Kicking at the habitus: students’ reading of critical pedagogy in PETE

This paper reports the findings of a research project that sought to understand how a group of 19 graduating physical education teacher education (PETE) students’ biographies served to mediate their understanding of the messages of their PETE programme, which was underpinned by a critical pedagogy philosophy. We use the Bourdieuian concepts of habitus, field, pedagogical action and pedagogical work to represent the similarities and variation in the student's reading of the PETE programme and its intension to foreground critical pedagogy. The five themes produced through an analysis of individual and focus group interview data informed by Bourdieu’s theory of practice are; ‘Individual programme readings’, ‘Pedagogical work (that matters)’, ‘Pedagogical work beyond the pedagogic actions of the teacher educators’; ‘No certainty of a critical perspective’ ‘Kicking at one’s habitus: Kicked, shaken and unstirred’. The findings demonstrate that students biographies have influenced and been reaffirmed or disrupted by both the formal PETE programme coursework and practicum experiences and as a result, the PETE programme impacts differently on different students. The authors are guardedly buoyed by the possibility that the structuring structure of habitus will have been sufficiently shaken by the PETE programme to allow for new possibilities yet we recognise that there will be no encounter that can claim pedagogical work on the habitus of all students. Our hope is that this critical pedagogy in PETE has given these participants the ‘tools’, that is, the insight, and perspective, needed to kick at their own habitus as they graduate and move beyond the intervention of PETE