Bourdieu's analytic concept of "habitus" has provided a valuable means of theorising coach development but is yet to be operationalised in empirical research. This article redresses this oversight by drawing on a larger study that inquired into how the "coaching 'habitus'" of elite-level Australian and New…

In this article we try to think in new ways about the educational relevance of physical exercise at school, revisiting a concrete practice that is mostly seen as superseded, namely Swedish gymnastics. A phenomenological analysis of this "forgotten" discipline will show that physical education might be taken in a very literal sense as the…

Fear of unmediated touch between adults and children has become a feature of life in Anglophone countries, including Australia. Previous research has shown that this fear has had an impact on interactions between adults and children, particularly in education and early years care contexts. To assess the extent to which these fears have influenced…

Physical education is a socially constructed activity that forms one component of a wider physical culture that includes sport and health/physical activity. The terms sport and physical education are often used interchangeably in school contexts, where sport and health continue to shape what is understood by the term physical education. This study…

Given that the health of the nation is often interpreted in and through the health of the nation's youth, the threat of the "childhood obesity epidemic" garners much attention and it is hardly surprising that physical education has been recruited in the "war on [childhood] obesity". This paper explores how students aged…

The discourse of competitive sport is, and has been, a defining feature of physical education for many years. Given the privileged and dominant position competition holds in physical education curricula, it is concerning that competitive physical education remains steeped in traditional pedagogies and that these pedagogies are constrained by…

This article explores how school physical education (PE) can both reinforce stereotyped notions of the brown body as inherently physical while also allowing young people to gain educational success. Drawing on a critical ethnographic study of Maori and Pasifika (Pacific Island) youth in PE in New Zealand, the article explores how the academic…

This article offers interpretive perspectives on play as a cultural activity during middle childhood by contrasting two communities targeted for aid by external sport and play programs: a Chicago public housing community and a community of Angolan refugee camps. Ethnographic anecdotes, along with some survey results, demonstrate that aside from…

When teaching in Sport Management programs professors are often forced to respond to the actions and teachings of professionals in the field. According to the study by Kincheloe & Steinberg many of these normalized and, indeed celebrated, behaviors are actions that are part and parcel of the "recovery movement" which (re)inscribe new…

This article takes a phenomenological approach to understanding embodiment in relation to teaching and learning taking place in movement contexts. Recently a number of studies have pointed to the potential that phenomenology has to understand the meanings and experiences of moving subjects. By presenting two examples of our own work on embodied…

This article emerges from a background of UK policy concerns about young people's participation in physical activity. It rehearses the arguments for lifestyle sports as a rich ground for enhancing students' engagement with physical education (PE). A review of the still limited literature suggests that lifestyle sports may have an…

The two-pronged purpose of this study is to examine factors determining the teaching behaviour of pre-service physical education (PE) teachers towards a constructivist approach, likewise referred to as teaching games for understanding (TGfU). Theory of planned behaviour (TPB) was applied to guide the formulation of research purpose and design. Six…

Anchored in the narrative inquiry tradition, this paper examines commonly held motives about curriculum making from the perspectives of four experienced physical education teachers in Korea. Field texts were collected throughout by employing narrative research tools such as in-depth interviews, focus groups, class observations and documents…

With a point of departure in a transactional understanding of epistemology, the purpose of this paper is to explore practical epistemologies in physical education (PE) by investigating how knowledge is produced and reproduced in students' and teachers' actions in PE practices posted as clips on the user-generated video-sharing website…

This article sets out to show how physiological knowledge about sex/gender relates to power issues within sport. The sport physiology research at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (Swedish acronym: GIH) during the twentieth century is analysed in relation to the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish…