Sport education: a panacea for hegemonic masculinity in physical education or more of the same?

Sport education has received considerable support from teachers, teacher educators and the sport pedagogy literature as a cure for much that ails physical education. The purpose of the study described in this paper was to determine the extent to which teachers employing the sport education model rejected and combatted or supported and reinforced masculine bias and sexism. Participants were one male and one female pre-service teacher. The study was conducted in the United States. Data collection and analysis were driven by the theory of hegemonic masculinity. Data were collected using a series of qualitative techniques as the pre-service teachers taught four sport education seasons to middle school pupils aged 11–14 years. Data were analyzed by employing analytic induction and constant comparison. Results revealed that hegemonic masculinity was supported and reinforced and masculine bias and sexism were prevalent within the sport education seasons. These findings suggest that merely adhering to the curricular scaffolding of the sport education model provides no more insulation against inequality than working within more traditional curricular frameworks. It was hypothesized that the support and reinforcement of hegemonic masculinity were due to the pre-service teachers’ orientations to teaching/coaching, interpretation of sport education and inexperience.