"Somewhere Over the Rainbow...": Queer(y)ing Physical Education Teacher Education

• In Event: 45.081 - Transforming Sport in Education: International Perspectives on LGBTQ Inclusion

Abstract

Objective

This paper will explore the nuances of pre-service teacher’s and one teacher educator’s collective engagement with queer pedagogies that run interferences into and disrupt physical education.

Perspectives/ Theory

For the past 20 years or more, researchers have documented the heteronormative landscape of physical education (Larsson, Fagrell, & Redelius, 2009; Sykes, 1998, 2001) how concepts of normality are embedded in the spaces, places, and curricular content of PE (Clarke, 2006; Larsson, Redelius, & Fagrell, 2011) and how these concepts are often ignored or left unchallenged by both students and teachers (Sykes, 2011).

Most recently, scholars have also drawn our attention to the queer potentials of physical education (Landi, 2018; lisahunter, 2017) and the ways in which students and pre-service teachers are themselves active in deconstructing, interrupting and interjecting dominant heteronormative cultures of physical education (Devís-Devís, Pereira-García, Fuentes-Miguel, et al., 2018; Larsson, Quennerstedt, & Öhman, 2014).

While these contributions are promising, research suggests that a sustained engagement with these necessary inferences are absent within many physical education teacher education programs (Hill et al., 2018; Walton-Fisette et al., 2018). In fact, no research to date has framed inquiry in a way that actively engages with pre-service teachers to critically consider the role heteronormativity plays in their everyday teaching practices and/ or the boundaries of queer pedagogies in physical education.

Methods, Data Sources, and Analysis

This paper is based on a Queer Participatory Action Research (PAR) project with 15 pre-service teachers and one University Lecturer in an Australian University. The purpose of this project was to work towards interrogating aspects of heteronormativity in everyday teaching practices through a critical and collaborative engagement with queer pedagogies.

Data for this paper were co-created through visual-arts-activist-based methods and supported by ethnographic techniques (interviews and focus groups). Data analysis was an ongoing practice, entangled in all aspects of the research process and informed by engagements with queer and new materialist theories (Butler, 2016; MacLure, 2013; Muñoz, 2009; Ringrose & Renold, 2014).

Findings:

The findings of this paper emphasis how pre-service teacher’s queer pedagogical encounters were both radically pleasurable and uncomfortable. By confronting what pre-service educators are actually faced with in emergent engagements with queer pedagogical possibilities, the findings open up space for a more critical consideration of the boundaries of educators’ responses to the complex material realities of heteronormativity in physical education spaces.

Significance:

This paper makes a significant contribution to the paucity of participatory and action-orientated social justice inquiry in physical education teacher education. This paper is also an important invitation for educators and researchers in the field to think differently about how they might work with pre-service teachers to queer physical education.

Author

• Leanne Coll, Deakin University