ABSTRACT
Health and physical education (HPE) pedagogies that fail to utilise the cultural resources of students from diverse backgrounds contribute to educational marginalisation and disadvantage. Within the Australian context, it is Indigenous and particular ethnic minority background students who are especially vulnerable in terms of educational disadvantage. Official responses include policy directives addressing teaching standards and cross-curriculum priorities designed to meet the needs of Indigenous, ethnically and linguistically diverse students. Concomitantly, there are calls for initial teacher education programmes to prepare teachers who can respect and respond to diverse student cohorts whilst meeting their educational, cultural and social needs. In this chapter, we engage with concerns around teacher preparedness and investigate how principles of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) can be put into practice in HPE. We first address theoretical orientations around CRP before reporting on pedagogical practices and learning experiences enacted in a final year HPE course within a Bachelor of Education degree programme at an Australian University. Data drawn from university and field-based teaching and learning experiences are discussed through a constellation of three themes: knowing and being in relation to culture, supporting ways of doing CRP in HPE and experiencing CRP in the field. Whilst our discussion around CRP focuses on the Australian context, we contend that connections exist for others preparing pre-service teachers for working with students from diverse cultural backgrounds within other Euro-centric schooling systems. We conclude by posing reflective questions designed to prompt educators to consider how they might engage with CRP within their pedagogical practice.
