Kicking at the Habitus: Exploring staff and student ‘readings’ of a socially critical physical education teacher education (PETE) programme

Abstract

While social justice and equity are themes foregrounded in many initial teacher education (ITE) programmes, there are a myriad of ways in which ITE draws attention to inequities and supports future teachers with the skills, knowledge and desire to address these issues. Critical pedagogy, with roots steeped in critical theory and the emancipatory literature of Paulo Freire is an orientation to ITE that privileges such aims. This thesis examines how critical pedagogy is understood and enacted by physical education teacher education (PETE) teacher educators in a single PETE programme that is underpinned by a critical orientation, and also the sense that the students in the programme have made of the critical pedagogies they encounter. At one level this thesis is an attempt to understand the enactment and subsequent reading of critical approaches to PETE. At a deeper level this research has the emancipatory aims of producing physical education (PE) teachers who aspire to, and who are equipped with, the required skills and dispositions for foregrounding social justice in their own teaching. In this thesis I draw on critical theory, specifically the work of Paulo Freire, Jurgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu, to illustrate both the synergy and tensions associated with the enactment of critical pedagogies by several teacher educators who teach within a single ITE programme. The teacher educators’ varying understandings and subsequent enactments of critical pedagogy ensure that their students are exposed to numerous critical approaches. At the same time, the encounters between individual student biographies and multiple, often unique, critical approaches, have led to uncertainty within students in their ability to coherently explain what critical pedagogy is, and how they could teach from a critical perspective. Each student claims that critical approaches in the PETE programme have made a difference, yet it is a different difference for each student. Complex life histories have served to filter the sense that students have made of the PETE programme. Some students understand critical pedagogy as taking action against structural injustices. These students have the eyes to recognise, and the will to address, some issues of social inequity, most often those issues they have encountered through their own lives. Other students conceive of critical pedagogy as a process of problematising knowledge and reflecting on their own teaching.