Original Article

European Physical Education Review

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Physical education initial ª The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1356336X15603382
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expressions of critical
pedagogy(ies): Coherency,
complexity or confusion?
Rod Philpot
School of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract
While an emphasis on social justice has emerged as a theme in initial teacher education (ITE) over
the past decade, there is much debate about how to engage ITE students in foregrounding issues of
equity and social justice in their own teaching. One strategy, the introduction of critical pedagogy in
ITE, has been promoted in teacher education literature since the early 1970s. In subsequent
decades it has become apparent that there is a lack of consensus on what critical pedagogy is, and
what it means to teach from a critical perspective.
Drawing on the ‘big tent’ of critical pedagogies, the purpose of this paper is to focus attention on
the evolution and/or devolution of critical pedagogy in physical education initial teacher education
(PETE). This paper reports on findings from a research project that explored how six health and
physical education teacher educators (PETEs), who teach in a single PETE programme that is
underpinned by a critical orientation, understand and enact critical pedagogy. Data were collected
through 60-minute semi-structured interviews. A six-step process of inductive thematic analysis
was used to analyse the data.
This study suggests there is a commitment to social justice from all six of the PETEs. It is evident,
however, that there are differences in their understanding of critical pedagogy. These differences
reveal each teacher educator’s own valued theoretical perspectives, and manifest themselves in
teaching practices in the PETE programme.

Keywords
Physical education, critical pedagogy, social justice, physical education teacher education

Corresponding author:
Rod Philpot, University of Auckland, 78 Epsom Ave, Epsom, Auckland, 1061, New Zealand.
Email: [email protected]

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2 European Physical Education Review

Introduction
For more than 30 years, numerous voices in education, including Paulo Freire (1970), Henry
Giroux (1981), and Michael Apple (1982), have been calling for education practices that include a
focus on issues of equity and social justice. Critical pedagogy, a perspective on education informed
by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and the influential work of Paulo Freire, has provided
a theoretical framework used by many critical scholars. These formative critical pedagogies sought
to draw attention to inequity through a Marxist critique of capitalism, and to empower those who
were marginalized by capitalism to overcome this form of oppression.
In the subsequent 30 years, voices for social justice have come from other critical the-
oretical frameworks that retain the emancipatory aims of critical pedagogy, but apply their
critique to social structures beyond capitalist theory. Critiques that focus on discrimination
based on race (Ladson-Billings, 1998), gender (hooks, 1984), sexual orientation (Butler,
1990), and religion (Rossatto, 2006) have broadened the vocabulary of criticality to include
theoretical perspectives such as post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-colonial theory,
and queer theory.
This evolution of critical pedagogy to critiques beyond capitalism has been received in different
ways. Many of the aforementioned theoretical perspectives subscribe to being in the ‘big tent’
(Lather, 1998) of critical pedagogies. Lather (2001) argues that Marxist social theory ignores
issues specific to anti-racist, feminist, and post-colonial educational projects. She proposes that
these projects are consistent with the central purpose of critical pedagogy, that is, using education
to bring about a more socially just world. More recently, McLaren (2000) expressed a different
perspective by suggesting that shifts away from its Marxist roots have diluted critical pedagogy.
McLaren and Farahmandpur (2000) call for a shift back to class-based analysis, claiming that
issues of cultural oppression are conflated with differences in class.
Sweet (1998) adds further complexity to critical pedagogy through using the term ‘radical
pedagogy’. While acknowledging that his definition does not enjoy universal agreement, he
describes radical pedagogy as practices that ‘question the legitimacy of existing systems of
hierarchy as related to race, gender, class, disability, sexual orientation, or other socially con-
structed divisions between people’ (Sweet, 1998: 101). Rather than linking the critique to class,
Sweet (1998) suggests that radical pedagogues’ practices include sharing power with students,
using non-traditional assessment methods, engaging in genuine dialogue rather than lecturing, and
coupling learning with activism. This notion of critical pedagogy shifts the focus to how one seeks
socially just and democratic educational practices rather than for whom.
While advocacy for critical pedagogy and education for social justice has grown exponentially
through traditional and emerging theoretical frameworks such as feminist, post-colonial, and queer
theories, there is little research that aims to understand how educators conceptualize and practise
critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy is not a narrow set of prescriptive practices (Breunig, 2011);
therefore, it is important to understand what is done in educational settings in the name of critical
pedagogy. This paper addresses this research gap and advances these issues through exploring the
understanding and practices of critical pedagogy of six initial teacher educators (ITEs) teaching in
a four-year physical education teacher education (PETE) programme. The paper has two key aims.
The first is to explore the teacher educators’ personal understanding of critical pedagogy. The
second aim of the paper is to investigate their practices of critical pedagogies in PETE. Ultimately,
this research attends to a social justice agenda through sharing how ITEs interpret and practise
critical pedagogy.

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Philpot 3

Educators and their understanding of critical pedagogy

Previous research demonstrates that ITEs have diverse understandings of critical pedagogy.
Breunig’s (2011) study of 17 self-identified critical pedagogues teaching in ITE programmes in
the US and Canada offers some insight into the varied understanding of the aims, purposes, and
practices of critical pedagogy. Breunig reports that there was limited consensus as to what a
‘self-identified critical pedagogue’ meant. For some participants it meant teaching about critical
pedagogy, while for others it revolved around the practice of critical pedagogy in their class-
rooms. The 17 participants expressed significant differences as to who they believed were the
most influential critical theorists, and what they felt were the purposes of critical pedagogy. More
than 36 ‘influential theorists’ were identified, with Freire, McLaren, and Giroux the most fre-
quently cited. The purposes of critical pedagogy were similarly varied, from purposes commonly
linked to critical pedagogy such as social justice, democracy, and social change, through to
purposes that move away from social justice agendas such as constructivism and critical thinking
(Breunig, 2011).
A cross-sectional study by Sahragard et al. (2014) of 20 Iranian school and university teachers
of English as a foreign language (EFL) provides some salient examples of the challenges for
critical pedagogues. The study showed that the EFL teachers linked critical pedagogy strongly to
creative thinking, while they were less aware of issues of ‘educational justice’ and ‘language and
ideology’ (2014: 186). The authors reported that teachers with postgraduate degrees were more
likely to be aware of the principles of critical pedagogy and ‘were much fonder of this pedagogy’
(Sahragard et al., 2014: 187). However, the authors observed that the teachers, who were able to
articulate teaching practices consistent with social justice agendas, did not often use these in their
teaching. Issues of limited class time, class size, an insufficient understanding of students’ back-
grounds, and the constraints of a top-down educational system were identified as barriers to using
critical approaches.
In the field of PETE, Muros Ruiz and Fernández-Balboa (2005) found similar incon-
sistencies in the understanding and practice of critical pedagogy. These authors report that, of
the 17 participating health and physical education initial teacher educators (PETEs), all of
whom volunteered for the study and claimed to practise a critical pedagogy, more than half
did not understand the main principles of critical pedagogy. Moreover, many of the methods
they used in their PETE were incongruent with these principles. This led the authors to
suggest that the limited success of critical pedagogy in PETE may be due to an inadequate
understanding by the ITEs purporting to enact it. The authors summarized their study by
suggesting that ‘not all that is called CP [critical pedagogy] is actually CP; and perhaps not
everyone who calls him – or herself – a ‘‘critical pedagogue’’ is so either’ (Muros Ruiz and
Fernández-Balboa, 2005: 258).
These findings reinforce the suggestion that critical pedagogy may be challenging to under-
stand. Without rich learning experiences, critical teaching in ITE may be reduced to creative or
critical thinking, with no emphasis on issues of social justice.

Study context
This study was located within a PETE1 programme at Te Ika a Maui University2 in Auckland, New
Zealand. The Bachelor of Physical Education (BPE) programme is a four-year, concurrent ITE
programme where content, pedagogy, and practicums are embedded in all four years of the

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4 European Physical Education Review

programme. The BPE programme is delivered on a small campus in a faculty of education that was
previously designed as a college of education. Most of the courses in the BPE programme are
taught by a group of 12 PETEs.
The BPE programme espouses being underpinned by a critical orientation. The programme
accreditation documents state that the aim of the programme is to promote reflective thought and
reconstructive action which necessitates the problematization of both the task of teaching and the
contexts in which it is embedded. This implies that critical pedagogies are represented across the
programme rather than in a single course.
The goals of critical pedagogy are congruent with education policy in New Zealand, where
valuing diversity and challenging inequality are principles that are explicitly articulated in
policy documents (Ministry of Education, 2007). The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of
Education, 2007) describes health and physical education (HPE) as ‘fostering critical thinking
and action’ (23) with ‘a sense of social justice’ (22) being an integral part of the attitudes and
values at the heart of the learning area. Culpan and Bruce (2007) suggest that the New Zealand
HPE curriculum provides a socio-critical perspective requiring pedagogy ‘that is critical in
nature and emancipatory in action’ (2).
Social justice features prominently in the academic writing of New Zealand PETEs. Recent
examples of literature that foreground social justice issues include examinations of: race and
culture (Burrows and McCormack, 2011; Fitzpatrick, 2013; Legge, 2010); critical reflection
(Ovens and Tinning, 2009); critical pedagogy (Bruce, 2013; Culpan and Bruce, 2007; Philpot,
2015); privatization of physical education (Powell, 2015); and critical examinations of health
education (Fitzpatrick and Tinning, 2015; Sinkinson, 2011).

Methodology
This is a critical interpretive study based on the epistemological and ontological assump-
tions of qualitative methodology. The study has been designed to explore ITEs’ under-
standing and use of critical pedagogies in PETE. I have focused on moving beyond being
descriptive to a deeper understanding through a conceptual account of the data (Braun and
Clarke, 2013).
Data for this study come from semi-structured interviews with six PETEs who teach HPE
courses in the BPE programme. Given the small number of teacher educators in the group, the
names and gender of the participants are protected through the use of pseudonyms and the non-
gendered pronouns ‘s/he’ and ‘hir’. The PETEs were selected through purposive sampling,
where the intention is to select informants who can best answer the research questions (Cresswell,
1994). All participants were required to teach at least two courses within the BPE programme
during the 2011 academic year.
All of the PETEs who participated in this study were former teachers in either primary or
secondary schools in New Zealand. The years of experience teaching within the BPE ranged from
three to more than 40 years. The three male and three female teacher educators represented a range
of academic positions including a professional teaching fellow, senior lecturers, principal lecturers,
and an associate professor.
All interviews were audiotaped and transcribed by an approved transcriber for analysis. All
transcriptions were returned to the research participants for member checking (Lincoln and Guba,
1985).

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Philpot 5

Data analysis
Data were analysed using a six-step process of inductive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke,
2006). Thematic analysis is a systematic examination of similarities between cases to develop
concepts and ideas (Punch, 2005). The first two phases of analysis involved familiarization with
the data and initial coding (Braun and Clarke, 2006). The process of data analysis began by lis-
tening to the interviews as I read through the transcriptions. The initial codes represented
understandings and practices consistent with the espoused principles of critical pedagogy. Initial
codes were written directly onto the right hand column of the transcripts. The third phase of
advanced coding involved copying statements from transcripts and mapping them into theme maps
(Braun and Clarke, 2006) in a separate document. The initial themes experienced three differing
outcomes: some themes disappeared as they did not hold up to further scrutiny; some merged; and
other themes remained.
The final stage of analysis involved drawing on theoretical concepts that helped to contribute to
understanding and explaining the data. Consistent with a research project that examines critical
pedagogies, the data analysis uses concepts from critical theory. The concepts used, which were
not predetermined before the data analysis began, were: teaching for equity (Freire, 1970); social
justice (Kincheloe, 2008; Smyth, 2011); examining power (Apple, 1982; Giroux, 1981); democratic
education (Fernández-Balboa, 1995); and reflection (Smyth, 1989). Concepts became apparent
during the process of coding. These concepts were based on my own grounding in critical theory and
critical pedagogy, which begins with the premise that all knowledge is value laden, and secondly,
that schools should be places that transform social inequalities. I was looking for practices consistent
with these principles. Peer reviewing (Cresswell, 2003) with a colleague was used as a means of
critiquing how the process of data analysis had led to the development of themes in this study.

Findings
The findings of this study are presented in two sections. The first focuses on the PETEs’ under-
standing of critical pedagogy. The subsequent section conveys the PETEs’ descriptions of their
own teaching practices in the BPE programme.

PETEs’ understanding of critical pedagogy

As previously stated, this study was an exploration of the understanding and practice of critical
pedagogy of six teacher educators in a four-year concurrent PETE programme. While the six
PETEs in this study did not claim to be critical pedagogues, they all teach in a BPE programme that
claims to be underpinned by critical pedagogy.
When asked directly ‘what is your understanding of critical pedagogy?’, the participants’
responses elicited a number of key concepts that appear regularly in most literature on critical
pedagogy (see Table 1). The number of concepts discussed by each participant varied dramatically
(from Jamie and Jean, who discussed five of the six concepts, through to Terry and Sam who
mentioned one).

Critical pedagogy – connected to critical theory

There is almost universal recognition amongst critical scholars that critical pedagogy can trace its
theoretical roots back to the critical theories of the Frankfurt School (Kincheloe and Steinberg,

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6 European Physical Education Review

Table 1. Health and physical education initial teacher educators’ understanding of critical pedagogy.

Link to critical Teaching to Social justice Examination Democratic Reflection on

theory address inequity orientation of power teaching teaching
p p p p p
Jamie
p p p p p
Jean
p p p
Michael
p
Sam
p
Terry
p p
Lee

1997). Three of the PETEs in this study reiterate the significance of critical theory as an under-
pinning for critical pedagogy.
Jamie recalled that critical pedagogy is strongly linked to both the Frankfurt School in Germany
and the work of Paulo Freire in Brazil, stating:

Critical theory emerged out of some locations where oppression was a big deal, and it was about
improving the life chances of those people in those settings . . . whether it was in Brazil, whether it was
the feminist movement, whether it was in Germany.

Michael made the connection between critical pedagogy and critical theory when s/he sug-
gested, ‘I see the word critical as influenced by Marx . . . it’s not good enough just to know about
the world, you want to try and change the world’. While Michael did not refer to critical theory
directly, the connection with Marxist analysis is consistent with the critical theory of the Frankfurt
School.
Jean described critical pedagogy as: ‘the type of analysis that will be occurring in learning based
on critical theory and post-structural analysis’. Jean differentiated between the Marxist analysis of
the Frankfurt School and hir own understanding and use of critical theory that moves beyond a
Marxist critique of capitalism, stating:

If you go back to something like critical theory, which is also called neo-Marxism sometimes, as I
understand it Marxism was an analysis of economic systems, particularly capitalism, whereas critical
theory is an analysis of social structures and very much who’s got [a] position of power, who’s got a
position of advantage and who has not.

While Jamie and Jean acknowledge the historical importance of critical theory, it is clear that
their understanding of critical pedagogy has evolved beyond the critical theory of the Frankfurt
School. Jamie referred to feminism while Jean alluded to post-structural analysis. These statements
provide a glimpse of how their understanding of critical pedagogy has broadened to the point
where critical theory is not the only theoretical perspective that informs their current understanding
of critical pedagogy.

Social justice orientation

Four of the PETEs suggested that critical pedagogy has an explicit social justice agenda that
involved addressing issues of inequality. Michael proposed that the purpose of critical pedagogy is

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Philpot 7

‘to help more broadly with issues of social injustice and equity . . . ’ Hir understanding of critical
pedagogy foregrounds teaching for social justice rather than teaching about social justice issues.
Michael stated that, ‘If you’re adopting a critical pedagogy, you’re accepting that there are these
issues out there already and you want to teach in a manner that’s going to have some impact on
these issues’. The emphasis on teaching to change society in the interests of social justice is an
important distinction to make in comparison with teaching to learn about inequity and social
justice.
In contrast, Lee suggested that critical pedagogy foregrounds social justice agendas as it helps
students to ‘understand something like colonialism’. While Lee’s descriptions of hir practices in
PETE suggest that s/he does take action to de-colonize students, hir description above could be
interpreted as being limited to critique.
Jean did not use the words ‘equity’ or ‘social justice’ in the interview; however, s/he recognizes
critical pedagogy as an analysis of who is, and who is not, privileged by structures in society. Jean
stated that critical pedagogies are ‘not looking at individual circumstances . . . you’re looking at
group circumstances’. Jean proposed that critical pedagogues focus on examining how equitable
education is for all students and suggests asking ‘who are the groups in society that are privileged
by the way schools are structured? Who in society is privileged/disadvantaged by the way edu-
cation systems are structured?’
Similar to the other three participants, Jamie asserted that social justice is at the heart of critical
pedagogy; however, s/he questioned the relevance of traditional critical theories, suggesting that
s/he is ‘quite drawn to other ways of theorising it’. Jamie described hir own teaching as a ‘sort of
social justice approach’.

Reflection as a critical practice

‘Reflection’ was a concept mentioned by four of the PETEs. It is noticeable in the
responses that there are different understandings of reflection. Reflection was described by
two participants as a cognitive process consistent with critical thinking. In contrast, Lee and
Jean suggested that reflection is a moral process where the reflection is on social justice
agendas.
Sam mentioned the value of reflection repeatedly during hir interview. It appears that, for
Sam, reflection is synonymous with thinking about, and reflecting on, one’s teaching. S/he
foregrounds a strong humanistic perspective when s/he suggests, ‘with PE it’s all about the
person, and the whole person, and it’s probably the curriculum area that is most situated to
actually look at that, that whole person, the physical, the spiritual’. Sam advocated for reflective
practices that have been described by Kemmis (1994) as ‘technical reflection’. As an example,
Sam stated that ‘I do the standard peer reflection, the self-reflection . . . giving them the
opportunity to offer up how they would do things differently . . . just reflecting on what they
have learned’.
Terry also asserted that critical pedagogy involves reflection. S/he stated that critical peda-
gogy is:

. . . discursive, it’s reflexive. It requires the teacher participant to think about what they are doing and,
more importantly, why they are doing it . . . We cannot treat all students as the same, based on what they
bring to the classroom in exactly the same way as we bring our own critical perspective to the class-
room from our own previous perspectives and understanding.

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8 European Physical Education Review

Both Terry and Sam advocate for teachers who know and understand their students, who endea-
vour to cater to the educational needs of students of all abilities. Notwithstanding the value of this
humanistic perspective, without foregrounding a social justice agenda it is not clear on what basis
the teaching is being judged. Without a clear social justice agenda that focuses on marginalized
groups in society, it is difficult to ascertain how consistent this type of reflection is with the pur-
poses of critical pedagogy.
In contrast, Lee subscribes to the ideal that teaching is based on values. S/he suggested that ‘for
me critical pedagogy is being able to look at what you’re doing and ask yourself, ‘‘is what I’m
teaching worthwhile?’’’ Lee is alluding to the process of judging teaching based on someone’s
values (what is worthwhile). What differentiates this from technical reflection is the proposition
that reflection is based on the values of equity and social justice. Lee conveyed this when s/he
stated that reflection involves ‘understanding issues of equity and inequality and being able to look
at what you’re teaching as a way of trying to make a difference to those things’. Hir description of
reflection included a focus on classroom practice, to recognise how their practice as teachers may
privilege and benefit groups of students. Lee espoused reflective practices where PETE students
are asked, ‘Have you considered gender? Have you looked at the equity issues that might be in your
lesson? What are you doing culturally in your physical education classes?’
Jean foregrounded the importance of making students aware that their ideas and beliefs
come from their own life experiences. Hir description resonates with Freire’s (1970) concept of
conscientization,3 a breaking of the metaphoric ‘shackles’ of understanding the world through
dominant lenses that leads to the acceptance of the way things are, as inevitable facts of life. Jean
proposed that hir critical pedagogy engages PETE students in reflecting on why they do things,
challenging students to explore how their own social and historical realities may influence their
beliefs. Jean suggested that:

. . . I want them to second think their own beliefs, their own values and to identify where their beliefs
and attitudes have come from, so it’s an historical tracking really of why do I believe whatever it is I
believe? Why do I believe that? So it’s not just about this is what I believe, it’s why do I believe that.

In contrast to the technical reflections of Terry and Sam ‘that aim . . . at problem solving
within a social context’ (Kemmis, 1994: 145), Lee and Jean advocate for critical reflection that
focuses on questioning hegemonic assumptions and exploring how power frames education prac-
tices (Brookfield, 1995).

Critical pedagogy as an analysis of power

Two of the six PETEs proposed that critical pedagogy focuses on the analysis of power. Jean
suggested that:

It comes back to an analysis of power. Where does power lie? Who’s got the power? Who’s advantaged
by power structures, who’s disadvantaged, who are the disadvantaged? How and why are they disad-
vantaged by the way society is structured? Whose voice is the one being heard and whose voice is not
being heard? So there are some fairly standard little questions you take to any situation if you’re going
to apply the socially critical lens.

Jamie similarly recognized that critical pedagogy involves ‘a really strong critique of power and
the influence that power has’. What is revealing in hir comments is that while s/he concurred that

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Philpot 9

critical pedagogy is an examination of power, Jamie has hir own theory about power that differs
from that of many critical theorists. Jamie questioned how critical theory portrays power as being
imposed:

So go back to that notion of power, I think it’s a bit problematic . . . the critical theory approach is to say
power is imposed from above, it’s hierarchical and that we resist power and we fight it. Whereas I think
more, post-modern, post-structuralist, complexity sort of approach, says power is more diffuse than
that. It’s not about being imposed from the top, but it’s about structures that we’re embedded in, and
it’s a lot more strategic than that. We comply, it’s more network than diffuse, and therefore it’s not
always about fighting those that are above us, it’s about understanding how structures create sort of
the worlds that we are participating in.

It is apparent in these findings that the analysis of power may not be consistent with the prac-
tices of all of the PETEs in the BPE. While Jean challenges the students to identify who has power,
Jamie focuses on how structures in schools create power relationships. I cannot help but wonder
how these contrasting views on power will be received and understood by the ITE students as they
negotiate the courses in the BPE programme.

Critical pedagogy – teaching for democracy

Democracy and democratic education feature in many descriptions of critical pedagogy (for
examples, see Apple, 2006; Fernández-Balboa, 1995; Giroux, 1981). There are two dominant but
connected versions of democratic education: one that focuses on democratic education as a process
where students participate in determining what is learned and how it is learned (Fernández-Balboa,
1995); and secondly, democratic education that prepares youth to actively participate in a dem-
ocratic society (Freire, 1998; Giroux, 2007).
Surprisingly, only one of the PETEs mentioned democracy as an integral part of critical
pedagogy. Jamie was alone in stating that critical pedagogy is underpinned by a commitment to
democracy. S/he proposed two fundamental principles that foreground hir own practice of critical
pedagogy, ‘recognizing [that] students, as recipients of professional knowledge, have the right to
be involved in determining what that knowledge is [and] it’s also important for us to give them the
skills to work in democratic structures’.

Critical pedagogy – thinking critically about pedagogy

One of the interesting responses that demonstrates how critical pedagogy can be subject to many
different understandings comes from one of the ‘newer’ PETEs who started teaching in the pro-
gramme well after the BPE programme had been developed. Sam stated that, ‘I guess I look
critically at different pedagogies, but I don’t know if I have thought about a critical pedagogy per
se’. This quote shows how critical thinking about pedagogical practices can be conflated to mean
critical pedagogy. In this statement Sam strongly foregrounds reflection about hir own practice and
s/he stresses the importance of engaging students in reflection on their own practice. Absent in hir
descriptions are the espoused purposes of critical pedagogy (e.g. social justice, emancipation,
democratic education).

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10 European Physical Education Review

Critical pedagogies in the BPE

The second question this paper endeavours to explore is the PETEs’ practices of critical pedagogy.
The PETEs were asked to describe the courses they teach in the BPE and the pedagogical practices
they used. This line of questioning was taken early in the interviews, before I asked questions about
critical pedagogy. The point I wish to make is that the interpretation of these practices as critical
pedagogies is my own. The PETEs were neither asked to identify as critical pedagogues, nor to
explain their own critical pedagogies.

Disrupting thinking
A common theme amongst the PETEs is that their practices in the BPE are geared toward dis-
rupting students’ thinking. Jean conveyed how s/he uses provocation activities as a teaching tool
designed to disrupt thinking. S/he proposed that ‘provocation is quite a good teaching tool, if you
want to get people to be thinking and contemplating and considering issues’. Specifically, Jean
uses moral dilemmas in hir teaching. S/he stated how these dilemmas require students to make
choices. Inevitably these choices are ‘ . . . based on say any ‘‘isms’’ they bring with them so if they
bring sexism, racism, homophobia or any bigotries [sic] with them, if you put up a moral dilemma,
that then starts bringing those isms to the fore’.
Michael articulated that there is a need to challenge and disrupt students’ thinking. ‘My strategy
has been to link it through to their own biography and to refer back to that . . . ’. During the
interview Michael reflected that, in recent years, s/he was uncertain how effective this practice had
been, as conversations in class became uncomfortable and served to stymie conversations. Michael
gave the example of discussions around racism:

The way that I introduce it is talking about Asian drivers and I just mention the word Asian drivers and
there’s laughter in the classroom . . . There are very few Asian students and the students strangely
enough feel happy to talk about Asian drivers . . . If we talk about Pākeha/Māori4 relations, or Pasifika,5
it stymies conversation . . . they don’t want to acknowledge that there’s racial problems in the
country . . . I think Māori and Pasifika [students in the class] typically don’t feel comfortable raising
issues in the class and confronting those.

Michael suggested that ‘students start to take it personally’ when engaging in conversations
about racism that ‘hit too close to home’. Michael reflected on hir practice, wondering if ‘it’s a
better strategy to leave out the biography and to look at physical education as a whole and then
people may not feel so individually connected to it’.
Lee described hir practice of disrupting thinking about the role of sport in physical education
through teaching content in the BPE programme that extends beyond sport. S/he suggested that
when:

. . . most of the students come to this degree, they’ve had little or no experience of contemporary dance
and they’ve had little or zero experience of Te ao kori6 and so what we’re doing is dealing with students
who’ve got a sport based normative for PE.

Lee relies heavily on experiential learning so that students can develop both confidence and com-
petence in what, for many of them, is a new movement context. S/he progresses their movement
skills through requiring students to ‘research, write and then teach [the content] in an active way’

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Philpot 11

to their classmates. Lee described hir practice as ‘working against that [domination of sport in phys-
ical education], to get them to have another view about the nature and purpose of physical education’.
In a different course Lee described how s/he endeavours to disrupt students’ thinking about
race. Included in the course is a four day ‘camp’ where the students live on a marae.7 This border-
crossing (Giroux, 1993) experience is described by Lee:

[the course] builds on that experience of stepping into the shoes of Māori . . . it asks them [the BPE stu-
dents] to become immersed in the culture . . . it’s like this massive role play of lived experience . . . I put
people out of their comfort zones . . . There’s a lot of prejudice.

Democratic education
Jamie focuses on democratic education as the key strategy in hir teaching in the BPE. S/he asserted
that ‘democratic teaching for me is recognizing that students, as recipients of professional
knowledge, have the right to be involved in determining what that knowledge is . . . students are
involved in co-designing the course with me . . . I use negotiated grading contracts where possible’.
Jamie proposed that ‘the key message that I’m trying to get through to them is for them to take
charge of their own professional learning, to be inquisitive, to be led by inquiry’.
In recent years Jamie has extended this concept of co-designing courses so that it extends across
three years of the programme. S/he observed that the first time s/he has the students (in the second
year) they do not come with ‘the same level of commitment to have an input into the course [as the
fourth year students]. Because you are always dealing with this power differential and you try and
coach them to think critically’.
Secondly, Jamie describes how s/he empowers students to take control and responsibility for
their own learning through the use of negotiated grading contracts. Jamie explained hir rationale
for this strategy: ‘students can think about the course work, think about what knowledge they need,
and can pursue that through their own sort of options’.

Discussion and conclusions

This study has endeavoured to explore the understanding and practice of critical pedagogy of six
PETEs in a PETE programme underpinned by critical pedagogy. The importance of this study is
that these PETEs are teaching the same students in the same four-year ITE programme. The BPE
programme offers a place and space for a comprehensive, coherent programmic approach to issues
of social justice. This contrasts with the ‘lone ranger’ approach to critical pedagogy in PETE,
where a number of academics report on the difficulty of foregrounding issues of social justice
through a single course (Cameron, 2012; Hickey, 2001; Tinning, 2002).
This study demonstrates that six PETEs teaching in the same PETE programme have some
similarities, yet a number of differences, in their understandings and espoused practice of critical
pedagogy. The differences in understanding of critical pedagogy range from Sam, who fore-
grounds reflection on pedagogical practices (a critique of pedagogy), to a sophisticated under-
standing of critical pedagogy whereby Jamie and Jean question the theoretical basis of critical
pedagogy and, in the case of Jamie, the notion that power is hierarchical and imposed.
The findings of this study suggest that most of the ITEs in the BPE programme connect
critical pedagogy to issues of social justice. The ITEs recognized the value of challenging
dominant ways of thinking and, in their own ways, try and develop the critical consciousness of

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12 European Physical Education Review

students. Jean uses moral dilemmas to expose student biases. Lee exposes students to practical
and bicultural experiences that move beyond the normative boundaries of PE as sport.
Michael’s practice involves both assessment and coursework that engages students in exploring
their own values and beliefs through discussions about stereotypes (e.g. Asian drivers), while
Jamie foregrounds the empowerment of students through negotiating curriculum and peer
assessment. While Terry makes no mention of many of the purposes of critical pedagogy in hir
interview (see Table 1), s/he does give examples of addressing issues of social justice. Two
examples of hir work for social justice include the production of a video resource designed to
promote ‘water safety’ for migrant communities, and research into the links between socio-
economic status and drowning.
Jean, Lee, and Michael demonstrate an understanding of critical pedagogy that is strongly
connected to social justice. This is reflected both in their descriptions of critical pedagogy and their
descriptions of their practices of critical pedagogy where they describe how they attempt to disrupt
the students’ thinking through exposing students’ biases and prejudices. It is telling that, although
these three participants acknowledged that critical pedagogy was closely connected to its origins in
the Frankfurt School of critical theory, none of the participants described their own practices as
informed by Marxism and a class-based analysis of society. Instead, there appears to be a strong
influence from ‘post’ theories that attempt to address issues of racism, sexism, and other forms of
discrimination beyond class. This broadening of critical pedagogy reflects Lather’s (2001) sug-
gestion that a critical pedagogy based on the single narrative of class is insufficient as it ignores
issues of racism, feminism, and other dominating discourses (such as sport) that serve to mar-
ginalize groups of students.
The descriptions and practices of critical pedagogy described by the participants in this study
are consistent with much of the advocacy for critical approaches in PETE, where a focus on class
and capitalism is conspicuous by its absence (for exceptions see Evans and Davies, 2011). For the
last 30 years, critical pedagogy in PE and PETE has largely consisted of an analysis beyond class.
The seminal literature called for critical PE and PETE focused on the hidden curriculum (Bain,
1990; Dodds, 1985; Fernández-Balboa, 1993) and feminism (Dewar, 1990, 1991). Social justice
issues in PETE literature continue to focus on discourses such as racism (Fitzpatrick, 2013; Legge,
2010), body image (Kirk, 2006; Tinning and Glasby, 2002), gender (Brown, 2005; Burrows, 2000;
Dewar, 1991; Dowling, 2009; Ennis, 1999; Evans et al., 1996; Olofsson, 2005), and motor elitism
(Devis-Devis and Sparkes, 1999; Evans, 2004; Hunter, 2004; Mordal-Moen and Green, 2012;
Tinning, 1997, 2012).
It is unclear whether this is interpreted as a dilution of critical pedagogy (McLaren, 2003) or an
overlap of pedagogies for social justice (Lather, 2001) that welcomes greater numbers of practi-
tioners. In this study Jamie acknowledges some of that tension when s/he proposes, ‘we are quite
drawn to other ways of theorising it [social justice]’. Breunig’s (2011) study of 17 self-proclaimed
critical pedagogues reveals the same tension between the desire to expound a single and more
focused critical pedagogy, the desire to find the one right definition (Lather, 1998), and the
evolution of ‘subfields’ of critical pedagogy (Breunig, 2011: 18).
As the current wave of neoliberal ideology continues to consume all discussions and decisions
about education, I find myself agreeing with McLaren and Farahmandpur (2000) and Apple
(2000), who contend that class issues conflate other issues of discrimination. Yet, in my own role
as a teacher educator, I wonder how useful and relevant it is for the PETE students I teach to focus
on the injustices created by class and neoliberal thinking. How much agency will young teachers
have to develop praxis that counters neoliberalism?

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Philpot 13

Many of the six PETEs explicitly convey that their work in the BPE courses focuses on
addressing inequality. The PETEs employ diverse pedagogical practices including negotiated
contracts, moral dilemmas, explorations of biographies, and border crossing experiences on a
marae. How this clustering of different critical practices in a single programme is read and
understood by the students in the BPE is unclear. Will students connect these practices or methods
to the purposes of critical education, that is, to social justice agendas, or will the students see
disparate practices that seemingly are unconnected?
Tinning’s (2002, 2012) call for a more modest pedagogy appears to resonate with the PETEs in
this study. If there is any validity to Tinning’s (2012) proposition that there is no single set of
pedagogical practices that will lead to the delivery of certain outcomes, then the multiple critical
pedagogies of Jamie, Michael, Jean, and Lee are needed to engage different students in considering
the value of critical pedagogy.
Although the quest for certain outcomes through a critical pedagogy in PETE remains unclear,
Jamie suggests the critical pedagogies in the BPE programme should not be construed as an
attempt to indoctrinate students into social justice agendas. S/he proposes that the BPE programme
serves to plant a metaphoric seed that, under the right conditions, will thrive in the practices of the
programme graduates:

I think we do plant a seed . . . and it’s about being able to nurture that seed. So that seed might not ger-
minate if you are the only student, the only person in this department and are quite conservative in the
way they teach. But given the right nurturing and maybe five or six of our students graduate and end up
working in the same school, then I can see that that would germinate and you do have an effect.

A second study that explores the understanding and practices of critical pedagogy of teachers
who have completed the Te Ika a Maui BPE programme is currently being conducted. This study
will help to illuminate how the critical pedagogies practised by the PETEs translate into physical
education classrooms in schools.
The evidence from this study suggests that the PETE students in the BPE programme are
exposed to a range of practices that are designed to empower students to take action against
inequity. While each PETE may approach different issues of social justice in dissimilar pedago-
gical ways, it appears that principles of critical pedagogy inform many of their practices. The Te
Ika a Maui BPE programme, while not an empirically pure critical pedagogy, should be fertile
ground for growing a critical perspective.

Conflict of Interest
None declared.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
1. The Bachelor of Physical Education programme prepares students to teach both health and physical edu-
cation in secondary schools. Although health is not visible in the programme title ‘BPE’, the programme is
a health and physical education initial teacher education (HPETE) programme. The more familiar terms,
PETE and PETEs, are used for the duration of this paper.

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14 European Physical Education Review

2. Pseudonym.
3. Conscientization is described by Freire (1970) as a deepening consciousness of the world that emerges
through a process of reflection and taking action.
4. Māori are the indigenous people of New Zealand. Pākeha is a Māori term for people of European descent.
5. Pasifika refers to students whose heritage originates in one of the South Pacific Islands (e.g. Tonga, Samoa,
Cook Islands).
6. Te ao kori translates from Māori to mean ‘the world of movement’. Te ao kori in New Zealand physical
education includes traditional Māori games, dance, creative movement, and recreational activities. See
http://health.tki.org.nz/Key-collections/Exploring-te-ao-kori/What-is-te-ao-kori for a detailed description.
7. A marae is a meeting area on the tribal land of a Māori tribe.

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Author biography
Rod Philpot lectures in the Faculty of Education, University of Auckland.

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