ABSTRACT
This chapter represents my concerns about the ways in which gender is constructed and represented in many teacher education programmes in physical education in North America. These concerns stem from my interests in the social construction of gender relations in and through physical education programmes that place a strong emphasis on individualistic, voluntarist analyses of the body, health and fitness, and human physical performance. Here I want to analyze how men and women students constructed their gender identities in a Canadian university physical education programme. The broad purpose is to locate this programme and these students within the context of the struggles and debates over the direction and content of physical education teacher education programmes in North American universities during the last twenty years.1 The chapter is also intended to be a critique of what Kirk (1989) has called the ‘orthodoxy’ in research on physical education teacher education, which consists of a ‘science of teaching’ modelled on the epistemology and methodology of positivist science.2 One need only look at the Journal of Teaching in Physical Education to understand the fervour with which many researchers are pursuing the promises of pedagogical science in physical education.3 The almost unbridled enthusiasm for what this science will do for physical education teaching is worrying because of its apparent lack of reflectiveness and selfcriticism. What I mean by this is that science seems to have taken on a life of its own for many of the protagonists of this science of pedagogy or ‘sport pedagogy,’4 and any criticism of this way of studying teaching is seen as heresy and unworthy of serious consideration.5
