Teacher Education Pedagogy: Dominant Discourses and the Process of Problem Setting

Pedagogy is a major concern of teacher education. Within this paper three pedagogies are discussed: performance pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and postmodern pedagogy. The case is made that in order to understand which particular pedagogies are privileged within physical education teacher education, it is useful to analyze the discourses on which they are based and the process of problem setting, which acts to define or set certain problems that require certain solutions. The problems that dominate the physical education profession tend to be those that address technical or instrumental issues, which in turn privilege performance pedagogy as the appropriate solution. The political processes involved in such problem setting are discussed with reference to dominant discourses and the nature of contemporary professional practice. It is argued that privileging performance pedagogy in teacher education is limited in vision and continues to produce physical education teachers who conceive of teaching as essentially a technical matter with little sense of the social, moral, and political aspects of their work.