Fostering intercultural dialogue: a case study of Chinese-Canadian students’ experiences and perspectives of a kinesiology program

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent research has drawn attention to the culture of whiteness and Eurocentrism within post-secondary kinesiology and physical education programs. By speaking with eighteen Chinese-Canadian undergraduate students, this case study examines how Eurocentrism manifests in an undergraduate kinesiology program at a western Canadian university. We found that a subtle, yet pervasive, center–margin framework was woven throughout the teaching and research culture of the program. This binary served to legitimize Western approaches to knowing and doing health and physical activity, while marginalizing – if not excluding altogether – non-Western knowledge systems. As one possible pathway for disrupting this knowledge/power hierarchy within kinesiology, we propose building opportunities for epistemic interculturalism throughout the curriculum. We maintain that a first step towards fostering intercultural opportunities is understanding the conditions of possibility that may enable or constrain non-coercive dialogical spaces. To this end, we aspire to expose the complex and subtle everyday processes through which the hegemony of the Western tradition is reproduced, which we suggest is the most significant contribution of this paper.