On Becoming a Male Physical Education Teacher: the informal culture of students and the construction of hegemonic masculinity

In this paper I reflect upon my own experience of training to be a teacher of physical education (PE). I focus on two particular rituals — which I call ‘Entertainments Night’ and ‘The Greyhound Inn’ — in order to demonstrate how informal culture served to legitimate and reproduce a hegemonic form of masculinity within the student body. This seriously undermined those messages which were being transmitted, simultaneously, through the formal culture of the institution, in new curriculum practices. The paper concludes by addressing PE in schools and suggests that attempts to improve the quality of practice cannot be separated from issues of masculinity.