ABSTRACT

Within the burgeoning physical cultural studies (PCS) scholarship, pedagogy has begun to emerge as a conceptual lens through which to understand the nexus between culture, the body, and learning. More recently, public pedagogy has become a driving force in the theorization and practice of PCS, and while the term is taken up in various ways, these usages are broadly situated within two key approaches. First, a number of studies explore how sites of physical culture operate pedagogically – that is, researchers analyze how various sites of physical culture in the public sphere act as pedagogical spaces and/or as pedagogues, as they teach us into certain ways of thinking about bodies, health, and physical activity. Second, the term public pedagogy is being deployed within PCS scholarship as a way to describe the ‘public engagement’ work that has become a fundamental aspect of the vision and enactment of PCS (Andrews and Silk, 2015). Andrews and Silk (ibid.) state, for example, that one key element of PCS is that it is ‘pedagogical’, and that ‘PCS represents a form of public pedagogy designed to impact learning communities within the academy, in the classroom, and throughout broader publics’. Despite this ethos, how (public) pedagogy is conceptualized and/or enacted is often unclear. In offering some distinction, we begin this chapter by exploring how the construct of ‘public pedagogy’ (Sandlin, O’Malley and Burdick, 2011) challenges the idea that pedagogical phenomena reside only in formal educational spaces. Subsequently, we explore some of the ways in which scholars have problematized public pedagogy, its theoretical and practical conceptualizations and what this might mean for PCS.