Physical education exists as a body of knowledge, system of beliefs and pedagogical practices developed through contested and negotiated meaning making (Goodson 1992). The struggles for the heartland of physical education have not occurred in isolation but reflect the workings of dominant discourses and power relations circulating within cultural and social arenas. In contemporary curriculum documents and texts, physical education is constructed as comprehensive and underpinned by the premise of promoting lifelong participation in physical activity. The overall impression is of a balanced and broad range of study where learning experiences are drawn from the gamut of physical activities and where emotional, social and cognitive learning occurs in learning environments which are equitable in their cultural neutrality (Garrett and Wrench 2007). In Australia the activity range officially includes health related fitness, dance, gymnastics, aquatic activities, outdoor education, and sports (ACARA 2103). Reality suggests that in practice what counts as physical education tends to be dominated by sport related activity and health related fitness (Tinning 1993; Wright 1996).

            Popkewitz (2008) reminds us that school subjects are ‘bodies  of knowledge’ encompassing concepts, ‘truths’, norms, generalisations and practices to be learnt by students. Physical Education, as with other school subjects, is a field of ‘cultural practices that order who the child is, should be and is not to be’ (Popkewitz 2004 p211). Of interest to this research is why sport related activity and health related fitness are determining the privileged cultural practices of the field of physical education.

            In order to understand the hegemony of sport related activity, health related fitness and associated pedagogical practices it is necessary to explore earlier contingencies, beliefs, and historically related utilitarian value attributed to physical education. In historicising of the present (Fejes 2008), I will draw upon Foucault’s conceptualisation of genealogy (1977a; 1980; 2004) as an analytic tool. Venn (2006) argues that genealogies foreground the historicity of the present or the constitutive effects of the past in the present. It is problematisations of the present, such as the hegemony of particular curriculum content and pedagogical practices, that provide impetus and focus for genealogical investigations (Gros 2005).   

Traditional historical narratives provide descriptions of the evolution of physical education, but from a Foucauldian perspective they fail to illuminate the modes of power relations at play, localised experiences of students and teachers, disjunctions within chronological accounts, and constitutive effects of power-knowledge as encoded in pedagogies. Adopting a genealogical approach allows me to pose key questions that frame this research undertaking:

In what ways has the field of physical education been constructed as a means to address societal problems? 

What modes of power infuse pedagogical practices of physical education?

How do these modes of power direct and shape subjectivities and conduct of teachers and students?

Through exploring the contingencies of earlier pedagogical practices and concomitant power relations, I argue that, potential exists to better understand contemporary curriculum and pedagogical practices and how relations of power work through these to shape behaviours and subjectivities of teachers and students. In this research undertaking I explore forms of physical education, associated pedagogical practices, and modes of power relations that have shaped the field. I will present data through a constellation of four themes: Physical training and attendant militaristic pedagogies; followed by games playingand civilising pedagogies (Kirk 1998); movement education and child centred pedagogies. The fourth and final theme is scientisation and performance pedagogies (Tinning 1991), which prevail today.

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