Anne Flintoff

The Challenges of Intersectionality: Researching Difference in Physical Education.

Researching the intersection of class, race, gender, sexuality and disability raises many issues for educational research. Indeed, Maynard (2002, 33) has recently argued that ‘difference is one of the most significant, yet unresolved, issues for feminist and social thinking at the beginning of the twentieth century’. This paper reviews some of the key imperatives of working with ‘intersectional theory’ and explores the extent to these debates are informing research around difference in education and Physical Education (PE). The first part of the paper highlights some key issues in theorising and researching intersectionality before moving on to consider how difference has been addressed within PE. The paper then considers three ongoing challenges of intersectionality – bodies and embodiment, politics and practice and empirical research. The paper argues for a continued focus on the specific context of PE within education for its contribution to these questions.

Targeting Mr average: participation, gender equity and school sport partnerships

The School Sport Partnership Programme (SSPP) is one strand of the national strategy for physical education and school sport in England, the physical education and school sport Club Links Strategy (PESSCL). The SSPP aims to make links between school physical education (PE) and out of school sports participation, and has a particular remit to raise the participation levels of several identified under-represented groups, of which girls and young women are one. National evaluations of the SSPP show that it is beginning to have positive impacts on young peoples activity levels by increasing the range and provision of extra curricular activities (Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED), 2003, 2004, 2005; Loughborough Partnership, 2005, 2006). This paper contributes to the developing picture of the phased implementation of the programme by providing qualitative insights into the work of one school sport partnership with a particular focus on gender equity. The paper explores the ways in which gender equity issues have been explicitly addressed within the ‘official texts’ of the SSPP; how these have shifted over time and how teachers are responding to and making sense of these in their daily practice. Using participation observation, interview and questionnaire data, the paper explores how the coordinators are addressing the challenge of increasing the participation of girls and young women. The paper draws on Walbys (2000) conceptualisation of different kinds of feminist praxis to highlight the limitations of the coordinators’ work. Two key themes from the data and their implications are addressed: the dominance of competitive sport practices and the PE professionals’ views of targeting as a strategy for increasing the participation of under-represented groups. The paper concludes that coordinators work within an equality or difference discourse with little evidence of the transformative praxis needed for the programme to be truly inclusive.

Narratives from the road to social justice in PETE: teacher educator perspectives

Developing teacher education programmes founded upon principles of critical pedagogy and social justice has become increasingly difficult in the current neoliberal climate of higher education. In this article, we adopt a narrative approach to illuminate some of the dilemmas which advocates of education for social justice face and to reflect upon how pedagogy for inclusion in the field of physical education (PE) teacher education (PETE) is defined and practiced. As a professional group, teacher educators seem largely hesitant to expose themselves to the researchers gaze, which is problematic if we expect preservice teachers to engage in messy, biographical reflexivity with regard to their own teaching practice. By engaging in self- and collective biographical story sharing about ‘our’ teacher educator struggles in England and Norway, we hope that the reader can identify ‘her/his’ struggles in the narratives about power and domination, and the spaces of opportunity in between.

Narratives From YouTube : Juxtaposing Stories About Physical Education

The aim of this paper is to explore what is performed in students’ and teachers’ actions in physical education practice in terms of “didactic irritations,” through an analysis of YouTube clips from 285 PE lessons from 27 different countries. Didactic irritations are occurrences that Rønholt describes as those demanding “didactic, pedagogical reflections and discussions, which in turn could lead to alternative thinking and understanding about teaching and learning.” Drawing on Barad’s ideas of performativity to challenge our habitual anthropocentric analytical gaze when looking at educational visual data, and using narrative construction, we also aim to give meaning to actions, relations, and experiences of the participants in the YouTube clips. To do this, we present juxtaposing narratives from teachers and students in terms of three “didactic irritations”: (a) stories from a track, (b), stories from a game, and (c), stories from a bench. The stories re-present events-of-moving in the data offering insights into embodied experiences in PE practice, making students’ as well as teachers’ actions in PE practice understandable.

Getting beyond normative interview talk of sameness and celebrating difference

The aim of this article is to problematise the use of the qualitative interview method within physical education (PE) research, but the discussion is equally relevant for the broader field of sport and exercise sciences. We argue that there is a tendency to pay lip‐service to the notion that knowledge is co‐constructed as multiple, contradictory, partial, cognitive, sensory and experienced in our research projects, whilst our interview practice can best be likened to a ‘form of opinion polling’. As critical, feminist researchers with an interest in matters of social justice, we explore the extent to which we are able to create interview encounters as arenas where researchers and informants can co‐construct stories of difference, and in particular, when faced with oppressive stories, whether they can create the space for alternative storylines to emerge? Drawing upon a critical analysis of our own interview practice, we suggest that a more ‘antagonistic’ form of interviewing may be appropriate if we wish to heed the linguistic turn in qualitative research and fulfil our ‘modest’ critical pedagogical objectives.

A whitewashed curriculum? The construction of race in contemporary PE curriculum policy

ABSTRACT Analyses of curricula in a range of countries show how they tend to reinforce, rather than challenge, popular theories of racism. To date, we know little about the contribution of physical education (PE) curriculum policy to the overall policy landscape. This paper examines the construction of race and racism in two national contexts (Norway and England) as a means of putting race and anti-racism on the PE policy research agenda. It adopts a critical whiteness perspective to analyse how whiteness, as a system of privilege, contributes to the racialisation of valued knowledge in PE and asks, who potentially benefits and/or is marginalised within the learning spaces available in the texts? The discourse analysis reveals that two discursive techniques of whiteness combine to privilege white, Eurocentric knowledge content. Unmarked white PE practices and students are constructed as universal, normative and contingent. As a result, non-white PE practices and students are positioned on the margins in contemporary policy texts. By revealing the racialisation processes evident in the texts, we aim to trouble the professions taken-for-granted truths about race in PE as integral to working towards the development of an antiracist subject.

Exclusionary power in sports organisations: The merger between the Women's Cricket Association and the England and Wales Cricket Board

This paper contributes to existing literature on gender equity within sporting organisations, focusing on the merger between the Women’s Cricket Association (WCA) and the England and Wales Cricket Board in 1998. At the time of the merger those involved in the WCA debated whether the merger would be positive for the future of the women’s game. In this paper we discuss the impact of the merger on the women’s role in the governance of their sport through the views of 10 women who were involved in playing, administrating, managing or coaching cricket during the time of the merger. The interviewees’ experiences are located within wider debates about power, gender and sport. We specifically draw on the concept of exclusionary power to highlight how gender inequities continue to impact upon the management and organisation of women’s cricket in England. Our participants’ testimonies suggest that since the merger, the game has unquestionably benefited from increased financial support. This has significantly boosted the elite development of the game. However, since the merger the role of women has changed. They now have limited power over the organisation and development of both elite and grassroots levels of play. This paper therefore contributes to existing research on gender relations and sporting organisations, such as the work of Stronach and Adair ((2009) ‘Brave new world’ or ‘sticky wicket’? Women, management and organizational power in Cricket Australia. Sport in Society 12(7): 910–932) and Sibson ((2010) “I Was Banging My Head against a Brick Wall”: Exclusionary power and the gendering of sport organisations. Journal of Sport Management 24: 379–399), by further applying the concept of exclusionary power to understanding gender relations within a UK sports context.

The (in)visibility of gender knowledge in the Physical Activity and Sport Science degree in Spain

ABSTRACT This paper draws on research that aimed to explore the construction of gender relations in sport and physical education (PE) through a national study of Spanish university degree curricula. Spain is a useful case study through which to explore gender knowledge within sport and PE degrees, because, unlike many other countries, it has a common, national curriculum framework for its Physical Activity and Sport Science (PASS) degrees. In addition, it has recently passed a new law concerning the introduction of gender knowledge in higher education (HE). Drawing on Bernstein’s (1990) framework of the pedagogic device, this paper examines how this HE gender policy becomes recontextualised as universities and lecturers interpret and translate this into the pedagogical texts that make up the PASS curricula. Purposive sampling was used to select 16 of the 37 universities offering PASS degrees in 2012/2013. The research analysed 16 PASS documents at the degree level and 763 individual subject handbooks. Using discourse analysis, the results showed where and how gender knowledge was incorporated and the extent to which the topic was presented coherently throughout the documents. The analysis revealed five categories of the (in)visibility of gender knowledge within the universities’ instructional discourse. Gender knowledge is largely ignored in PASS curricular documentation, appearing, at best, in highly superficial ways. Despite a national policy requirement on universities to incorporate gender knowledge, this study shows how recontextualisation processes within specific universities’ pedagogic devices operate to marginalise such perspectives within PASS curricula. The research also revealed the significance of individual agents committed to gender equity being situated, and having influence, throughout the pedagogic device. The paper concludes that without a much wider, critical engagement in knowledge about gender equity, PASS degrees will continue to reproduce rather than disrupt the gender relations that have traditionally characterised the field.

‘I just treat them all the same, really’: Teachers, whiteness and (anti) racism in physical education

ABSTRACT This paper explores physical educators’ perspectives on race and racism as a first step towards disrupting whiteness and supporting the development of antiracist practice. With close links to sport, a practice centrally implicated in the creation and maintenance of racialised bodies and hierarchies, Physical Education (PE) offers an important context for a study of whiteness and racism in education. Using collective biography we examine physical educators’ narrative stories for what they reveal about the operation of whiteness and racism in PE. Teachers draw on narratives from curricula texts which uphold and reinforce notions of the racialised other, thereby reasserting normative, universal white knowledge. Their pedagogy is underpinned by a colour blind approach where race is ‘not seen’, yet essentialist and cultural discourses of race are nevertheless deployed to position particular racialised and gendered bodies as ‘problems’ in PE. Engagement with antiracism is limited to professional rhetoric within pedagogical practice.

Girls, Physical Education and Feminist Praxis

This chapter argues for the continuing importance of feminist praxis in PE. It draws on recent research that responds to calls for more middle-ground theorizing in PE to explore difference and inequality, and for the use of creative methods in research practice with young people. The first example explores black and minority ethnic student teachers’ experiences of their PE teacher education, going beyond earlier, “single-issue” approaches that focus on gender and PETE to address how gender is interwoven with race and ethnicity (and other relations of power). The second example focuses on using innovative methods to understand the diverse PE experiences of South Asian, Muslim girls. In so doing, it challenges dominant conceptions of “femininity” as homogeneous and problematizes simplistic views of Muslim girls’ (dis)engagement. The chapter concludes by pointing to areas where future feminist praxis in PE would be valuable.