An increasing number of scholars argue that politicians’ ill-defined policies of sport for integration are difficult to realize and, paradoxically, can lead to a sense of alterity and exclusion. This ...paper provides a micro-analysis of the ‘slippage’ between government visions of sport for integration for refugees and the local, contextual interpretations of sport policy for inclusion. From a critical constructivist perspective, influenced by critical race theory, it examines policy enactment by asking: ‘How did sport for integration of young refugees get talked and written about in a voluntary sports club?’; ‘How did this language in use construct the practices that became locally naturalized?’; and ‘What ideologies were underpinning these realities’? Findings from the critical discourse analysis revealed that local enactments of policy for integration were mostly built upon assimilationist ideas that can exclude, rather than integrate, refugees, and did ideological work to uphold racialized hierarchies in sport. Alternative visions of integration (such as two-way processes of integration or ideas about celebrating cultural diversity) were rationally marginalized in the everyday business of the voluntary sports club, namely, competitive sport. The findings contribute to the literature that claims VSCs may be unsuitable arenas for integration initiatives aiming to provide meaningful physical activity for refugee youth.
Scholars have increasingly called for the need to problematise and critically examine sport policy for integration/inclusion. This article aims to contribute to this ongoing debate by presenting a ...Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis of the languaging of three decades of Norwegian sport policy for integration/inclusion, as well as non-sport policy that seeks to use sport as a policy tool. The analysis demonstrates how ideas and practices about the integration of ethnic minorities in sport are constructed in the shadows of the ‘real business’ of sport. Self-evident ‘Truths’ about inclusion/integration convey simplistic notions of assimilation into existing sport practices, reify notions of homogenous groups both with regard to the majority and the ethnic minority Norwegian population, distributing power unequally across the majority–minority divide, and contribute to construct sport as a racially coded, Eurocentric practice. The pervasive, long-standing idea that sport is inclusive works discursively to marginalise contradictory ideas, such as the complexities of integration that focus upon the need for a transformation of structures and practices, and ‘Truths’ like resourceful ethnic minorities or an adaptable sports organisation remain currently almost unthinkable. The analysis bears witness to scholars’ claims for the need to broaden research methodologies and policies for integration in/through sport, such that inequitable, Eurocentric, assimilated practices can be re-languaged to enable hybrid, transnational sports spaces frequented by resourceful participants.
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.
Responding to calls about the urgent need to better understand young disabled people's experiences in the subject of Physical Education (PE), this paper adopts a narrative approach to explore how ...they experience and value teaching and learning in PE; when and how they feel in/excluded; and to ask 'what barriers/facilitators are perceived to be of importance for their sense of in/exclusion?' Narratives structure and illuminate not only young people's own experiences and self-identities, but they also reveal insights about the socio-cultural locations they inhabit. When they are well told they can persuade us to revisit our taken-for-granted realities about disability and inclusive education. Analyses of a case study of stories from the discursive spaces of PE lessons reveal that the deep culture of schooling and the hegemonic 'truths' of PE, not least of performativity, often result in segregated and alienating experiences, in which the disabled student is defined as malfunctioning and lacking 'ability'. PUBLICATION 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 profession's taken-for-granted truths about race in PE as integral to working towards the development of an antiracist subject.
The concept of the 'professional teacher' is highly contestable, and the array of definitions that circulate in teacher education draw on competing theoretical and ideological positions. This paper ...explores what discourses about professionalism are currently available within Norwegian physical education teacher education (PETE) and, in particular, asks whether they reflect the needs of postmodern teachers in a 'knowledge society'? It acknowledges that there are currently two dominant discourses about the 'professional' teacher, so-called 'activist' or 'managerial' professionalism, and asks whether, and in what ways, PE student teachers engage with and/or reject the discourses' competing ideas about what counts as 'good' practice. By analysing the student teachers' emerging professional identities, the paper aims to reveal not only the students' subjective meanings about professionalism, but also illuminate the current power structures that operate in PETE about relevant 'professional' knowledge.
It draws on data from group interviews with 12 Norwegian PE students in their final year of study for a bachelor degree in PETE, and a critical content analysis of PETE curricula at two institutions of higher education.
The paper highlights the way in which views about professionalism in PETE tend to be normative in nature, and are not founded on explicit theoretical ideas about 'good' practice or theoretical understandings of the role of the teacher in postmodern schools. Indeed, PETE programmes seem to do little to disrupt recruits' 'apprenticeship-of-observation', even though Lortie revealed this problematic aspect of professional socialisation over three decades ago. The student teachers' narratives seem to be locked into 'modernist' or 'classical' ideas about good PE practice, which are inappropriate for meeting the challenges of working with socially diverse pupils or in collaborative teacher groups. Recruitment to PETE via examinable PE appears paradoxically to accentuate the students' sports performing (teacher) selves, rather than providing them with a solid understanding of PE's content knowledge on which to develop broader PE teacher professional identities. Therefore, the paper asks whether teacher educators need to reassess their recruitment policies to PETE, as well as to systematically re-analyse their 'taken-for-granted' notions of teacher professionalism.
This paper attempts to illustrate how embodied ways of knowing may enhance our theoretical understanding within the field of physical education teacher education (PETE). It seeks to illustrate how ...teacher educators' viewpoints and understanding of gender relations are inevitably linked to socially constructed webs of emotions, as much as to intellectual rationales. Indeed, the paper argues for the need for PETE research to transcend the dualistic divide of reason/emotion.
It builds upon interview data from an investigation interested in illuminating the ways in which teacher educators develop their professional identities, using the lenses of gender equal opportunities and equity to examine the degree to which identities reflect 'managerial' or 'democratic' professional projects. In particular it analyses the way in which 'gender talk' seems to evoke strong emotional reactions, often 'negative' feelings, while at the same time, gender equity concerns remain on the periphery of the discipline, despite increasing research evidence which reveals damaging discriminatory learning environments. By using Hargreaves (2000) concept of 'emotional geographies' the paper contends that 'negative emotions' about gender issues are currently hegemonic on account of today's configurations of human relations in PETE, because the discipline's feeling rules construct 'negative feelings' as being reasonable. Acknowledging that professional identities are on-going projects, and that feeling rules can be re-configured, the paper also seeks to illustrate how competing emotions may in the future lead to gender equality assuming a new role in PETE's 'regimes of truths'.
Scholars within physical education (PE) have paid relatively little attention to social class. Studies have tended to quantify inequities in participation in leisure activities and overlooked the ...processes of how social class structures attitudes towards particular forms of physical culture, including PE, and how they are practised. In this context, the paper focuses upon the dynamics between families and schools, and the economics of embodiment. It provides insights from parents/guardians' narratives of social location and positionality in physical culture and how these stories-as-lived influence their children's physical identities, whilst socialising them into the rules of a culture and class. Data have been generated from in-depth interviews and have been thematically analysed drawing upon the analytic tools of Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction and narrative inquiry's concept of plot. The findings reveal that middle class parents/guardians narrated stories about cultivating their children's physical capital as central to their upbringing. In contrast, working class parents/guardians told tales couched in a laissez faire attitude with regard to their children's physical literacy and participation in physical culture. Interestingly, neither middle class nor working class parents/guardians talked about the significance of school PE lessons for their children's physical capital. This seemingly shared ambivalence was, nonetheless, configured in significantly different ways reflecting their differing social locations, lifestyles and narrative repertories. The narrative consequences for the children are arguably great and contribute to the social reproduction of physical capital, rather than social transformation as policy-makers desire.
Background: The persistent gaps between a largely white profession and ethnically diverse school populations have brought renewed calls to support teachers' critical engagement with race. Programmes ...examining the effects of racism have had limited impact on practice, with student teachers responding with either denial, guilt or fear; they also contribute to a deficit view of racialised students in relation to an accepted white 'norm', and position white teachers 'outside' of race. Recent calls argue for a shift in focus towards an examination of the workings of the dominant culture through a critical engagement with whiteness, positioning white teachers within the processes of racialisation. Teacher educators' roles are central, and yet, while we routinely expect student teachers to reflect critically on issues of social justice, we have been less willing to engage in such work ourselves. This is particularly the case within physical education teacher education (PETE), an overwhelmingly white, embodied space, and where race and racism as professional issues are largely invisible.
Purpose: This paper examines the operation of whiteness within PETE through a critical reflection on the three co-authors' careers and experiences working for social justice. The research questions were twofold: How are race, (anti) racism and whiteness constructed through everyday experiences of families, schooling and teacher education? How can collective biography be used to excavate discourses of race, racism and whiteness as the first step towards challenging them? In beginning the process of reflecting on what it means for us 'to do own work' in relation to (anti) racism, we examine some of the tensions and challenges for teacher educators in PE attempting to work to dismantle whiteness.
Methodology: As co-authors, we engaged in collective biography work - a process in which we reflected upon, wrote about and shared our embodied experiences and memories about race, racism and whiteness as educators working for social justice. Using a critical whiteness lens, these narratives were examined for what they reveal about the collective practices and discourses about whiteness and (anti)racism within PETE.
Results: The narratives reveal the ways in which whiteness operates within PETE through processes of naturalisation, ex-denomination and universalisation. We have been educated, and now work within, teacher education contexts where professional discourse about race at best focuses on understanding the racialised 'other', and at worse is invisible. By drawing on a 'racialised other', deficit discourse in our pedagogy, and by ignoring race in own research on inequalities in PETE, we have failed to disrupt universalised discourses of 'white-as-norm', or addressed our own privileged racialised positioning. Reflecting critically on our biographies and careers has been the first step in recognising how whiteness works in order that we can begin to work to disrupt it.
Conclusion: The study highlights some of the challenges of addressing (anti)racism within PETE and argues that a focus on whiteness might offer a productive starting point. White teacher educators must critically examine their own role within these processes if they are to expect student teachers to engage seriously in doing the same.
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