This paper seeks to outline a context for the reform and redesign of school physical education through a new critical pedagogy. I use the concept of precarity as a lens through which to view ongoing and emerging challenges. Economic crises and austerity (Clark and Heath, 2014), small government (Judt, 2010), the privatisation of public resources (Meek, 2014), digitisation and social media (Goodyear et al, 2017), growing inequality (Atkinson, 2015), and the rise of the Precariat, ‘the new dangerous social class’ (Standing, 2016), have generated new challenges for education. Given current government policy in Scotland centred on reducing social inequality, the Precariat provides an opportunity to take a much more nuanced view of social inequality than we have previously been able to. Moreover, it allows us to problematize how we deploy social class in our analyses of the challenges facing schools and education now and in the future (Savage et al., 2015).
A second focus for this paper is the notion of a new critical pedagogy. There has been something of a retreat from the idea of critical pedagogy among the physical education research community in recent years, with for example Tinning’s (2002) influential advocacy of a ‘modest pedagogy’ and Enright et al’s (2014) proposal for Appreciative Inquiry. I will argue that now more than ever physical educators need to be alive to the serious social and economic challenges that shape young people’s health, happiness and life chances. I will seek to demonstrate how this new critical pedagogy, informed by Rorty’s (1999) pragmatism and a politics of possibility and social hope, can create an agenda for reform and redesign that involves networked learning communities of teachers and pupils in partnership with external agents and agencies such as researchers and policy-makers (Day and Townsend, 2009).
