Exploring social justice pedagogies in health and physical education through Critical Incident Technique methodology

Abstract

In this paper, we describe and reflect on the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) methodology used to explore how secondary school health and physical education (HPE) teachers address social justice in their teaching practice. The paper is informed by data generated as part of an ongoing three-year international research project involving eight physical education teacher education (PETE) researchers from three different countries. One of the general aims of the project was to develop teaching strategies to assist HPE teachers to refine and develop their practices so that they may become more inclusive and engaging for all students, thus helping contribute to more equitable educational outcomes. The specific aim of this paper is twofold: to describe the methodological framework of the research project and, secondly, to reflect on the challenges encountered in the research process along with the limitations and further potential of this research approach. We argue that the use of CIT methodology has allowed us to document rich descriptions of examples of teaching for social justice and to identify teacher practices that resonate with critical perspectives, or what we have come to call ‘social justice pedagogies’. We conclude by asserting that our use of CIT methodology in this project serves as a political quest to reaffirm the social justice agenda in HPE practice through providing teachers with examples of social justice pedagogies. It is not an attempt to espouse a one-size-fits-all social justice model for HPE since social justice teaching strategies are enabled and constrained by the contexts in which they are practised.

Psychological Capital on College Teachers’ and Students’ Entrepreneurial Performance and Sports Morality Under Social and Political Education

“…The objective of college social and political education (SPE) is to improve the social, political, and moral qualities of teachers and students through certain social concepts, political views, and ethical norms education ( Du et al, 2020 ; Li et al, 2020 ; Wu A. et al, 2020 ). College SPE has a particular practical significance by providing solid support for the critical force of China’s economic construction, college entrepreneurs, IEE, and sports ( Mu et al, 2020 ; Philpot et al, 2021 ).…”

Teaching for Student and Societal Wellbeing in HPE: Nine Pedagogies for Social Justice

“…In the second phase of analysis, researcher pairs from each country then met to compare, cross-check, and reduce initial codes and themes into common/shared codes and themes. The third and final level of analysis was a group analysis by all members of the research team via two online video conferences (for a full description of the study design see Philpot et al, 2020 ). In summary, the three final themes (i) “Building relationships,” (ii) “Teaching for social cohesion,” and (iii) “Explicitly teaching about and acting on social inequities” we have reported previously (Gerdin et al, 2020 ) were generated through a 3-year iterative process that required us to examine our own assumptions, our own culturally located taken-for-granted practices, and our methods of defining what we were looking for and how we went about finding it in a systematic way.…”

Social Justice Pedagogies in School Health and Physical Education—Building Relationships, Teaching for Social Cohesion and Addressing Social Inequities

“…Therefore, the strength of CIT is its high degree of focus on “ things that matter ” in a particular activity [ 45 ]. In this study, we employed CIT to explore the thought processes and actions of HPE teachers with a narrow focus on teaching for equity and social justice (for a full discussion of the methodology used in this study, see [ 46 ]).…”