Physical education futures?

In our discussion of futures talk in Chapter 3, Stier, Kleinman and Milchrist (1994) offered three possible futures for physical education. Stier suggested that physical education was basically doing a good job and that any problems that did exist required only minor periodic adjustments. Milchrist disagreed and argued that while physical education was worth retaining in schools, it was seriously enough flawed to require a radical overhaul. Kleinman, offering the least optimistic future for physical education, agreed with Milchrist’s assessment that there were serious problems but proposed that the subject was beyond rescue and indeed deserved to become extinct. I plan to use these three possible future scenarios for physical education to structure this final chapter in order to provide answers to the questions posed at the conclusion of the previous chapter and elsewhere in this book. I will do so in relation to the specific configuration of physical education that I have identified as the id2 of physical education-as-sport-techniques. It is of this id2 of physical education, in the light of the preceding analyses in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 in particular, that we will ask whether the future is ‘more of the same’, ‘radical reform’, or ‘extinction’. In this context I will also raise the possibility of a future shift in the id2 of

physical education of the proportions of the previous shift: from an id2 of physical education-as-gymnastics to an id2 of physical education-as-sport-techniques. In so doing, we will seek to remind ourselves of the conditions under which this previous shift took place, dated in Britain somewhere between the two world wars, with the new id2 of physical education manifest and emerging in the 1950s. This task requires that we enter into the territory of Bernstein’s (2000) primary field of knowledge production, and consider the possibility of a future that is at this moment unknown to us and so as yet unimagined. In other words, we will seek to move beyond what Massengale (2000: 106) described as ‘trend extrapolation’, where ‘things will be exactly like they were

in the past, or … things will change in the same way as they changed in the past, or … what has been observed in the past will continue into the future, in the same direction, and at the same rate of speed’. We can be sure, can we not, that whatever future lies in store for physical education, ‘things’ are unlikely to follow the same course; history is unlikely to repeat itself? Through all of this I will seek to address the contribution physical educa-

tors might themselves make to physical education futures. Penney and Chandler (2000: 85) are in the Milchrist camp insofar as they see ‘substantial change as a matter of necessity if (physical education) is to have educational worth in the 21st century’. While I think it is unlikely that some sections of the community of physical educators would agree with Penney and Chandler on that point, I suspect they would strongly endorse their next comment that ‘it is for all within the profession to address and debate what the futures should be and to ensure that policy and curriculum developments then reflect the visions established, and facilitate their realization’ (p. 85). Is this a possibility, given Houlihan’s (2002) insightful analysis of the ‘crowded policy spaces’ of educational reform in which physical educators’ voices have in the past been silenced or ignored by more powerful lobbies? And Bernstein’s (2000) concern that during the 1980s and 1990s in Britain the official recontextualising field (ORF) of government and its agents was progressively diminishing the influence of all other agents and alternative voices in the recontextualising process? Will ‘the profession’ be permitted to act like a profession, with at least some rights to self-determination and self-regulation? History in this case is not on physical educators’ side, and so we need to consider what it would take for physical educators themselves to be included in, never mind central to, the radical reform of their subject. Important to the possibility of physical educators taking an active and

coordinated part in the construction of physical education futures is the kinds of individual recruited to physical education teacher education courses and the nature of these courses. As we saw in Chapter 4, the fate of school physical education and physical education teacher education is interdependent. Indeed, I suggested in Chapter 5 that one of the perverse reasons why the id2

of physical education-as-sport-techniques has endured is because it is suited to teachers’ lack of in-depth knowledge of games and sport relative to their pre-1970s predecessors. Given this interdependency of school and university programmes, in the course of this chapter I will consider the implications of each of the scenarios for physical education teacher education. On the basis of the analysis carried out so far in this study, what are physical education futures?

In this ‘more of the same’ scenario, the id2 of physical education-as-sporttechniques continues to legitimate multi-activity, sport-based programmes (Flintoff, 2008: 408), with molecularised teaching of techniques informed by the ‘hegemony of biomechanics’ (Rovegno, 1995). Politicians and policy

makers are unaware of the deep problems within the subject that I have, in this study, suggested exist. Indeed, evaluations of initiatives associated with the DCMS/DCSF (2008) Physical Education and Sport Strategy for Young People suggest that the restructuring of schools into partnerships are extending opportunities, for instance, for extra-curricular experiences for young people (Quick et al., 2008; Loughborough Partnership, 2006), although we should also note that these evaluations are being carried out by government organisations within the ORF or by agents co-opted by the ORF. These politicians and policy makers treat with disdain the dissenting voices of, for example, feminists, sociologists and critical pedagogues from within Bernstein’s pedagogic recontextualising field (PRF), who complain interminably in jargon-ridden prose, as the politicians and their agents see it, about the reproduction of social inequalities. Physical education in schools takes in its stride attempts to reform the subject through exercises such as, in England and Wales, the National Curriculum (Curtner-Smith, 1999; Smith et al., 2007). Even radical reforms of the whole school curriculum are absorbed and adjustments made in order that the core practices of the id2 of physical education-as-sporttechniques can continue intact, such as was the case with the creation of Key Learning Areas in 1990s Australia (Penney and Kirk, 1996). Meanwhile, some argue that any problems that physical education might

be held accountable for, such as an (alleged) rise in the incidence of childhood obesity, can be resolved only if we have more of the same kind of physical education, more curriculum time, more facilities and more teachers. Responsibility for such problems is therefore displaced, and accountability evaded. Furthermore, some physical educators argue, only minor adjustments are required in order to keep physical education on track to face any new challenges that might emerge. They add that degree-qualified teachers are evidence of progress in the field and of the acceptance of physical education within the academy. Significantly, lobbyists for a ‘more of the same’ future skilfully make use of politicians’ and policy makers’ own expectations of multi-activity, sport-based physical education, many of them formed by their own experience of the private and grammar schools in which the games ethic has a natural home, to reinforce their view that even if they (the private and grammar-school educated politicians) personally were ‘rabbits’, they could still appreciate games and sports as a force for good.1