Peering into the physical education office in Australian schools : the departmental office as a socialization space

The work of Hal Lawson in the early 1980s (1983a, 1983b) gave some of the early direction to socialization research in physical education. This work was guided by Lortie’s (1975) ideas around a person’s subjective warrant. This referred to a subjective understanding of what it means to teach, and a personal appraisal of one’s ability to meet those challenges. Whilst physical education teacher education (PETE) has been considered to be a low impact enterprise with little scope for addressing predisposed views of teaching (Lawson, 1983b) much less is known the nature of the learning experiences gained within, what are often, the tight confines of the PE departmental staffroom or office within a school. These were our primary concerns both within the context of first, the field-based experiences during a PETE program and second, in the beginning year of teaching. What follows then is a discussion about a project that was primarily focused on the idea of the workplace as a context for professional learning. We soon realized that this was inextricably linked to how preservice PE teachers are (or are not) socialized into the profession.