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P A r t 1

Defining Our Field

Courtesy of William H. Freeman

new. Even in the formative years of American physical education in the late 1800s many different titles were used for programs that had essentially the same focus. Our field today has its sometimes unclear focus as a result of changes that began half a century ago in the core field of physical education. First, look at the changing motivations for human movement, and then the changing terms for human movement and the changing approaches to human movement.

Changing Motivations for Human Movement

Our field is interested in people’s motivation for movement. Why do we exercise? Why do we take part in sport? From prehistoric times to today, we find changing motivations for human movement.

Survival Skills

Survival was the basic aim of education in primitive society—for both the individual and the group. The education of young males was primarily accom- plished by physical means that were strongly oriented toward physical strength and cunning. Good hunting and fighting skills were necessary if early men were to feed themselves and their families and provide protection from outside forces. Primitive education was concerned with learning in two areas: survival skills and conformity conduct.^2 Survival skills included the ability to defend oneself and others; the ability to provide food, clothing, and shelter; and the skills necessary to survive as an individual in the world.

Conformity Conduct

Conformity conduct was designed to ensure the survival of the group by putting the skills of the individual at the service of the group. People had to be able to work with others to meet the needs of the group, or the group would not survive. If the group did not survive, then humans might eventually become extinct.

Fitness and Heath

As society advanced and basic survival was no longer the greatest concern, people gradually realized that movement and physical activity affected their health and fitness. That awareness appeared in early large cultures, but we are most aware of it in the ancient Greeks, with their concept of “a sound mind in a sound body.” As we move toward modern times, the growing awareness of the impact of movement and fitness on health affected developing theories of education. By the Renaissance, some schools were beginning to realize that unhealthy students were less able to learn, so they began to add physical activity to their curriculum.

Sport and Pleasurable Movement

As children, we learn that movement itself is pleasurable. As we get older and our skills advance, we find the simple pleasure of sporting movement. We learn

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the pleasure of controlling our bodies to improve our performances, yet there is a simple joy in the movement itself, the doing. Too often our field has over- looked or downplayed pleasure as a motivation or reward for movement and sport. 3 Gregg Twietmeyer argues that

Kinesiology is, in an important sense, an evangelical profession; a profession which must be willing to proudly profess the joys of moving well, for those joys are learned. The degree to which pleasure and intrinsic satisfaction are found in kinesiology depends on how well we steward our inheritance.^4

His comments are an outgrowth of the argument made by Klaus Meier more than 30 years ago that “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” 5 Pleasure does not necessarily require skill.

Changing Terms for Human Movement

Our field has been known by many other labels in the past. Most of them are now considered too narrow and exclusive to express the full scope of the field.

Gymnastics

Gymnastics was the earliest of those titles. During the 1800s, gymnastics referred to exercises or activities that took place in a gymnasium, rather than to the activities that today are part of that particular sport. The term was very popular with European programs, but in the United States it was used for only one phase of the total physical education program. Today, because its meaning is limited, the term usually includes an explanatory subtitle, such as Olympic gymnastics or corrective gymnastics.

Hygiene and Health

Hygiene , another popular term of the 1800s, referred to the science of preserving people’s health. Its definition is similar to today’s health education programs, which developed around 1900 when state legislatures passed laws requiring the teaching of basic health practices. Many of the early leaders in American physical education were physicians concerned with improving the overall health of students.

Exercise and Fitness

Physical culture , a popular term during the late 1800s, was often used with the term physical training to sell programs of personal health. Today, in the United States, physical training refers exclusively to conditioning exercises and programs—education only of the physical. The term is still commonly used to describe programs in the armed services, but it is a far too narrow concept of physical education to be used by today’s educators.

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benefits, the definition does not refer solely to the traditional meaning of physical activity. We must view the term physical on a broader, more abstract plane, as a condition of mind as well as body. Indeed, this physical education should bring about improvements “in mind and body” that affect all aspects of the person’s daily living, and the whole person should benefit by the experience. This mind– body holistic approach includes an emphasis on all three educational domains: the psychomotor, the cognitive, and the affective. Indeed, Robert Gensemer refers to “the body as a place for the mind.”^9

Sport

In defining physical education, we must also consider its relationship to play and sport. Many scholars have studied play and its implications for our well-being. Many of their studies consider sport and physical education to be one and the same, but play, sport, and physical education are three different, yet overlapping, entities. Play is essentially activity used as amusement. We think of play as non- competitive physical amusement, although play does not have to be physical. Play is not necessarily sport or physical education, even though elements of play may be found in both. Sport is an organized, competitive form of play. Some people view sport simply as an organized form of play, which might put it closer to physical education as we have defined it. However, careful examination shows that sport traditionally involves competitive activities. When we refer to sport as “organized” competitive activity, we mean that the activity has been refined and formalized to some degree—that is, some definite form or process is involved. Rules, whether they are written or not, are used in the activity, and those rules or procedures cannot be changed during the competition, although new rules may evolve from one episode to the next. Sport is, above all, a competitive activity. We cannot think of sport without thinking of competition, for without the competition, sport becomes simply play or recreation. Play can at times be sport, but strictly speaking, sport is never simply play; the competitive aspect is essential to its nature. Physical education has elements of both play and sport, but it is not exclusively either, nor is it a balanced combination of the two. As its title indicates, physical education is physical activity with an educational goal. It is physical and it seeks to educate, but neither play nor sport, even though both can be used in the educational process, always includes the educational aspect of the physical expe- rience as a vital aim. Play, sport, and physical education involve forms of movement, and all three can fit within the context of education if they are used for some educational purpose. Play can be relaxing and entertaining without any educational aim, just as sport can exist for its own sake without any educational aim. For example, professional sports (some people prefer the term athletics ) have no educational

Changing Terms for Human Movement 7

goals, yet we still consider them to be sport. An activity does not need to be amateur to be considered sport. Sport and play can exist purely for pleasure, purely for education, or for any combination of the two. Pleasure and education are not mutually exclusive; they can and should coexist.

Allied Areas: Health Education, Recreation, and Dance

Our definition of physical education is concerned with the development or education of each person, both of their physical body and through physical means. To complete the description of this very broad concept, three areas allied to the field of physical education and sport must be introduced: health education, recreation, and dance.

Health Education The old concept of health education has become more comprehensive over the last several decades. When we speak of health education, we use it most often in the sense of the total health-related fitness of the person: physical, mental, emotional, and social. The old model had three subareas: health instruction, health services, and health environment. Today the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion promotes a model that it calls a coordinated school health program (CSHP).^10 The CSHP model has eight components:

1. Health education. A K–12 school curriculum to address “the physical, mental, emotional, and social dimensions of health.”
2. Physical education. A K–12 school curriculum “that provides cognitive content and learning experiences in a variety of activity areas.... Quality physical education should promote... each student’s optimum physical, mental, emotional, and social development.”
3. Health services. Services that “appraise, protect, and promote health.”
4. Nutritional services. “Access to a variety of nutritious and appealing meals that accommodate the health and nutritional needs of all students.”
5. Counseling and psychological services. Services “to improve students’ mental, emotional, and social health.”
6. Healthy school environment. “The physical and aesthetic surroundings and the psychosocial climate and culture of the school.”
7. Health promotion for staff. Improvement of staff health should improve the staff’s commitment to student health and their ability to serve as role models.
8. Family and community involvement. Involves the school, parents, and community together; uses community resources and services to meet health-related needs.

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Education Focus

Eventually, educators realized that poor health and fitness was a major factor in students’ poor academic performance. By the late 1700s, early private schools in Europe were adding physical activity as a way to improve student health, resulting in improved classroom performance.

Fitness Focus

By the late 1800s, the focus of physical education was increasingly on physical fitness. Though the underlying reason for that focus was the effect that it had on student learning, teachers were increasingly aware of the importance of fitness on long-term health.

Sport Focus

By the 1920s, sport had become a major factor in physical education programs. The reason for the change from educational gymnastics and calisthenics to sports

Courtesy of the News & Observer of Raleigh (NC), photo

(^) by Thomas Green.

The move of services from the public to the private sector limits many recreational opportunities to people with higher incomes.

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was very simple: Students were more likely to benefit from the programs because they were more fun.

Lifetime Fitness and Wellness Focus

By the 1970s, the focus on popular competitive sports began to give way first to a lifetime fitness focus, and then to a lifetime wellness focus. Lifetime fitness still had a sport emphasis, but it shifted from the most popular competitive sports to sports that people could enjoy throughout their lifetime, such as tennis and swimming, rather than football. The lifetime wellness focus was a shift from developing high-level fitness and sports skills to a focus on wellness for a healthy life. This meant a focus on levels of basic fitness through moderate exercise that would benefit even people of lower skill or fitness levels, resulting in a longer life span and fewer health problems during their lifetime.

Holism: The Unity of Mind and Body

One of the difficult questions over the ages has been the philosophical clash between the intellectual and the physical. A common belief is that the mind and the body are separate, with an emphasis on either one or the other. In most cases, this belief, called dualism, leads to a preference for the mind and a belief that physical activities are inferior to mental activities. We see this idea in the medieval Church, with its growing belief in the evil nature of the body. Because the body was considered evil, acts that the body enjoyed were discouraged. Even today we see this belief in the idea of the superiority (and separation) of mind over body. The contrary philosophy is monism, a belief in the unity of mind and body. We trace the heritage of this idea to the ancient Athenians, with the concept of “a sound mind in a sound body.” That motto is often considered an ideal statement of the goal of traditional physical education: the use of physical activi- ties to develop all aspects of the person—mind, body, and spirit. It is consistent with Earle Zeigler’s argument that the real focus of our field is developmental physical activities, rather than physical activity alone. There is a goal of develop- ing the person in many ways.^12 However, the real question is not whether we believe in a holistic concept; the question is whether that concept is now dominant in our society, or even in our field. In society, dualism still rules, even though our field stresses monism. Physical education programs are downsized or removed because physical classes are con- sidered inferior to intellectual classes. The belief in the value of using physical means to develop the whole person has not captured the public imagination. Indeed, there is some question regarding whether the holistic concept is dominant even in the practices of our field. Too often people reject healthful activities by citing the lack of value or balance in their school’s physical education classes. This difference between what we teach and what we do is a thorn in the side of the field of physical education.

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activity.”^16 We need to remember that this argument is based on kinesiology as the name at the college level rather than at every level of application. In fact, it is largely a creature of the largest research-focused universities. We can understand some of the reason behind this drive toward acceptance of the new name by a comment made while arguing the new name’s value: “The word kinesiology in its present broad sense is an appropriate image that serves to market our field of study.”^17 As Larry Locke put it,

I now will embarrass us all by noticing what we are really talking about. This program [on The Evolving Undergraduate Major] is about power and turf. It is about who will control the undergraduate major, not about what is in it or its present state of evolution. This program is about who will teach it and which students will be required to take it.... The disciplinarians still covet those captive, credit-bearing clients [teacher education majors] who still constitute the largest single population of undergraduate students passing through most of our schools.^18

A decade later, after listening to discussions of the future of the field in higher education, Locke remarked that

almost all of [this] discussion reflects the particular contexts of Research I and Research II universities. Whether lessons about prospering in those environments can safely be generalized to institutions in the other eight Carnegie categories is still unclear. The majority of kinesiology and physical education programs in North America are not in colleges or universities with research as a primary mission. Thus, in contemplat- ing our professional and academic colleagues’ good counsel, we should remember just how narrow and really peculiar the experiences behind these analyses and consequent advice have been.^19

The supporters of kinesiology argue that it is a superset of the discipline—a field of study, rather than a discipline. Or, as Waneen Spirduso writes, “a cross- disciplinary field of study rather than an academic discipline, strictly defined.” As she emphasizes the value of the focus on studying physical activity, she argues that it “really is the common denominator of sport, exercise, ergonomics, biomechanics and all the other activities that kinesiologists study.”^20 Charles Corbin argues that “becoming a field is more than saying we are one.”^21 He uses Myron Lieberman’s characteristics of a profession to “provide a basis for developing criteria for establishing a field.” Corbin states that a field must have the following:

1. A discipline (unique subject matter) that uses intellectual techniques
2. Disciplinarians with long training in the unique subject matter and its intellectual techniques, who should be dedicated to research that contrib- utes to preparing professionals in the field and providing the field’s social service

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3. A subject matter related to the delivery of a social service (professional education)
4. Professionals with long training in the disciplinary and professional subject matter
5. A clarified code of ethics and an organization or organizations that govern the field and enforce the code
6. Agencies dedicated to preparing disciplinarians and professionals who have studied all types of knowledge and are dedicated to the field and the social service it provides
7. A clientele that needs and demands the field’s services Corbin argues that we are a discipline, but not yet a field. He says that we need more than simply an organization; we need to commit to the field’s common goals. This approach is similar to an earlier recommendation by Earle Zeigler when he described physical education as going through stages of being a multidiscipline, a cross discipline, and finally an interdiscipline as the subdisciplines begin to interact once again. He called for

a recognizable state of reunification within what we presently call the field of sport and physical education. We do need a new name, but it should be a name that reflects both the disciplinary and the professional aspects of our work.... We simply must figure out ways and means of unifying the various aspects of our own quasi-profession/quasi-discipline to at least a reasonable degree.^22

At the same time, some scholars questioned the value of the discipline movement. As Lawrence Locke points out and Elizabeth Bressan emphasizes, we did not develop disciplines—we simply declared that they are present. Locke says that disciplines do not appear by being declared or “proven.” “They are created by the labor of inquiry, the accumulation of knowledge and theory, the fortunes of social recognition, and the accidents of history.”^23 Elizabeth Bressan writes that young scholars in the disciplines are, in fact, trained in the language and bases of fields other than physical education, so that there is no real community of scholars who study physical education, or human movement or sport or whatever particular delineation of content upon which we might settle. A sound disciplinary structure is supposed to promote such communal identity and effort.^24 Jan Broekhoef suggests that a discipline is not as necessary as we originally believed: The assumption... is that persons who have mastered the formal content of the academic discipline will be better prepared to teach than those who possess only professional and applied knowledge. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to support such an assumption [my emphasis].... Theory and practice should stand in a reciprocal relationship.^25

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First, a profession’s activities are intellectual. Physical skills may be involved in performing the work, but the work must have an intellectual base, or “body of knowledge.” The intellectual nature of the field must be one of the most impor- tant aspects of the work, rather than the physical or other skills used to apply the knowledge. This is the area where physical education has been most criticized by outsiders. Second, a profession’s work must be practical. It must have a genuine use. Even though it is based on knowledge, that knowledge has no value unless it is applied. Most physical educators agree that physical education has an intellectual base, and every physical educator will agree that the work is practical. The knowledge is applied to develop and improve people’s fitness, skills, and health. Third, a profession is concerned with research that results in new knowledge and ideas, which are then tested and applied in the professional work. This characteristic certainly is true of physical education, although some educators are dissatisfied with the limited amount of research and the tendency to experiment only in the most narrowly practical areas. Some critics argue that physical educators and coaches are the most resistant of all groups to change, even when research has shown that the changes are needed. Fourth, a profession has a formal organization. Examples in physical educa- tion are the numerous professional groups, such as AAHPERD and the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). Organization is closely related to the fifth characteristic, the capacity for communication. Fifth, a profession has formal means of communication among its members, not only to enable them to work together to solve common problems but also to distribute information. AAHPERD is the largest group that assists physical educators in meeting those communication requirements. It holds regular meetings at the state, district, and national levels and also sponsors many publica- tions. The ACSM has a large annual convention and also sponsors publications. Sixth, a profession practices altruism and service. That is, the members of the profession are dedicated to helping others. A profession shows concern for people’s welfare, and it exists (at least in part) to help improve or protect others’ lives. Few people would disagree that this characteristic applies to teaching. Most physical educators consider their field a profession. It does meet all of Flexner’s criteria to some degree, though some may disagree about the importance given to some of the criteria. However, 2 decades after Charles A. Bucher argued that physical education was not a fully matured profession but instead was an emerging one, Robert Gensemer echoed Bucher with his description of the field as “an emergent profession.”^33 Do people see physical educators as rendering a “unique and essential social service,” one that could not be rendered by a non-professional? Some people believe physical educators are doing a job that most well-coordinated people could do. Are physical educators selective about the people admitted to the field? Research consistently indicates that the students majoring in the teacher prepa- ration programs in our colleges rank low in intelligence and academic training

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among our nation’s college students and that certification and licensure require- ments sometimes vary so widely as to be almost meaningless. Are “rigorous train- ing programs” provided for future members? There also are many doubts in this area. Finally, is physical education “self-regulatory”? Are unethical or ill-prepared members dealt with within the field? This has rarely been the case. Bucher and Gensemer suggest, rightly, that physical education has not yet earned the full status of a profession but is still emerging. Though some educators argue that it has spent a long time emerging, its basic shortcomings as a profes- sion are clear. Although physical education’s goals equal the characteristics of a profession, its public status has not yet risen to that level. That is still a critical task for today’s physical educators. In the past, physical education was considered an applied field, one in which practical skills were gained through personal experience and then applied in teaching and coaching in the school setting. When the discipline movement grew in the 1960s and 1970s and advanced a more scholarly, research-based emphasis, that emphasis was largely defined as sport, though it was sometimes broadened to the less sport-centered term movement. In the 1990s and with a shift toward a redefined kinesiology as the scholarly focus of a broader, more unified field of study, the idea of a research-focused subdiscipline of sport pedagogy has grown. During the early years of developing a discipline, many subdisciplines were proposed, debated, and justified, such as sport biomechanics or sport history. However, not every proposed subdiscipline found widespread acceptance. A section on “The Academic Foundations of Exercise Science and Kinesiology,” includes an overview of the subdiscipline of sport pedagogy. At this point, I simply want to emphasize the importance of physical education and sport pedagogy as a legitimate subject for scholarly study. The distinction between the two terms is that physical education traditionally refers only to school-related activities (though this book prefers a much broader definition), and sport pedagogy “is a broad field concerned with the content, processes, and outcomes of sport, fitness, and physi- cal education programs in schools, community programs, and clubs.”^34 Perhaps movement pedagogy would be a more accurate name for the subdiscipline. In short, movement pedagogy studies the organized teaching or learning related to human movement, regardless of where the activity takes place. One factor in the development of a more scholarly focus in physical education was the Holmes Group report, which recommended a greater aca- demic focus for all teacher education programs. 35 In a sense, it shone a light on weaknesses in the scholarly underpinnings of teacher education programs. Many state legislatures began to strengthen academic requirements for teacher education, and professional groups reacted by developing plans to raise their professional status with more academically oriented requirements. However, the legislatures have resisted the Holmes Group proposal to make teacher edu- cation a 5-year program, a proposal that was also recommended in the 1950s and 1960s.

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States and Canada, their driving forces were not the same. In Canada the move toward professionalizing sport to produce high performance success (such as at the Olympic Games) required administrators and sport scientists to operate the pro- gram. The knowledge of volunteers was not sufficient to gain success on the world stage. Many of the Canadian specialists did graduate work in the United States, where they encountered the other driving force: status in the research universities. I defined a discipline as an area of knowledge and theory that can exist purely for itself with no need to show that it has a practical application. The interest in that side of the field began to develop in the mid-1960s, promoted by Franklin M. Henry’s definition. The result was a flurry of discussion about whether physi- cal education was a discipline, whether it had the required focus of attention and particular mode of inquiry. The question of whether physical education could demonstrate a body of knowledge caused particular concern. Daryl Siedentop discussed the idea of a discipline by describing it as “value-free” because it tries to study “what is” rather than “what should be.” He suggested that the difference between a discipline and a profession could be summarized by the idea that “a discipline describes while a profession prescribes.”^39 A discipline avoids bias in research. On the other hand, a profession tries to solve a specific problem and must therefore study a specific group, which results in a biased study and results. The interest in a discipline centered around Franklin Henry’s 1964 article and its implications. While scholars tried to define a discipline and its area of study, AAHPER (as it was known then) worked to demonstrate the field’s “body of knowledge.” At the same time, scholars in the Big Ten Conference schools organized a series of annual conferences to discuss the different newly emerging disciplines or subdisciplines in sport studies. Meanwhile, the American Academy of Physical Education debated whether a new name was needed for physical education, one that would better demonstrate the true focus of its study. In the years since Henry’s article first appeared and spurred interest in developing a discipline, many changes in direction have affected our broad field. The first notable change was the split between groups focused on the profession and those focused on developing the discipline. Many conflicts seem to match physical education against exercise and sport science, “teachers” against “researchers.” The more practical appearance of the profession side of studies has created problems for those interested in the discipline or research side because each group sometimes questions the other’s validity or importance. In truth, both groups contribute to our field in important ways. Their conflicts often seem to be little more than arguments over differing points of view, though often the real argument has been political rather than theoretical, a struggle for power or funding. However, the scholarly side of physical education is far more prominent today than it was then. A second notable change has been the appearance of new professional societies representing the subdisciplines and their scholarly focuses of interest.

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Those new groups have promoted scholarship in their areas by initiating national conferences and by publishing journals that offer more scholarly and specific outlets of research than those provided by the older organizations of physical education. By the late 1970s, AAHPERD recognized the growth of the schol- arly interests and started discipline-focused academies within its own professional structure. A third change in the direction of the field that has become evident over the last several decades is the great burst of scholarly research and writing. That growth of scholarship has been invaluable in revitalizing our field and presenting it to the outside world as an academically respectable field.

Our Field as a Discipline The difference between a discipline and a profession can be confusing because a field can be a discipline, while its practitioners can be members of a profession. In essence, a discipline is an area of knowledge and theory that can exist purely for itself, but a profession must have a practical application. We have shown that our field has practical uses (such as developing people’s fitness and health) and thus can be considered a profession. What, then, is necessary for the field to be con- sidered a discipline? Franklin Henry defines an academic discipline as an orga- nized body of knowledge collectively embraced in a formal course of learning. The acquisition of such knowledge is assumed to be an adequate and worthy objective as such, without any demonstration or requirement of practical applica- tion. The content is theoretical and scholarly as distinguished from technical and professional.^40 Henry’s definition (a synthesis of several other definitions of a discipline) makes it clear that to be considered a discipline, our field must have a “body of knowledge,” that is, it must focus on some specific scholarly knowledge. Is this the case with our field? Henry and many others believe that it is. We can think of a discipline as an area of basic science concerned with the discovery of new knowledge but not really obligated to find any use for that knowledge or to apply it in any way. The primary object of a discipline is to gain knowledge, while in a profession it is to apply that knowledge in a way that serves others. Gerald S. Kenyon suggests that three criteria are necessary for a field to be a discipline:

1. A focus of attention
2. A unique body of knowledge
3. A particular mode of inquiry (research method) Many authors suggest that the focus of attention of physical education as a discipline is the human movement phenomena, or as Kenyon puts it, the study of “man in motion.” Although there is some argument over whether our field also possesses a unique body of knowledge, many people do feel that such a body of knowledge exists and that it has expanded vastly over the years. Kenyon

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