| Physical Education has been garnering greater attention as the neoliberal agenda promotes healthy active living. This, combined with an educational shift in Ontario's secondary school system, becomes the cultural context for the interrogation of the production of health knowledge in the 1999 Ontario Physical and Health Education curriculum revision process. From a feminist post-structural perspective I explore power/knowledge relations within curriculum development to expose the politics of knowledge production (Foucault, 1977; Gore, 1998; St. Pierre, 2001). Drawing from critical cultural studies and the circuit of cultural production (Hall, 1997), my research establishes a circuit of knowledge production uncovering the confounding ways health knowledge is (re)produced in physical education. The methods used in this research include policy text and discourse analysis of seven policy documents combined with in-depth interviews with three policy planners and writers. In addition, a critical ethnography of a Toronto area school exposes the translation of policy in a school setting. The ethnography is a compilation of interviews with 5 physical educators and the school principal, focus groups with 54 students, and participant observation of seven different physical education classes, several times a week, for six months. At the policy level, the disproportionate representation from the health sector foreshadows the discursive production of health discourse in the curriculum re-visioning process. Re-invigorating health discourse and negating the physical educator's knowledge works to legitimate the curriculum while maintaining the power/knowledge relations of the profession. The view of physical activity and health in school curriculum continues to be framed through middle class, white, culturally dominant, gendered values. Embodied learning is regulated by standardized parameters that function to give physical education more legitimacy within the school and provides greater clarity for physical educators during evaluation; however, the dominant patterns of moving and learning about the body benefit some while continuing to constrain others. Students' experiences suggest the potential for enjoyable, meaningful movement and health practice, but the reliance on set evaluative measures limits the possibility of fully learning about one's body. I conclude that physical education continues to emphasize a successfully physically educated person, as being someone who can (re)produce dominant lifestyle practices. |
