Changing the student teacher habitus: interweaving Bourdieu’s theory of practice with pragmatism’s crisis, creativity, and problem based learning

Abstract

In recent years, Bourdieu’s sociological theory of practice has become an increasingly common approach for exploring sport, physical education (PE), and physical culture more generally (see for example, Sanchez & Spencer 2013; lisahunter et al., 2015). Our interest here is to present the view that Bourdieu’s theory of practice provides a complimentary set of conceptual tools for understanding and potentially intervening in what Lawson (1988) refers to as the five interweaving analytical types of socialization that contribute to occupational socialization into PE, namely: societal, sport, professional, organizational, and bureaucratic. Central to the idea of habitus is that once developed through sustained and repetitive practice in the social fields inhabited, relatively stable schemes of dispositions (physical, emotional, and cognitive orientations towards the social world) are developed which guide (but not determine) how individuals perceive and choose to act in these fields. However, once developed, these dispositions are relatively difficult to change, which serves the field’s social continuity and transmission of values and practices over time. The contention of this chapter is that this is precisely the situation that undergraduate PE programs, PE teacher education (PETE), and initial teacher education (ITE) programs1 continuously face when attempting to address the a priori socialization of physical education students and student teachers respectively.