Abstract
Socially-critical scholarship and critical pedagogy have become increasingly central to Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) over the last three decades. The purpose of this paper is to provide a snapshot of the history of the critical project in PETE and an analysis of critical pedagogies in contemporary Western society. In this paper, the accounts of critical pedagogies are classified based on their focus on (a) critical reflection, (b) pedagogies of discomfort and (c) democratic principles, although the authors recognise that in PETE practice these categories overlap and interconnect and do not represent exclusively independent pedagogies. The paper concludes that relationships between PETE teacher educators and PETE students built on trust and care and secondly, connections between PETE teacher educators and the broader physical education teaching community are important as they provide the conditions needed to embed critical pedagogies into PETE courses and PETE programmes.
Keywords:
Critical pedagogy; Physical education; Teacher education