ABSTRACT
How is physical education to respond to this challenge of precarity? This chapter considers a range of issues around the advocacy for and critique of critical pedagogies in physical education. As a means of clarifying the concept of critical pedagogy, a distinction is made between two related forms of socially critical work in educational institutions, socially critical scholarship, and critical pedagogy. Both are informed by principles of social justice, and both aim to trouble the normative order of physical education and young people’s experiences of it, though in different ways. Socially critical scholarship emphasizes analysis and critique, while critical pedagogy is focused on inclusive, fair, and equitable embodied educational experience. Applying these definitions, the author assesses and establishes the suitability of critical pedagogy as physical education’s response to precarity. The chapter explores critical pedagogy’s possibilities and also its limits in terms of what can be asked of it as an educational practice within the school and the university as institutions.
