ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we discussed a number of issues that point towards the conceptual underpinnings of the analyses that we and others present in this book. In this chapter we focus explicitly on conceptual matters. This provides an important foundation for reading the chapters that follow. In the first part of the chapter we direct attention to concepts that are central to debates about and understandings of ‘gender issues’ and ‘gender equity’ in physical education. We then shift the focus to concepts that in our view enable a more complete and better understanding of the representation, expression and exclusion of gender in policy and practice in physical education. We deconstruct familiar and established ways of thinking and conceptualising ‘policy’ and ‘practice’ and re-position these concepts within a view of policy as a complex, ongoing, relational and contested process in which many people at many sites (including schools, teacher training institutions and government departments) have a part to play in advancing gender equity in physical education. We present the concepts of text and discourse as key tools for the analyses of gender in physical education, enabling us to explore and reveal the ways in which particular values and interests find expression in the policies and practices of physical education, while others are not given scope to emerge. In the final section of the chapter we comment upon the role that research and researchers may play in furthering understandings and expressions of gender equity in the subject.
