In search of a critical PETE programme

For some time now many teacher educators have recognised the need to address issues of social justice and inequality. The challenge of teaching increasingly diverse student populations has led teacher educators to consider practices and pedagogies that move beyond a technical orientation. One of the alternate paradigms, critical teacher education, promotes a model of teacher development that transcends a sole focus on the acquisition of mere technical skills, to practices that foreground awareness of equity issues and socially just teaching practices. Although critical teacher education is not new, most research on teacher education for social justice examines the impact of individual courses on developing pre-service teachers’ awareness of critical issues. The paper presents an analysis of a physical education teacher education (PETE) programme that is underpinned by critically oriented philosophies. Critical discourse analysis of documents was used to reveal consistencies and contradictions between the espoused critical orientation of the programme and the discourse of the individual courses. The findings provide evidence of critical pedagogies across a range of courses in the PETE programme. The significance of this study lies in new possibilities for critical teacher education when the critical orientation is spread across a whole programme rather than concentrated only in individual courses