ABSTRACT
The introduction of physical education as an examinable subject in the post-compulsory years of secondary school (years 11 and 12) has been a relatively recent innovation in Australia. Broadly speaking, it has been only within the last decade and a half that examination courses in physical education have been available to secondary school students in some Australian states. As there has been no ‘national’ curriculum, each state has pioneered its own developments largely in isolation from each other. In the process of developing examination courses physical educators have had to address key issues which the profession has debated vigorously for half a century or more. Much of this debate has centred on the nature of essential or ‘worthwhile’ knowledge in physical education, the educational status of physical education as a school (or college/university) subject, and the place of physical activity within an examinable ‘academic’ subject. The programmes that have recently become established and accepted in secondary school physical education have much in common with what Connell et al. (1982) called the ‘hegemonic curriculum’, which among other things is characterized by a preponderance of propositional knowledge, particularly in the sciences, and forms of pedagogy and assessment that project the values of the ruling class. Part of the difficulty with such hegemonic physical education programmes is that they present physical education knowledge as factual, empirical and value free. However, we agree with Evans and Davies when they claim that
Physical education…is inevitably a site of struggle, a contest of and for competing definitions about what is to count as worthwhile knowledge, what the body, the individual, school and society are and ought to be. These values, assumptions, and definitions held by individuals both within the profession and outside it influence, guide, facilitate and constrain the work of teachers and shape their pupils’ identities and practices. (Evans and Davies, 1986, p. 2)
They add:
Taking this perspective we can view recent debates about the physical education curriculum as part of a broader battle for ownership and control over what counts as valid educational knowledge, how this is produced,
distributed and evaluated. In short it is the struggle over ownership and control of the labour process of teaching. (Evans and Davies, 1986, p. 9)
In this chapter we discuss the development of a new examination course for secondary school physical education in Victoria, Australia that explicitly set out to challenge some of the key notions on which hegemonic physical education programmes are typically based. This new Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) course replaces the previous Higher School Certificate (HSC) course which was introduced into Victorian secondary schools in the mid-1970s and was extremely popular in terms of the number of schools which adopted it and the number of students who chose to do it. This chapter will include a critique of the previous course, which represented hegemonic physical education in a powerful form, and an outline of the new course. As we were both members of the writing team for the new curriculum, to this extent at least we write from the perspective of insiders. We will approach the issue of curriculum development as a process of cultural production, and focus on how knowledge about physical activity, as represented by the curriculum, has been selected, organized, appropriated, legitimated and evaluated. In so doing, we intend to provide an example of how school curricula are constructed, not by accident, but rather as the result of choices made between contesting points of view which represent different vested interests. Throughout we attempt to locate the development of the new curriculum within the context of what we consider to be major contemporary social and cultural influences on physical education.
