Abstract
Primary school physical education is practised in schools throughout New Zealand in a variety of ways, and this ethnographic study examines the nature of those practices within one such school environment. The justifications for physically-educating children are underpinned by ideas and assumptions about what is good for the individual and what is good for society – a tension which must be managed within the context of a teacher’s professional practice. While physical education is imagined to serve a number of purposes - such as enhancing health, nurturing social skills, developing motor abilities, and even providing outlets for excess energy, the extent to which these aspirations (and a growing list of others) are achievable, remains an important question for the field. However, regardless of what is hoped for or claimed, the temporal, material, semantic and relational dimensions in which teachers and students encounter one another as physical education is being practised, provide vital clues as to what really happens.
Drawing extensively on the theory of practice architectures and the theory of ecologies of practices as articulated in Kemmis et al. (2014), and utilising data from a series of observations, interviews and focus group discussions with teachers and students, this study explores deeply, physical education practices as they occur in one primary school. The analysis demonstrates that physical education practices are situated, relational and always mediated by complex cultural, social, material, and discursive conditions. Physical education practices are also a collective enterprise rather than simply the actions of individuals and they ‘play out’ differently for some than for others. This means that an attunement to the consequences of practices (praxis) should be a central concern for those interested in the nature of the impression that physical education leaves on the lives of children and young people. The study shows the value of bringing into view the ‘architectures’ within which physical education is enabled and constrained - architectures existing in semantic, social, and material ways - which contour rather than determine how it is possible to practise, in a curriculum area that continues to have its parameters and purposes stretched by government, health, sport and recreation interests.