Jack of All Trades, Master of One: Examining Tensions Around Preparing Work-Ready Kinesiology Graduates in Canada

This paper draws on findings from a study aimed at examining how Canadian Kinesiology programs define themselves within the post-secondary education landscape, and their students’ understandings and experiences of their studies. Using critical discourse analysis, our findings demonstrate Kinesiology’s ability to preserve its appeal among undergraduate students through its successful positioning of itself as a disciplinary field of choice and flexibility, and students’ own enthusiasm for and optimism about Kinesiology as a meaningful area for study. However, our findings also highlight Kinesiology’s entrenched alignment with narrow conceptualizations of health/healthcare, and inherent vulnerabilities in the current post-secondary education landscape given that such programs do not necessarily produce workplace-ready graduates as much as they produce ready-for-more-education graduates. We conclude by discussing the implications of such tensions.