Description: Critical Pedagogy, Physical Education and Urban Schooling is a critical ethnography of health, physical education and the schooling experiences of urban youth. This book thus explores the complex potential for health and physical education as key sites of learning for marginalized urban youth, examining these disciplines as subjects that are both politically fraught and also spaces of hope.
Review Quotes: Katie Fitzpatrick is a gifted researcher and writer. Her familiarity with the literatures of health/physical education, critical ethnography and reproduction theory is most impressive. Her ability to integrate social theory with critical ethnography and lives reflects her talents as a theorist and a writer. At the intersection, then, of critical ethnography and physical/health education, Dr. Fitzpatrick crafts a narrative about racialized bodies, produced and performed at the intersection of color, class and sexuality where young people ingest, resist, queer and challenge dominant stereotypes that circulate on the gym floor. (Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Social Psychology, Women's Studies and Urban Education, Graduate Center, CUNY, New York)
This is a very thoughtful and readable book. It does justice to the lives of the young people whose stories and lives are interpreted in sensitive and theoretically robust ways. This work is important for practitioners, teacher educators and policy makers and for PETE students - some of whom will recognise their own experiences and others who will be inspired to engage in a critical pedagogical approach. (Jan Wright, Professorial Research Fellow, Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong, Australia)