THE RISE AND TRIUMPH OR DECLINE AND FALL OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION?
Don Hellison
University of Illinois at Chicago

Back in Paleolithic times, 1987 to be exact, John Massengale invited Shirl Hoffman and me to write about the future of physical education. My task was to describe "the rise and triumph of physical education" while Shirl addressed its "decline and fall." When I recently reread and compared these chapters, it was evident who'd "won." Shirl got much of it right-- the creeping privatization of physical education, the commercialization of athletics, the over-specialization of university physical education scholarship. My crystal ball must have sprung a leak, filled as it was with ideas like physical education in higher education becoming more applied and relevant; professors and practitioners truly collaborating on a regular basis; a reversal in the fragmentation of health, physical education, and recreation (maybe that wasn't totally off the mark); school physical education moving to smaller classes and away from the three week unit; and interscholastic athletics offering different kinds of options to meet the needs of more students while shifting more responsibility to student athletes.

When I look back on what I wrote, disregarding my assignment to be positive at all costs, it sounds like the dreamy ravings of an ivory tower professor - which I am! But you'd think that as a part-time teacher for over thirty years, some of Shirl's cynicism would have crept in. The truth is that it has more than crept; it has strongly influenced my thinking about in-school PE.
It's not that PE teachers aren't trying. In Portland and Chicago and in my travels to many other cities and towns, I've met an overwhelming number of highly committed, open-minded, and very competent PE teachers. Moreover, those who have adapted a responsibility-based approach in their practice continue to amaze me with their energy and creativity. But as I listen to their stories, sometimes observe their classes, and reflect on my own in-school PE teaching experiences, I see a number of barriers to the fulfillment of these teachers' potential built into the structure and policies of public schools (not to mention the further marginalization of physical education, art, and music thanks to No Child Left Behind).

Of course, as a college professor I have the luxury of ruminating about these things and creating teaching situations for kids that are difficult to duplicate in the bureaucratic maze of a full time public school position. (They are difficult enough for me and my colleagues to create as it is!) And I always need to remind myself of something I learned from a line in a book written by Ernie Pascarella. After what seemed like a thousand pages of data and interpretation, Ernie concluded, "It's more complicated than that!"

In the less-than-fully complicated lens I look through, I first realized how dysfunctional schools are in carrying out their educational mission in physical education when, by accident, I found myself teaching in an alternative secondary school. How I got there is a long story and doesn't matter; what does is that I loved it so much I stayed as the school's PE teacher for eight years! (And subsequently spent two more years in alternative schools in other locations.) The kids were no pushovers, being court-referred or kicked out of school for various offenses (like not showing up for an entire year!), but with a school population of about fifty and small class sizes, PE being the largest class in the school at 15, I could accomplish so much more than I could in my public school experience. First of all, and most important in my view (a view that has considerable support in the literature), I could develop relationships with the kids. Even though I had to be at the university to do my "real" job, I was in the public school every day and around enough to interact with students outside of PE - a task made easier with so few kids in the school. And with fifteen students in class, I could spend what I call, mistakenly I suppose, one on one counseling time. It was easy to become part of the school culture in that situation. New kids would come to the gym having already been "clued in" by other students about writing in journals and other things we routinely did in PE, so much so that when I changed something I got complaints!

Fast-forward to my work in Chicago: For the past 17 years I've been exploring "what's possible" (thanks to Magdalene Lampert for that idea) with low income minority kids in some of the toughest neighborhoods in the United States. And I find that my vision of a responsibility-based PE is indeed possible, if (and these are huge ifs) my classes are small, if I can continue with the same kids over several years, if I have total control of the curriculum (e.g., if basketball is the motivational hook, it becomes my primary vehicle), and if I'm not forced to deal with what I call the deep culture of PE (e.g., uniforms, squads, whistles). Even then, my successes are often small or sometimes non-existent.

Can these kinds of alternative practices find their way in bits and pieces into public school systems? Middle School Teacher of the Year John Hichwa's small group instruction within a class of thirty students suggests that they can, and in the hands of good teachers, block scheduling could facilitate some changes. So I remain hopeful, not optimistic but hopeful based on Vaclav Havel's distinction between hope and optimism. Hope, he said, is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. My hopeful outlook is also based on John Lilly's point that when all is said and done, what that really matters is who you touch along the way. For dedicated, competent physical education teachers, however, touching kids in deeper, more sustained ways would certainly be facilitated by some fundamental changes in how schools do business.

© PELINKS4U, 2004