Fitzpatrick qualified first as a teacher, and taught for seven years in secondary schools in South Auckland.
[1] She worked as a lecturer in the Sport and Leisure Studies Department at the University of Waikato.
A critical ethnography of health, physical education and (sub)urban schooling at the University of Waikato.
[2] Fitzpatrick then joined the faculty of the University of Auckland, rising to full professor.
Her first, Critical Pedagogy, Physical Education and Urban Schooling (2013, Peter Lang) won the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Outstanding Book Prize in 2013.