 135; joined-up and collaborative learning, need for 184 collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) 58 conditions of service 69 continuing professional development 61 continuing professional learning, need for promotion of 184 Coonan, W., Dwyer, T., Worsley, T., Leitch, D. et al. 90 Cooper Institute 25 cooperation 177; cooperative teamwork 161; in Sport Education, importance of 159–60 Corbin, C.B. 90, 92 Corlett, A. 2 Cosma, A., Whitehead, R., Neville, F., Currie, D. and Inchley, J. 36 Crase, D. and Walker, H. 64 Crawford, R. 91, 96 critical inquiry: on the body, research paper concerning 168–9; into male domination of spaces for physical activity 171–2 critical pedagogies 4, 103–5; advocacy for 103–4, 106, 107, 108, 114, 119, 126; of affect, precarity and 146, 151–2; Auckland University, physical education teacher education at 132–4; Australia, developments in school physical education in 136–141; concerns of 105–6; credibility of physical education 116–17; criticism of concept 104; defining critical pedagogy 106–14, 119; enablement in schools of socially critical scholarship and 145–6; examples of 125–6; experience, critical pedagogies of physical education as 115–18; experience, Dewey’s concept of continuity of 117; future potential for 114–18; learning environment, problem of 116; limitations in schools on socially critical scholarship and 145–6; ‘Modest Pedagogy,’ Tinning’s concept of 110–14; New Zealand, developments in school physical education in 141–5; in physical education teacher education 126–36, 146; practices constituting, lack of

clarity on 126–7; praxis in critical pedagogies of physical education teacher education 134–6; precarity, taking focus on 104; Queensland University, physical education teacher education at 127–32; queer phenomenology and 117–18; in school physical education 136–46, 151; school physical education, experiential engagement of student teachers in 164–74; socially critical scholarship and 105–6, 118–19; in socio-political networks 125–6; Sport Education and adaptations to match 160–62; ‘straight pedagogy,’ rethink on 115–18, 119; ‘straightening devices’ 117; of teacher education 186; terminological proliferation in 105 critical pedagogies of affect for physical education: alternative worlds, support for imagination of 166–7; Beauty Walk 167–8; body narratives and meanings, constructions of 164–5; Brazil, working with socially vulnerable youth in 175–6; critical inquiry into male domination of spaces for physical activity 171–2; critical inquiry on the body, research paper concerning 168–9; critical pedagogy of school physical education, experiential engagement of student teachers in 164–74; cultural stories of women 166; Cultural Studies Curriculum 161–3; disabling body narratives, counteraction against 166; domination, relations of 165; embodiment, girls’ experiences of 174; empowering possibilities, co-construction of 176; Empowering Sport 163; empowerment through action, activist approach to physical education 164–77; ‘Fashion In’ and ‘Fashion Out,’ body narratives and 165–6; feminist poststructuralism 166–7, 168–9; girly girl identity 170–71; ‘healthy hair,’ narratives about 165–6; heteronormative femininity, culture of 170–71; Ireland, Participatory Action Research approach in 174–5; language of possibility, development of 170; leadership programme 176; learning

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Index aspirations, emergence of 176; Norway, curriculum co-creation in 175; Oliver’s activist work, development of 164–5; participation in physical activity, influences on 170–71; physical activity, critical inquiry into male domination of spaces for 171–2; physical activity, girls learning value of 172; physical education, girls’ self-identified barriers to engagement with 174; physical education and critical literacy, bringing together 166–7; physical education curriculum, incomplete without space for reflection 169; pioneers of 153; Positive Youth Development (PYD) 153, 157–9; ‘right body shape,’ narratives about 165–6; safe spaces for expression of alternative views, creation of 166–7; same-sex learning partnerships 175; scaffolding and support, need for 169; school-based activist programs, critical elements in development of 173; Scotland, school-based professional learning in Glasgow 173–4; Sport Education 160–63; Sport for Peace 160–61; Student Centered Inquiry-as-Curriculum (SCIC) 134–5, 164–74, 176; Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) 153–9; transformation, focus on 171; voices of young girls, foregrounding of 165, 168–9, 170, 177 critical reflexivity 108, 111–12, 167, 177 ‘cruel optimism,’ Berlant’s notion of 20, 27 Culpan, I. and Bruce, J. 141–2 cultural capital: complex interactions of economic and social capital and 14–15; notion of 15 cultural politics of class 17–18 cultural stories of women 166 Cultural Studies Curriculum 161–3; benefits of 162; implementation of Cultural Studies approach 162; Sport Education and 153, 161–2, 177 Culturally Relevant Physical Education (CRPE) 130 curriculum policies 3, 5, 56, 85–6, 94–5, 98; critical pedagogies of teacher education and school physical education 125–6, 127, 133, 136, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146 Curtner-Smith, M.D. 60, 61, 62

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Curtner-Smith, M.D. and Sofo, S. 61 Curtner-Smith, M.D., Todorovic, J.R., McCaughtry, N.A. and Lacon, S.A. 67 Cusak, L., Desha, L.N., Del MarC. B. and Hoffman, T.C. 40 cyberbullying 37 daily physical activity (DPA) 84 Daily Physical Education program 90, 91 decision-making 23, 96; individual and collective, opportunities for 163 Defining Physical Education (Kirk, D.) 88–9 Democracy & Education 106–7 Devis-Devis, J. 104, 124, 146 Dewar, A.M. 59–60, 64, 125 Dewar, A.M. and Lawson, H.A. 60 Dewey, J. 115–16, 117, 151 ‘digital democracy,’ ‘digital divide’ and 41, 49 digital media, pervasiveness of 50 disaster capitalism 12–13 discrimination and precarity 1–2 disruptive pupil behaviour and precarity 1–2 domination, relations of 165 Dorling, D. 10 Douglas, D.D. and Halas, J.M. 64–5 Dovemark, M. and Beach, D. 19, 24, 27 Dowling, F. and Flintoff, A. 65 Dudley, D., Van Bergen, P., McMaugh, A. and Mackenzie, E. 40, 42 Dwyer, J.J.M., Allison, R., Goldenberg, E.R., Fein, A.J.et al. 35 Eckelt, M. 19 economic capital: accumulation of 15–16; complex interactions of social and cultural capital and 14–15 education: Australia, Tri-Skills programme in 25; marketization and privatization of 23–5, 27–8; neoliberalism and physical education 24–5; outsourcing of 25; Pedasport ‘Pay-to-Play Program’ 25; physical education, privatization and 24–5; selective redistribution of public funding for 23–4 Education Support Partnership 57 Educational Theory 110 elite class, gap between emerging precariat and 17 embodiment 3, 152, 171, 173; diversities of 118; gendered embodiment 170;

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192 Index girls’ experiences of 44, 174; stereotypes of 65 emotional labour 71–2, 74 employment 2, 9, 18–20, 73; employment protection 58; health, wellbeing and precariousness in 27; insecure employment 21–2, 82; nature of, social class and 18; precariousness in 20; for teachers, insecurity of 57–8; unemployment 9, 22, 34, 36, 160–61 empowerment 3, 97, 113–14, 151, 154, 157, 163; empowering possibilities, co-construction of 176; Empowering Sport 163; through action, activist approach to physical education 164–77 England: Education Acts (1940s) in 89; ‘Great Recession’ of 2008 in, health effects of 37–8; Health Survey for (2001–2013) 37–8; obesity among school-aged children in, prevalence of 35; School Medical Service in 88; Syllabus for Physical Training (1933) 88–9; Syllabus for Physical Training in 88; ‘whitewashing’ of policies in 65 Engström, L.-M. 34 Ennis, C.D. 160, 161 Ennis, C.D., Solmon, M.A., Satina, B., Loftus, S.J. et al. 74, 160–61 Enright, E. and Gard, M. 40–41 Enright, E. and O’Sullivan, M. 105, 110, 174–5 Enright, E., Hill, J., Sandford, R. and Gard, M. 104, 109 equity, value of 160 European Physical Education Review 185 Evans, J. 24, 25, 27, 125 Evans, J. and Davies, B. 13, 14, 24 exercise-is-medicine 92–5 experience: critical pedagogies of physical education as 115–18; Dewey’s concept of continuity of 117 fair play, inclusion and enthusiasm 159–63 Fairclough, S. and Stratton, G. 33, 95 Fardouly, J. and Vartanian, L.R. 45–6 Farrell, L., Hollingsworth, B., Propper, C. and Shields, M.A. 34 ‘Fashion In’ and ‘Fashion Out,’ body narratives and 165–6 Faulkner, R.A. and Bailey, D.A. 34

Felis-Anya, M., Martos-Garcia, D. and Devis-Devis, J. 104 feminist poststructuralism 166–7, 168–9 Ferguson, D. 57 Fisette, J.L. 44, 110, 174 Fisette, J.L. and Walton, T.A. 105, 174 Fitnessgram (Cooper Institute) 25, 96, 107 Fitzpatrick, K. 50, 67, 142, 143–5; affect for physical education, critical pedagogies of 153, 156, 172; critical pedagogies of physical education as response to precarity 104, 110, 115 Fitzpatrick, K. and McGlashan, H. 75, 116–17, 119, 152 Fitzpatrick, K. and Russell, D. 108, 115 Flemons, M., Diffey, F. and Cunliffe, D. 64 Fletcher, S. 113 Flintoff, A. and Dowling, F. 65–6 Flintoff, A. and Scraton, S. 43, 44, 105 Flintoff, A., Dowling, F.J. and Fitzgerald, H. 65 Flory, S.B. 65, 66–7, 68, 72, 74, 130 Flory, S.B., Tischler, A. and Sanders, S. 104 Fraser-Thomas, J.L., Côté, J. and Deakin, J. 157 Frasquilho, D., Matos, M.D., Marques, A., Gaspar, T. and Caldas-De-Almeida, J. 36 free-market capitalism 9 Friedman, Milton 13 Friere, P. 114 Frith, E. 40 Gallagher, S. 42, 46 Gard, M. 9, 33, 35, 41, 86, 93–4, 153 Gard, M. and Pluim, C. 25, 107, 108, 115 Gard, M. and Wright, J. 33, 93 Garrett, R. 105 gender inequality, precarity and 1–2 Generalized Resistance Resources (GRRs) 152, 172; physical education-as-health promotion 96 Germany, precarity in 19 Gillespie, L. 143, 145 girly girl identity 170–71 Giroux, H. 170 Glasby, T. and Macdonald, D. 117 Global North 1–2, 5, 47, 103, 113, 130, 152–3, 182, 184; occupational socialization of physical education teachers,

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Index stress, burnout and precarity 56–7, 68, 73, 74; physical education-ashealth promotion 82–3, 91, 92, 94, 99; precarity in, significance of 2; social turbulence, education and precarity 9, 18, 20–21, 26 Global South 10, 20, 47, 49–50 globalization, critiques of 12–13 goal-setting in Positive Youth Development (PYD) 158 Goodyear, V.A. and Armour, K.M. 39, 40, 41, 46 Goodyear, V.A., Armour, K.M. and Wood, H. 39, 40–42, 50 Goodyear, V.A., Casey, A. and Kirk, D. 110 Googer, K., Gorely, T., Lavalee, D. and Harwood, C. 69 Gordon, B. and Doyle, S. 158 Gordon, B., Jacobs, J.M. and Wright, P. M. 157–8 Gore, J.M. 109, 127–9, 132 Gorely, T., Holroyd, R. and Kirk, D. 43, 116 Graber, K., Killian, C.M. and Woods, A.M. 62 Gray, S., MacIssac, S. and Harvey, W.J. 134, 146 Great British Class Survey (GBCS) 14–16, 18, 21 Greece, burnout and job satisfaction in 70 Green, K. 62 Green, K., Smith, A. and Roberts, K. 14 Grenier, M., Phillipson, C., Laliberte Rudson, D., Hatzifilalithis, S., Kobayashi, K. and Marier, P. 19 Griffin, P.S. 125 Guardian 1, 10, 57, 67 Gur-Ze’ev, I. 110–11 Haerens, L., Kirk, D., Cardon, G. and Bourdeauhuji, I. 85 Handbook of Salutongenesis (Mittelmark, M.B. et al.) 97 Harris, J. 85, 92 Hastie, P.A. 92 Hastie, P.A. and Buchanan, A. 163 Hastie, P.A., Martinez de Ojeda, D. and Calderón Luquin, A. 159–60, 163 Hayek, Friedrich 11, 13 health: early approaches to 87–90; health-based rationale for physical

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education, trend towards 83–4; Health Behaviour of School Children (HBSC) study 36, 37; Health-Optimizing Physical Education 85; medico-health rationale, scientific functionalism and 83, 88–90; ‘new health consciousness,’ health-related fitness and 90–92; pathogenic approach to health promotion 95–6, 97, 98; physical education and contemporary interest in wellbeing and 84–7; physical inactivity and, relationship between 35–6; visibility within global physical education discourse of wellbeing and 82–3 health and wellbeing of young people, precarity and 32–50; appearance comparisons, social media, body image and 46; attitudes to body image 42–3; body image and 42–6; body image shaping 43–4; body schema, interchangeably use of ‘body image’ and 42; body size, perceptions of 37; ‘body work’ 45; Brazil, social vulnerability in community soccer in Santos 46–8; British Heart Foundation (BHF), data from 35; bullying, problem of 36–7; changing rooms, body image disturbance in context of 43; cyberbullying 37; ‘digital democracy,’ ‘digital divide’ and 41, 49; digital media, pervasiveness of 50; evidence of studies 33–9, 49; ‘Great Recession’ of 2008 in England, health effects of 37–8; Health Behaviour of School Children (HBSC) study 36, 37; health-related content on social media 40; internet and 39–42; mental health, young people and 36–9; moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) 33, 39; multiple deprivation 33–4, 35, 36, 38, 41; National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) 35–6; obesity among school-aged children in England, prevalence of 35; online behaviour, potential for harm from 41; pathogenic paradigm 34–5; peer content on social media 40; perceptions of body image 42–3; physical activities, transformation of barriers to 44–5; physical activity, health of

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194 Index young people and 34–6; physical inactivity and health, relationship between 35–6; positive body image, physical competence and 44; poverty, precarity and 38; precarity, effects of growing up in 37–8; precarity, intersectionality of 49–50; precarity and health, relationship between 32–3, 33–9; proximal events in class, body image influences of 44; salutogenesis and 38–9; school composition, socio-economic inequalities and 38; ‘social gradient’ in physical inactivity 34–5; social media, body image stereotypes and 45–6; social media and 39–42; social media messages, interactions with 41–2; social physique anxiety 45; social vulnerability and 46–8; state components of body image disturbance 43; trait components of body image disturbance 42–3 ‘healthy hair,’ narratives about 165–6 Hellison, D. and Martinek, T. 154 Hellison, D., Martinek, T. and Walsh, D. 157 Hellison, D.R. 3, 72, 115, 144, 182, 185; affect for physical education, critical pedagogies of 152, 154–6, 157, 159, 163 Hellison, D.R. and Templin, T.J. 114 helplessness 152 Herald 67 heterogeneity of precarity 19 heteronormative femininity, culture of 170–71 Hickey, C. 134, 138–9, 146 Hickey, C. and Mooney, A. 104, 124 Hickey, C., Kirk, D., Macdonald, D. and Penney, D. 138–9 Hodge, S.R. and Stroot, S.A. 64 Hoffman, H.A., Young, J. and Klesius, S.E. 114 Hoffman, S.J. 25 Holt, N.L. 157 hopelessness, feelings of 152 Hurricane Katrina 12 Ill Fares the Land (Judt, T.) 11–12 individual awareness, levels of 154–5 inequalities differentiating social class 14–15

initial teacher education 62–3, 63–4; demise in duration and quality of 184 initial teacher training: recruitment into 185 internet, health and wellbeing of young people and 39–42 Inui, A. 19 Ireland: Participatory Action Research approach in 174–5; recruitment and retention, difficulties with 63 Ives, H. and Kirk, D. 63 Jacks, L.P. 113 Jakobsson, B.T. 97 Janssen, X., Mann, K.D., Basterfield, L., Parkinson, K.N., Pearce, M.S. et al. 34 Japan, precarity in 19 Ješinová, L., Spurná, M., Kudlácˇ ek, M. and Sklenarříková, J. 70 Jette, S. and Vertinsky, P. 93 Jofre-Bonet, M., Serra-Sastre, V. and Vandoros, S. 37–8 Journal of Teaching in Physical Education (JTPE) 59–60 Judt, T. 10, 11–12, 23, 152 Kelly, H.P. 114 Kelly, Y., Zilanawala, A., Sacker, A. et al. 35 Kenny, U., Sullivan, L., Callaghan, M., Molcho, M. and Kelly, C. 37, 46 Kerner, C., Haerens, L. and Kirk, D. 42–3, 44 Kerner, C., Kirk, D., De Meester, A. and Haerens, L. 43 Kickbush, I. 97 Kilborn, M., Lorusso, J. and Francis, N. 86 Kilborn, M.L. 99 Kinchin, G.D. 163 Kinchin, G.D. and O’Sullivan, M. 161–2 Kirk, D. 3, 13, 63, 161, 182, 184; critical pedagogies of physical education in response to precarity 103, 104, 105, 114; health and well-being in young people, precarity and 33, 42, 50; physical education as health promotion 82, 85, 86, 87–90, 91, 92, 93–4, 98; physical education teacher education and school physical education, critical pedagogies of 124, 126, 128–9, 132, 137

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Index Kirk, D. and Colquhoun, D. 25, 91, 110, 125 Kirk, D. and Haerens, L. 61, 185 Kirk, D. and Macdonald, D. 110 Kirk, D., Burgess-Limerick, R., Kiss, M., Lahey, J. and Penney, D. 138 Kirk, D., Lamb, C.A., Oliver, K.L. with Ewing-Day, R. et al. 43, 110, 115, 173, 174 Kirk, D., Macdonald, D. and O’Sullivan, M. 61 Kirk, D., Nauright, J., Hanrahan, S., Macdonald, D. and Jobling, I. 128 Klein, N. 12–13, 94 knife crime, precarity and 1–2 Koustelios, A. and Tsigilis, N. 70 Kovesi, C. and Kern, L. 19 Laban, R. 113 Lamb, C.A., Oliver, K. L. and Kirk, D. 173–4 Lamb, C.A., Oliver, K.L. and Kirk, D. 44 Landi, D. 117 language: of possibility, development of 170; terminological proliferation 105; in writing about precarity 5 Lather, P. 110, 111–12 Lawson, H.A. 124, 125, 184; occupational socialization of physical education teachers, stress, burnout and pracarity 59–60, 62, 63, 64 Lawson, H.A., Kirk, D. and MacPhail, A. 183–4, 186 Lawson, Nigel 11 leadership 88, 143; afterschool ‘leadership club’ 157; Building the Foundationa (BtF) and programme for 176; helping and 158 Leahy, D., O’Flynn, G. and Wright, J. 139, 140 Leahy, D., Wright, J. and Penney, D. 104 learning aspirations, emergence of 176 learning environment, problem of 116 Learning to Labour (Willis, P.) 10, 27 Lee, Y.H. 71–2 Lincove, J.A., Barrett, N. and Strunk, K. O. 12, 58 Lindstrom, M. and Rovall, M. 37 lisahunter 6 living in precarity, experiences of 22 Locke, L.F. 61, 187 Locke, L.F. and Massengale, J.D. 60, 62

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Luguetti, C., Oliver, K. L., Kirk, D. and Dantas, L. 46–8, 110, 115, 175–6 Luguetti, C., Oliver, K.L., Dantas, L. and Kirk, D. 176 McCaughtry, N. 61 McConnell, K. 85 McCuaig, L. 130–31, 132 McCuaig, L. and Quennerstedt, M. 64, 83, 97, 172 McCuaig, L., Atkin, J. and Macdonald, D. 4, 105, 136 McCuaig, L., Enright, E., Rossi, A., Macdonald, D. and Hansen, S. 24, 25 McCuaig, L., Quennerstedt, M. and Macdonald, D. 97, 139 McCullick, B. A., Lux, K. M., Belcher, D. G., and Davies, N. 63 Macdonald, D. 24, 68, 69, 105, 124, 129, 132 Macdonald, D., Abernethy, P. and Bramich, K. 62 Macdonald, D. and Brooker, R. 137 Macdonald, D. and Kirk, D. 68 Macdonald, D. and Tinning, R. 57 Macdonald, D., Hutchins, C. and Madden, J. 60, 68 McIntosh, P.C. 13, 89 McIntyre, J., Philpot, R. and Smith, W. 142 McKay, J., Gore, J. and Kirk, D. 106, 111 McKenzie, T.L. and Lounsbery, M.A. 33, 95 McKenzie, T.L., Sallis, J.F. and Rosengard, P. 85 McKenzie, T.L., Sallis, J.F., Rosengard, P. and Ballard, K. 85 McLaren, P. 110–11 McMillan, P. 109–10 MacPhail, A., Kirk, D. and Griffin, L. 110 Mäkelä, K., Hirvensalo, M., Laakso, L. and Whipp, P.R. 59, 68, 69, 70 Mandigo, J., Corlett, J. and Anderson, A. 157 Marchant, A., Hawton, K., Stewart, A., Montgomery, P., Singaravelu, V. et al. 40, 41 marketization of education 23–5, 27–8 Marttinen, R., Johnston, K., Phillips, S., Fredrick, R.N. and Meza, B. 66–7, 159 medico-health rationale, scientific functionalism and 83, 88–90

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196 Index Meek, J. 10–11 mental health: precarity and 1–2; young people and 36–9 Merrem, A.M. and Curtner-Smith, M. D. 62 Metzler, M.W., McKenzie, T.L., van der Mars, H. et al. 85 military training 87 Millar, K. 19–20, 21 Millennium Cohort Study 35 Mills, C. 16 Mittelmark, M.B., Sagy, S., Eriksson, M., Bauer, G.F. et al. 97 Models-based Practice 85 moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) 33, 39; health and wellbeing of young people, precarity and 33, 39; physical education as health promotion 86, 95, 98, 99 ‘Towards a Modest Pedagogy’ (Tinning, R.) 110–14 Molé, N.J. 19–20, 21 Moore, G.F., Littlecott, H.J., Evans, R., Murphy, S., Hewitt, G. and Fletcher, A. 38, 56 Morgan, R.E. and Adamson, G.T. 89 multiple deprivation 103, 173; health and wellbeing of young people, precarity and 33–4, 35, 36, 38, 41; Scottish Index of (SIMD) 5, 35 Näsström, S. and Kalm, S. 19, 22, 23 National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) 35–6 National Health Service (NHS) 10, 34, 40; NHS Scotland 34 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) 36 National Statement on Health and Physical Education for Australian Schools (1994) 136 National Statistics, Office of 13 National Statistics, Socio-Economic Classification 13 Neilson, B. and Rossiter, N. 18–19 neoliberal practices: labour markets, precarity and 9; physical education and 24–5; poverty as effect of 1; public edudation and 57 Netherlands, precarity in 19 ‘new health consciousness,’ health-related fitness and 90–92

New Mexico State University (NMSU) 134, 136, 145 New Public Health (NPH) 83, 91, 92–5; exercise-is-medicine, physical activity and obesity 92–5; physical educationas-health promotion 83, 91, 92–5 New Zealand 152, 153; Aotearoa/NZ 64, 104, 125–6, 133, 152, 153; Bachelor of Physical Education (BPE) program at University of Auckland 132–3; developments in school physical education in 141–5; developments of critical pedagogies in Aotearoa/NZ 136, 141–5, 146; high stakes examinations embedded in physical education in 64 Newman, Sir George 88 Norway: curriculum co-creation in 175; ‘whitewashing’ of policies in 65 obesity: among school-aged children in England, prevalence of 35; concerns about 93–4; ‘obesity crisis’ 82–3, 94–5 O’Brien, J., Martin Ginis, K.A. and Kirk, D. 44–5, 46 O’Donovan, T.M. and Kirk, D. 43 Oliver, K.L. 44–5, 134–6, 145; activist work of, development of 164–5; critical pedagogies of affect for physical education 159, 164–73, 174–7 Oliver, K.L. and Hamzeh, M. 171–2 Oliver, K.L. and Kirk, D. 4, 44, 143–4, 172, 176; critical pedagogies in response to precarity 105, 115, 116, 118 Oliver, K.L. and Lalik, R. 108, 164, 166–9 Oliver, K.L. and Oesterreich, H.A. 134–5, 164, 173 Oliver, K.L., Hamzeh, M. and McCaughtry, N. 44, 50, 170–71; critical pedagogies in response to precarity 105, 110, 115 Oliver, K.L., Luguetti, C., Aranda, R., Nuñez Enriquez, O. and Rodriguez, A-A. 135 Oliver, K.L., Oesterreich, H.A., Aranda, R., Archeleta, J., Blazer, C. et al. 135 Oliver, P. 5 online behaviour, potential for harm from 41 O’Sullivan, M. 60

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Index O’Sullivan, M. and Kinchin, G.D. 161–2, 163 O’Sullivan, M., Siedentop, D. and Locke, L. 106, 108, 111 ‘othering’ of performers in sport 65–6 Ottawa Charter (2006) 92 outsourcing 9, 24, 32; of education 25 Ovens, A., Flory, S.B., Sutherland, S., Philpot, R. et al. 104; critical pedagogies of teacher education and school physical education 125, 127, 129, 135–6, 145 pathogenic paradigm 34–5 Pedasport ‘Pay-to-Play Program’ 25 peer content on social media 40 peer review journals 185 Penney, D. and Kirk, D. 137 Penney, D. and Mitchell, S. 24 Perloff, R.M. 45 personal and social development issues, research on 160 personal and social responsibility 155 Philpot, R., Gerdin, G. and Smith, W. 73, 105, 143, 145 Philpot, R.A. 104, 110, 126, 132–4, 185 physical activities: benefits of regular activity 2–3; critical inquiry into male domination of spaces for 171–2; girls learning value of 172; health of young people and 34–6; importance in TPSR 155–6; levels-in-action in 155; life skills learning and 3; participation in, influences on 170–71; pathogenic view of 83–4; physical cultures, benefits of initiation into 3; ‘social gradient’ in 34–5; transformation of barriers to 44–5 physical education: challenge of precarity and 103–4, 186; credibility of 116–17; critical literacy and, bringing together 166–7; curriculum for, incomplete without space for reflection 169; girls’ self-identified barriers to engagement with 174; inception In UK of 88; physical education-as-sport techniques 3; precarity and 8–9; privatization and 24–5; return on investment in 3; social justice in, concern for 4 Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy 104, 185

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physical education-as-health promotion 82–99; Circuit Training 89, 90; Daily Physical Education program 90, 91; early approaches to health 87–90; exercise-is-medicine 92–5; Generalized Resistance Resources (GRRs) 96; health and wellbeing, physical education and contemporary interest in 84–7; health and wellbeing, visibility within global physical education discourse 82–3; health-based rationale for physical education, trend towards 83–4; medico-health rationale, scientific functionalism and 83, 88–90; men in physical education teaching, post-war influx of 88–9; military training 87; ‘new health consciousness,’ health-related fitness and 90–92; New Public Health (NPH) 83, 91, 92–5; obesity, concerns about 93–4; ‘obesity crisis’ 82–3, 94–5; pathogenic approach to health promotion 95–6, 97, 98; physical activity, pathogenic view of 83–4; physical education, inception In UK of 88; physical education-as-sport-techniques 89–90; physical education teachers, precarity and 59; progressive overload, principle of 89; Royal Commission on Physical Training in Scotland 87–8; salutogenesis, health promotion and 96–7, 99; sedentary lifestyles, concerns about risks of 91; ‘Sense of Coherence’ (SOC) 96–7; Syllabus for Physical Training in England (1933) 88–9 Physical Education for Victorian Schools (Kelly, H.P.) 114 Physical Education Futures (Kirk, D.) 89–90, 187 physical education teacher education (PETE): adaptiveness and responsiveness to change, need for 184; collaborative and joined-up learning, need for 184; continuing professional learning, need for promotion of 184; critical pedagogy in 126–36, 146; initial teacher education, demise in duration and quality of 184; need for reform of 183–4; novice teachers’ induction, need for focus on first years of 184; peer review journals 185; praxis in critical pedagogies of 134–6;

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198 Index programmes for 57, 60, 109, 126, 130, 133; recruitment into initial teacher training 185; reform of, challenges of 184–5 physical education teachers: attrition amongst 66, 67–8, 69–70, 71, 73, 74, 75; Australia, burnout levels in 70; becoming a physical education teacher 59–67; burnout amongst 56, 58–9, 66, 68, 69, 70–71, 73, 74–5; challenge of school environments for 186; conditions of service 69; continuing professional development 61; Education Support Partnership 57; emotional labour 71–2, 74; future of socialization research 63; Greece, burnout and job satisfaction in 70; initial teacher education 62–3, 63–4; insecurity of employment for teachers 57–8; marginal status in schools of 182–3, 184–5; neoliberal practices, public education and 57; ‘othering’ of performers in sport 65–6; physical education-as-health promotion 59; precarity, challenges in school environments and rise of 66–7; precarity, experiences of 9; precarity, teacher suitability for challenge of 56–7, 58–9; precarity and 56–75; professional learning for precarity 182–3; professional socialization 59–60; proletarianization of physical education teaching 57; public school funding, erosion of 57–8; racialization of performers in sport 65–6; relevance of socialization research 63–4; secondary traumatic stress (STS) 71, 72, 74, 75; Self Determination Theory (SDT) 70; socialization process 61–2; socio-political organizations, schools as 61; stress 56, 58–9, 66; stress, burnout and attrition among teachers 67–73; subjective warrant perceptual framework 60, 62, 63, 69, 73, 74; teacher qualities, importance of 156; teacher socialization 59–67; United States, job dissatisfaction in 70; ‘whitewashed’ occupation, physical education as 64–7; workplace conditions 61, 62 Placek, J.H., Dodds, P., Doolittle, S.A., Portman, P., Ratliffe, T., and Pinkham, K. 64

politics of social classification 17–18 Positive Youth Development (PYD) 153, 157–9; after school club 158; applied sport-programming model 157; critical pedagogies of affect for physical education and 153, 157–9; goal-setting 158; influence of TPSR approach on 159; leadership, helping and 158; relatedness 158; safe spaces for learning 159; self-determination theory 158; self-direction 158; social and emotional development, centrality of 157–8; teamwork 158; transference of responsibility model 158 poverty: growth of, emergence of precariat and 26; precarity and 1–2, 38 Pozo, P., Grao-Cruces, A. and Perez-Ordas, R. 154 precarity: Anglophone notion of 19–21; anthropological perspectives on 19–20; Bourdieu’s précatité 18–19; challenges in school environments and rise of 66–7; challenges of 6; children and young people living in 9; concept of 1, 8–9; critical pedagogies of affect for physical education and 146, 151–2; critical pedagogy taking folus on 104; ‘cruel optimism,’ Berlant’s notion of 20, 27; discrimination and 1–2; disruptive pupil behaviour and 1–2; effects of growing up in 37–8; empirical referents of 1–2; fluidity, uncertainty, and instability inherent in 27; gender inequality and 1–2; health and, relationship between 32–3, 33–9; heterogeneity of 19; intersectionality of 49–50; knife crime and 1–2; language in writing about 5; living in, experiences of 22; mental health and 1–2; neoliberal labour markets and 9; notion of, qualifications of 19–21; physical education and 8–9, 186; physical education and challenge of 103–4; precariat and 18–23; precariousness, notion of 8; precarity trap 22–3, 26–7; prevalence of 1; referents of, terminology for 5; reluctance to be identified with precariat 19–20, 21, 26; school physical education and 2; Standing’s perspective on 21–2; strategy of ‘small

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Index wins’ against 4–5, 154, 178; teacher professional learning for 182–3; teacher suitability for challenge of 56–7, 58–9; teachers and experiences of 9; wageless catadores in Rio de Janeiro 20 Premji, S. 19 Pringle, R., Larsson, H. and Gerdin, G. 104 Private Island (Meek, J.) 10–11 privatization of education 23–5, 27–8 professional socialization 59–60 progressive overload, principle of 89 public school funding, erosion of 57–8 Pühse, U. and Gerber, M. 89 qualifications of precarity, notion of 19–21 Queensland Board of Senior Secondary School Studies (BSSSS) 137–8 Queensland University, physical education teacher education at 127–32 queerness 117–19; critical pedagogies and embrace of 151; queer moments 118, 119, 177; queer phenomenology 117, 119; straight pedagogy, queering of 152 Quennerstedt, M. 39–40, 41, 97 ‘Race Names’ (Oliver, P.) 5 racialization of performers in sport 65–6 Raitakan, O.T., Porkka, K.V.K., Taimela, S., Telama, R. et al. 34 REACH program 159 referents of precarity, terminology for 5 Registrar General 13 relatedness, Positive Youth Development (PYD) and 158 Resolution Foundation 2 Rich, E. 40 Richards, K.A.R. 61–2 Richards, K.A.R. and Gaudreault, K.L. 59–60, 61–2, 63 Richards, K.A.R. and Templin, T.J. 60, 61 Richards, K.A.R., Templin, T.J. and Gaudreault, K.L. 62 Robinson, D.B. and Randall, L. 104, 108–9 Rossi, T., Macdonald, D., lisahunter and Christensen, E. 62, 74 Rovegno, I. and Bandhauer, D. 114 Rovegno, I. and Kirk, D. 103, 105, 113–14, 124

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Rovengo, I. 114 Royal Commission on Physical Training in Scotland 87–8 Runciman, D. 23, 152 safe spaces: for expression of alternative views, creation of 166–7; for learning, Positive Youth Development (PYD) and 159 Sallis, J.F. and McKenzie, T.L. 85, 92–3 Sallis, J.F., McKenzie, T.L., Beets, M. W., Beighle, A., Erwin, H. and Lee, S. 85, 86 salutogenesis: health and wellbeing of young people and 38–9; health promotion and 96–7, 99; physical activity, salutogenic perspective on 2–3, 6, 37–8, 39–40, 139, 157, 172 same-sex learning partnerships 175 Savage, M., Cunningham, N., Devine, F., Friedman, S., Laurison, D. et al. 2, 5, 13, 14–16, 17–18, 21, 26 scaffolding and support, need for 169 Schempp, P.G. and Graber, K.C. 61 school-based activist programs, critical elements in development of 173 school composition, socio-economic inequalities and 38 School Medical Service in England 88 school physical education: critical pedagogy in 136–46, 151; precarity and 2 Scotland: childhood poverty in 1–2; Curriculum for Excellence 84–5; Education Scotland 84; educational investment in 3; Health and Wellbeing 84; ‘Let’s Make Scotland More Active’ (LMSMA) strategy in 34; Royal Commission on Physical Training in 87–8; school-based professional learning in Glasgow 173–4; Scottish Government 2, 35; Scottish Health Survey 35; Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) 5, 35 Scraton, S.J. 125 secondary traumatic stress (STS) 71, 72, 74, 75 sedentary lifestyles, concerns about risks of 91 selective redistribution of public funding for education 23–4 self-body-world connections 154, 177

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200 Index Self Determination Theory (SDT) 70, 158 self-direction, Positive Youth Development (PYD) and 158 self-evaluation, TPSR and 155 Senior Physical Education Syllabus (BSSSS, Queensland) 137–8, 140, 143 ‘Sense of Coherence’ (SOC) 96–8, 146, 177; salutogenic concern for 152 Sheikh, M.A. 36 Shelley, K. and McCuaig, L. 104, 109, 131 Shen, B., McCaughtry, N., Martin, J., Garn, A., Kulik, N. and Fahlman, M. 70 Shock Doctrine (Klein, N.) 12–13, 94 Siedentop, D. 159 Simons-Morton, B., O’Hara, N.M., Simons-Morton, D. and Parcel, G. 92 Singapore 84, 85 small wins, strategy of 4–5, 154, 178 Smith, C.S. 19 Smith, Y.R. 64 Smolak, L. 43 social and emotional development: centrality for Positive Youth Development (PYD) 157–8; promotion of, Sport Education and 163 social capital: complex interactions of economic and cultural capital and 14–15; social class and 15 social class: Bourdieu’s perspective on 14; class, people’s subjective experience of 18, 26; cultural capital, notion of 15; cultural politics of class 17–18; economic, cultural, and social capital, complex interactions of 14–15; economic capital, accumulation of 15–16; elite class, gap between emerging precariat and 17; employment, nature of 18; Great British Class Survey (GBCS) 14–16, 18, 21; inequalities differentiating 14–15; occupation and, association between 13–14; politics of social classification 17–18; rethink on 13–18; social, cultural and physical dimensions to class 14; social class groupings, Savage et al.’s perspective on 16–17; Socio-Economic Classification (National Statistics, 2014) 13–14; wealth, concept of 14–15 social justice 13, 24, 27, 32, 105–6, 113–15, 159, 162, 171, 178, 185, 186; concepts of 119; critical pedagogies of

PETE and school physical education 133, 134, 136, 137–8, 143–4, 145, 146; critical scholarship and focus on 125; equity and, issues of 156–7; focus of critical pedagogy on, precarity and 103–4; in physical education, concern for 4; principles of 62, 111, 124; teaching about 74; for young people, concerns about 154 Social Justice in Physical Education (Robinson, D.B. and Randall, L.) 108 social media: body image stereotypes and 45–6; health and wellbeing of young people and 39–42; messages of, interactions with 41–2 social physique anxiety 45 social problems, scale of 4 social turbulence 9; contours of 10–13; political systems and 10; social world, unpredictability in 10 social vulnerability 46–8 Socialization into Physical Education (Templin, T.J. and Schempp, P.G., Eds.) 60 socialization process 134; physical education teachers, precarity and 61–2 socialization research, relevance of 63–4 socially critical scholarship 186; critical pedagogy 105–6, 118–19; pedagogical practice and, relationship between 125 Socio-Economic Classification (National Statistics, 2014) 13–14 socio-economic position (SEP) 34–5 socio-political networks, critical pedagogy in 125–6 socio-political organizations, schools as 61 Sollerhed, A-C., Ejlertsson, G. and Apitzsch, E. 97 Sonego, M., Pichiule, M., Gandarillas, A., Polo, C. and Ordob, M. 37 SPARK physical education programmes 85 Sparkes, A., Templin, T.J. and Schempp, P.G. 60 Sperka, L. and Enright, E. 24 Spittle, M., Kremer, P. and Sullivan, S. 70 Sport, Education & Society 104, 185 Sport Education 153, 163, 177, 186; affinity, value of 160; autonomy, student perceptions of their own 160; benefits of Cultural Studies approach 162; communication in, importance of

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Index 159–60; cooperation in, importance of 159–60; cooperative teamwork 161; critical pedagogies of affect for physical education and 160–63; critical pedagogy, adaptations to match 160–62; Cultural Studies Curriculum and 161–2; Empowering Sport 163; equity, value of 160; fair play, inclusion and enthusiasm in 159–63; implementation of Cultural Studies approach 162; individual and collective decision making, opportunities for 163; personal and social development issues, research on 160; positive social interaction, importance of 159–60; social and emotional development, promotion of 163; Sport for Peace and 160–61 Sport England 40 Sport for Peace 153, 160–61; critical pedagogies of affect for physical education and 160–61; Sport Education and 160–61 Springer, S., Birch, K. and MacLeavy, J. 9 Stamatakis, E., Wardle, J. and Cole, T. J. 35, 41 Standal, O.F. 3, 42, 131, 151; critical pedagogies of physical education as response to precarity 105, 116, 117–18, 119 Standing, G. 2, 9, 13, 19, 32, 49, 82, 156; precarity, perspective on 21–2 Stenhouse, L. 173 Stodden, D.F., Goodway, J.D., Langendorfer, S.J., Roberton, M.A. et al. 44 Stolz, S. 42 ‘straight pedagogy,’ rethink on 115–18, 119 ‘straightening devices’ 117 strategy of ‘small wins’ against precarity 4–5, 154, 178 stress 2, 5, 9, 22, 32, 37, 74, 96, 158, 169, 183, 184; burnout and attrition among teachers and 67–73; physical education teachers and 56, 58–9, 66 Student Centered Inquiry-as-Curriculum (SCIC) 134–5, 164, 176 subjective warrant perceptual framework 60, 62, 63, 69, 73, 74, 134 Sweden: Health Study in Scania 37; precarity in 19 Syllabus for Physical Training in England (1933) 88–9

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Tannehill, D. 60 Teacher Socialization in Physical Education (Richards, K.A.R. and Gaudreault, K. L., Eds.) 59–60 Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) 153–9, 163, 177, 182, 186; alienated youth, working with 154, 156–7; alienation 156–7; awareness talks 155; caring about young people, fundamental requirement of 156; critical pedagogies of affect for physical education and 153–9; individual awareness, levels of 154–5; personal and social responsibility 155; physical activities, importance in 155–6; physical activities, levels-in-action in 155; self-body-world connections 154, 177; self-evaluation 155; small wins, strategy of 154, 178; student-centred pedagogy, overcoming “fuzziness” of 154–5; teacher qualities, importance of 156; transference 155 Teaching Responsibility Through Physical Activity (Bronfenbrenner, U.) 154 team sports 66, 128, 155 teamwork, teams and 158, 159–60, 163; team affiliation 161; team portfolios 162 Templin, TJ. 59–60 Templin, T.J. and Schempp, P.G. 60 Templin, T.J., Graber, K.C. and Richards, K.A.R. 63, 68, 183, 184 Templin, T.J., Padaruth, S., Sparkes, A. C. and Schempp, P.G. 60–61, 62, 72 Terry, W. 19 Thatcher, Margaret 10–11 Thomas, J.R. 185 Thorburn, M. 9 Thorburn, M. and Gray, S. 62, 63 Thorkelson, E. 19, 21, 22 Thorpe, S. 94 Tinning, R. 25, 91, 124, 125; critical pedagogies of physical education as response to precarity 104, 109, 110–14, 119 Tinning, R. and Kirk, D. 91 Todes, S. 117 Townsend, N., Wickramasinghe, K., Williams, J., Bhatnagar, P. and Rayner, M. 35 transference 155; of responsibility model 158; transferences of learning, notion of 159

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202 Index transformation 44, 173, 174, 176; critical pedagogy and claims of 108; focus on, pedagogies of affect and 171; physical activity field, rapid transformation of 184; social transformation, learning and 118–19, 170; transformative pedagogies 104 Trost, S.G. 33, 34 Trump, Donald 12 Tsouloupas, C.N. and Carson, R.L. 74 Tulchinsky, T.H. and Varavikova, E.A. 92 unemployment 9, 22, 34, 36, 160–61 United Kingdom: austerity in 2, 3; clobalized competition, dilemma for 12; economy of, process of privatization in 10–11; high stakes examinations embedded in physical education in 64; insecurity of employment for teachers 57–8; National Child Development Study 37; physical education, inception In 88; recruitment and retention, difficulties with 63; share ownership, privatization and change in 11; shrinking the state in, topic of 11–12; Value Added Tax (VAT) in 11 United States 152–2; collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in, lack of 58; ethnic diversity of urban public schools in 65; insecurity of employment for teachers 58; job dissatisfaction in 70; precarity in 19; precarity in, mal-effects of 152–3; recruitment and retention, difficulties with 63; SHAPE America 84, 85; Sport for Peace in 160–61; teacher attrition in public schools in 66 USA Today 67 Van Kooy, J. and Bowman, D. 19 Varea, V. 5 Vertinsky, P.A. 105, 125 Wallhead, T. and O’Sullivan, M. 163 Walseth, K., Engebretsen, B. and Elvebakk, L. 43, 161, 175 Walsh, D.S., Ozaeta, J. and Wright, P. M. 158 Walton-Fisette, J.L. and Sutherland, S. 104 Wang, H., Li, W. and Deng, Y. 19

Ward, S. and Parker, M. 157, 158 Wartella, E., Rideout, V., Montague, H., Beaudoin-Ryan, L. and Lauricella, A. 39, 41 wealth, concept of 14–15 Webb, M.C. and Wasilick, L.M. 40 Webber, L.S., Catellier, D.J., Lytle, L.A. et al. 34 Weick, K.E. 4, 152, 176, 178 wellbeing 151–2, 162, 172, 186; community connection and 140; concept of 8–9; mental health and wellbeing of young people 103; promotion of 141–2; student teachers and 131; see also health and wellbeing of young people, precarity and Whipp, P.R. and Salin, K. 70 Whitehead, J. and Fox, K. 90 Whitehead, N. and Hendry, L. 90 Whitehead, R.D., Cosma, A., Cecil, J., Currie, C. et al. 37 ‘whitewashed’ occupation, physical education as 64–7 Wilcox, K.C., Angelis, J.I., Baker, L. and Lawson, H.A. 69 Williams, B.J. and Macdonald, D. 24 Williams, B.J., Hay, P.J. and Macdonald, D. 24–5 Williams, R. 15, 87 Willis, P. 10, 27 Women First (Fletcher, S.) 113 Woods, S.M. and Ayers, S.F. 59–60 workplace conditions for physical education teachers 61, 62, 116, 186 World Health Organisation (WHO) 25, 95 young people: alienated youth, working with 154–5, 156–7; caring about, fundamental requirement of TPSR 156; children and young people living in precarity 9; effects of growing up in precarity 37–8; internet, health and wellbeing of young people and 39–42; mental health and 36–9; mental health and wellbeing of 103; physical activities, health of young people and 34–6; voices of young girls, foregrounding of 165, 168–9, 170, 177; see also health and wellbeing of young people, precarity and