Physical Education teaching and research is fundamental to the physical and social health of our communities. The Routledge Physical Education Reader presents an authoritative and representative selection of the very best international scholarship in PE, drawn from across the full topical range of the discipline.

Containing a rich blend of contemporary, ‘classic’ and hard-to-find articles, this book helps students gain a full understanding of the historical context in which current issues and debates within PE have emerged. Leading international scholars Richard Bailey and David...

Can we imagine a future in which physical education in schools no longer exists?

In this controversial and powerful meditation on physical education, David Kirk argues that a number of different futures are possible. Kirk argues that multi-activity, sport-based forms of physical education have been dominant in schools since the mid-twentieth century and that they have been highly resistant to change. The practice of physical education has focused on the transmission of de-contextualised sport-techniques to large classes of children who possess a range of interests and...

To understand and more creatively capture the social world, visual methods have increasingly become used by researchers in the social sciences and education. However, despite the rapid development of visual-based knowledge, and despite the obvious links between human movement and visual forms of understanding, visual research has been scarce in the fields of physical culture and physical education pedagogy. This groundbreaking book is the first to mark a "visual turn" in understanding and researching physical culture and pedagogies, offering innovative, image-based research that reveals...