Sunday, December 5, 2010
History never repeats....?
The current debates about physical education and its value as a part of education are similar to those that were had in the profession, primarily in the United States of America, during the 1930s. The only different was that in present day it is the fight for physical education to continue with the discourses of sport rather than education; whereas nearly 80 years ago these debates were between education and medicine.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Affect in physical education - a professional concern
Education is supposed to be about teaching for the holistic development of the child or adolescent. Within physical education this is often construed too narrowly, where skill development, fitness and physical activity are the main activities that make up its content and pedagogy.
As a researcher and teacher educator responsible for researching and teaching future physical educators I have an interest in the development of the holistic being, that primarily being the child. One aspect that I think is often forgotten by physical education teachers is that of affect. For me the affective qualities relate really to areas such as feeling, emotion, sensing, pleasure, meaning and meaning-making and are best understood, I think by terms such as fun, joy and delight. My own area of research, of late, is beginning to understand how this can be taught in physical education. Several of my recent papers have examined these concepts. The one thing that I can say for sure is that it is under-researched (so if you are looking for an Honours/Masters project can I suggest you contact me: trent.brown@monash.edu) although there has been move of late within the literature of interest in these areas.
One of my concerns is that future physical educators do not really understand these concepts well and are not taught these concepts within their undergraduate studies. It is really a marginalised area of research and as a result teaching. Having said this the work of several influential educators, philosophers and academicians (Pope from University of Waikato, Kretchmar from Penn State, Tinning from UQ, Sandahl from Norway, Kentel from Leeds Met, Pringle from University of Auckland) have attempted to adjust the agenda with relation to affect. Whilst I am buoyant about the possibilities, I do wish to share a concern I have about this work.
Some of the work have insinuated either implicitly or explicitly, that for affect to be meaningful it needs to occur in an alternate pedagogical form of physical education such as Sport Education in Physical Education Program (SEPEP) or in Teaching Games for Understanding (see Pope, 2005, 2005a; Kretchmar 2005). Should not it be the responsibility of the physical educator to teach for movement affect, movement delight or movement meaning irrespective of the context of the program? My answer is overwhelming YES! In physical education the teacher should be responsible for the teaching of these concepts irrespective. It should be at the forefront of the physical educators mind, when planning and teaching and that everytime they enter the physical education classroom joy, emotion, sensation, fun and delight are at the core of what they do. In doing so they should not privilege this, but be aware that if holism is an appropriate objective of physical education that these concepts should be taught next to skill development, fitness and physical activity.
It is important that such ongoing development of alternative models continues, so in this way I do not wish to deny that such work is therefore important. My concern with the model(s) is that some teachers might say that they teach affect only when they use SEPEP or TGfU.
In summary I implore teachers to teach for affect in all of their physical education classes INCLUDING those when they use models such as SEPEP and TGfU. It is an important but often neglected area of pedagogy - I am guessing that you like mean want to make sure that student's are engaged with experiences that are meaningful.
Trent
As a researcher and teacher educator responsible for researching and teaching future physical educators I have an interest in the development of the holistic being, that primarily being the child. One aspect that I think is often forgotten by physical education teachers is that of affect. For me the affective qualities relate really to areas such as feeling, emotion, sensing, pleasure, meaning and meaning-making and are best understood, I think by terms such as fun, joy and delight. My own area of research, of late, is beginning to understand how this can be taught in physical education. Several of my recent papers have examined these concepts. The one thing that I can say for sure is that it is under-researched (so if you are looking for an Honours/Masters project can I suggest you contact me: trent.brown@monash.edu) although there has been move of late within the literature of interest in these areas.
One of my concerns is that future physical educators do not really understand these concepts well and are not taught these concepts within their undergraduate studies. It is really a marginalised area of research and as a result teaching. Having said this the work of several influential educators, philosophers and academicians (Pope from University of Waikato, Kretchmar from Penn State, Tinning from UQ, Sandahl from Norway, Kentel from Leeds Met, Pringle from University of Auckland) have attempted to adjust the agenda with relation to affect. Whilst I am buoyant about the possibilities, I do wish to share a concern I have about this work.
Some of the work have insinuated either implicitly or explicitly, that for affect to be meaningful it needs to occur in an alternate pedagogical form of physical education such as Sport Education in Physical Education Program (SEPEP) or in Teaching Games for Understanding (see Pope, 2005, 2005a; Kretchmar 2005). Should not it be the responsibility of the physical educator to teach for movement affect, movement delight or movement meaning irrespective of the context of the program? My answer is overwhelming YES! In physical education the teacher should be responsible for the teaching of these concepts irrespective. It should be at the forefront of the physical educators mind, when planning and teaching and that everytime they enter the physical education classroom joy, emotion, sensation, fun and delight are at the core of what they do. In doing so they should not privilege this, but be aware that if holism is an appropriate objective of physical education that these concepts should be taught next to skill development, fitness and physical activity.
It is important that such ongoing development of alternative models continues, so in this way I do not wish to deny that such work is therefore important. My concern with the model(s) is that some teachers might say that they teach affect only when they use SEPEP or TGfU.
In summary I implore teachers to teach for affect in all of their physical education classes INCLUDING those when they use models such as SEPEP and TGfU. It is an important but often neglected area of pedagogy - I am guessing that you like mean want to make sure that student's are engaged with experiences that are meaningful.
Trent
Thursday, August 5, 2010
A call to arms: physical education and professional learning - is self-study an answer?
As a physical education teacher, researcher and physical education teacher educator one of my aims is to understand what happens in the name of physical education. Over the past decade as I have moved from being a teacher, to teacher educator one thing that has always interested me is the notion of professional learning. This has come to the fore for me more recently as I grapple with my own research identity. My Phd dissertation related to what physical education teachers' knew about health related physical activity knowledge. However this did not answer all the questions that I have about our profession. I have moved through to engage with qualitative research and more recently the 'lived experiences' of students and teachers. This has led me back to examining the personal narratives of professional learning of physical education teachers as they have lived it.
I recently re-read an article by Professor Kathy Armour (now University of Birmingham) in the journal Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy (2010 - 15:1-13) titled The physical education profession and its professional responsibility...or...why '12 weeks paid holiday' will never be enough. It was a call to arms for all physical educators, be they teachers, researchers, academics, professional associations to re-focus their effort on professional learning in physical education, as Armour stated we all have a "...professional responsibility in physical education."
Each member of the profession has a responsibility to base its best practices upon the best knowledge available at any given time. This important statement should guide the profession into the future as research that is conducted needs to be more clearly disseminated. HOwever for me is problematic. I am not sure that physical education teachers atually engage in any research literature after they have graduted, except when they are presented with information as part of a professional development session. Armour's call to arms for career-long professional development (CPD) is identified as a defining characteristic of all professions, yet it is argued that much of the CPD traditionally offered to physical education is limited in both scope and challenge. I tend to agree and it is something worth examining in greater detail.
There are a couple of points from the Armour (2010) article that I would like to re-iterate:
1. that the role of the researcher is to "...listen to what teachers say, respect it, and try to find ways of making things a bit better for the profession" (Armour, 2010) - I fully support this position and hopefully this blog goes some way in understanding this.
2. The traditional model of CPD made up of one day courses, disconnected from previous experiences of professional learning and delivered out of school is ineffective and does not impact of teachers practices.
3. Teacher education and university education in physical education and professional development should be seen as one and the same process, e.g. long term development of teachers as learners, teacher education should model the learning approach and CPD needs to support teachers' learning and with research progressively throughout their careers.
It is this final point that I wish to describe in a little more detail. Dot point 3 goes to the heart of learning. In line with all the other authors before me teachers need to understand themselves beyond just teaching but also to the notion of supporting, nurturing and developing learning - not only for their students, but to the profession but MOST importantly for themselves - Teachers as learners .
It is my belief that the concept of self-study has the potential to achieve all of the above points already mentioned. This literature is vast, but exists primarily outside of the physical education discourse.
Self-study may be a very important process in understanding physical education teachers' professional learning because it offers ways for teachers' to see beyond the superficial to engage with the 'practical' in more nuanced and sophisticated ways (Loughran, 2007). As physical educators are 'practical' people due to their nature, the content and pedagogies they use on a day to day basis, enable and integrate the professional responsibility espoused by Armour above. This self-study approach to professional learning, which has practice at the forefront of such work needs to become more explicit in the physical education community.
As others have noted "...the outcomes of self-study have the potential to influence practice dramatically". If research and professional learning utilising such an approach becomes more explicit in physical education teacher education and professional learning programs then the profession of physical education would be well served.
I recently re-read an article by Professor Kathy Armour (now University of Birmingham) in the journal Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy (2010 - 15:1-13) titled The physical education profession and its professional responsibility...or...why '12 weeks paid holiday' will never be enough. It was a call to arms for all physical educators, be they teachers, researchers, academics, professional associations to re-focus their effort on professional learning in physical education, as Armour stated we all have a "...professional responsibility in physical education."
Each member of the profession has a responsibility to base its best practices upon the best knowledge available at any given time. This important statement should guide the profession into the future as research that is conducted needs to be more clearly disseminated. HOwever for me is problematic. I am not sure that physical education teachers atually engage in any research literature after they have graduted, except when they are presented with information as part of a professional development session. Armour's call to arms for career-long professional development (CPD) is identified as a defining characteristic of all professions, yet it is argued that much of the CPD traditionally offered to physical education is limited in both scope and challenge. I tend to agree and it is something worth examining in greater detail.
There are a couple of points from the Armour (2010) article that I would like to re-iterate:
1. that the role of the researcher is to "...listen to what teachers say, respect it, and try to find ways of making things a bit better for the profession" (Armour, 2010) - I fully support this position and hopefully this blog goes some way in understanding this.
2. The traditional model of CPD made up of one day courses, disconnected from previous experiences of professional learning and delivered out of school is ineffective and does not impact of teachers practices.
3. Teacher education and university education in physical education and professional development should be seen as one and the same process, e.g. long term development of teachers as learners, teacher education should model the learning approach and CPD needs to support teachers' learning and with research progressively throughout their careers.
It is this final point that I wish to describe in a little more detail. Dot point 3 goes to the heart of learning. In line with all the other authors before me teachers need to understand themselves beyond just teaching but also to the notion of supporting, nurturing and developing learning - not only for their students, but to the profession but MOST importantly for themselves - Teachers as learners .
It is my belief that the concept of self-study has the potential to achieve all of the above points already mentioned. This literature is vast, but exists primarily outside of the physical education discourse.
Self-study may be a very important process in understanding physical education teachers' professional learning because it offers ways for teachers' to see beyond the superficial to engage with the 'practical' in more nuanced and sophisticated ways (Loughran, 2007). As physical educators are 'practical' people due to their nature, the content and pedagogies they use on a day to day basis, enable and integrate the professional responsibility espoused by Armour above. This self-study approach to professional learning, which has practice at the forefront of such work needs to become more explicit in the physical education community.
As others have noted "...the outcomes of self-study have the potential to influence practice dramatically". If research and professional learning utilising such an approach becomes more explicit in physical education teacher education and professional learning programs then the profession of physical education would be well served.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
A forgotten purpose of physical education
As academics we are often described as living in the ‘ivory tower’ with little or no reality of what is happening in the real world. While I and many of my colleagues would disagree, primarily because we are often in schools watching physical education lessons taught by student teachers or engaging in research projects in collaboration with physical education teachers that keeps us grounded in the up-to-date practice of physical education, I can understand that this mentality is rather pervasive. Having said this, I think that one of my responsibilities along with teaching and service is to ‘academically’ look and research what is occurring in the name of physical education. And this leads me to the following question – what is the purpose of physical education?
It was only a couple of days ago that my colleagues and I were discussing this exact question. Research published in 2008 in the American journal , Quest, argued that the instrumental purposes of getting fit, healthy and well should not be seen as the ONLY purposes for physical education. In fact the author stated that this thought is “…conspiring to rob our profession of its soul”. Interesting point, indeed and I tend to agree. The more that I look at this question, primarily through the literature, the more that it seems to me that physical education has forgotten its purpose educationally. I think that most physical education teachers would agree that physical education is more than just skill development, more than just fitness development, more than just playing games and sport and more than understanding the energy systems of elite athlete. Those physical education teachers who share a similar mindset to mine would argue that what is missing is an understanding about the moral, ethical, social and cultural dimensions of movement. Others would say that the meaning of movement is the ‘forgotten purpose of physical education’. Whilst some physical education teachers value these educational purposes (not as replacements to the knowledge of anatomy or the development of fundamental motor skills, but as complementary to these dominant ways of knowing) they are often marginalised to the risk discourses of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and obesity.
So how might we be able to address these ‘forgotten purposes of physical education’? I think initially physical education teachers need to understand that students engage in movement related activity for many reasons and that an understanding about an individual’s subjective experience of movement in physical education is important and valuable educationally. As another researcher in physical education stated one of the key objectives of physical education is to “discover the heretofore hidden perspectives of acts and uncover the deeper meaning of one’s being as it explores movement experiences”.
Physical education teachers should be aware that there are several purposes to the teaching of physical education. There will always be a place for fitness and skill development, what I am asking is that you consider ‘other ways of knowing’ next time you teach a class of physical education.
It was only a couple of days ago that my colleagues and I were discussing this exact question. Research published in 2008 in the American journal , Quest, argued that the instrumental purposes of getting fit, healthy and well should not be seen as the ONLY purposes for physical education. In fact the author stated that this thought is “…conspiring to rob our profession of its soul”. Interesting point, indeed and I tend to agree. The more that I look at this question, primarily through the literature, the more that it seems to me that physical education has forgotten its purpose educationally. I think that most physical education teachers would agree that physical education is more than just skill development, more than just fitness development, more than just playing games and sport and more than understanding the energy systems of elite athlete. Those physical education teachers who share a similar mindset to mine would argue that what is missing is an understanding about the moral, ethical, social and cultural dimensions of movement. Others would say that the meaning of movement is the ‘forgotten purpose of physical education’. Whilst some physical education teachers value these educational purposes (not as replacements to the knowledge of anatomy or the development of fundamental motor skills, but as complementary to these dominant ways of knowing) they are often marginalised to the risk discourses of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and obesity.
So how might we be able to address these ‘forgotten purposes of physical education’? I think initially physical education teachers need to understand that students engage in movement related activity for many reasons and that an understanding about an individual’s subjective experience of movement in physical education is important and valuable educationally. As another researcher in physical education stated one of the key objectives of physical education is to “discover the heretofore hidden perspectives of acts and uncover the deeper meaning of one’s being as it explores movement experiences”.
Physical education teachers should be aware that there are several purposes to the teaching of physical education. There will always be a place for fitness and skill development, what I am asking is that you consider ‘other ways of knowing’ next time you teach a class of physical education.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Human movement and humans moving
Human movement, physical education, sport, outdoor recreation/education and fitness generally all have one thing in common. They are disciplines which involve the moving body. The moving body is basic to bodily experience but the qualities and characteristics of it in differing environments and communities are not well appreciated in the current education literature nor current public health or health promotion discourses. Physical activity and sport are typically understood through the sciences of exercise/sport (e.g. anatomy, biomechanics, psychology, exercise physiology, skill acquisition and exercise rehabilitation). However, the ‘human’ aspect of movement is lost, as is the notion of human agency and its social and environmental contexts, when such scientific discourses are emphasised.
Within the Movement, Environment and Community (MEC) research group at Monash University – Peninsula campus, a group of researchers believe there is a need in education and public health/health promotion for the development of qualities and characteristics of the body in movement that posits a more intrinsic and subjective value of physical activity. Our research focuses on complex meanings that individuals experience in physical activity. Research has intimated (Kretchmar, 2000) that developing more meaningful experiences of physical activity and movement may help promote and maintain active lifestyles than those that do not.
The lack of understanding about the moving body also serves to undermine how ‘movers’ make meaning of their bodily movements, but more importantly for those that work with the moving body, such as fitness trainers, gym instructors, community sport practitioners, physical education/outdoor education teachers, learning about the subjective and intrinsic qualities of the moving body must complement the richness of knowledge that has occurred in the technical, cognitive and social fields in each of the sub-disciplines.
Traditionally, in schools and pre-service teacher education, the discourses of physical education have been heavily shaped by sports, fitness, skills and drills and a culture of competition. It is therefore important that researchers/educators begin to understand the meaning of movement for children and adolescents in educational settings so as to allow them to find ‘deep’ meaning in their experiences. For example if physical education is ‘about’ learning through, about and in movement, then developing an understanding of the diversity of experiences that bodies can have during moving activities such as golf, soccer, bushwalking, kayaking, tai chi or yoga, must account for not only the scientific rational objective approach most often used (e.g. technical, skills, cognitive), but must also seriously engage with the subjective intrinsic qualities of that experience as experienced by the individuals with which we work.
To date the literature in physical education/sport relating to the moving body has not been abundant but that which has been available for four decades is conceptually rich and has provided untapped intellectual resources for theoretical development of a phenomenology (lived experience) of movement. But this work needs to continue and there are many opportunities for Honours, Masters and Doctoral students to pursue projects/studies related to intrinsic and subjective qualities of movement, the moving body and how individuals might make meaning from their engagement with movement in school, health or community settings.
The study of movement as a broader, more complex, individual and social and spatially sensitive and temporally aware phenomenon and its implications for education relate also to the physical, emotional and mental health debates individuals and society now confronts.
Within the Movement, Environment and Community (MEC) research group at Monash University – Peninsula campus, a group of researchers believe there is a need in education and public health/health promotion for the development of qualities and characteristics of the body in movement that posits a more intrinsic and subjective value of physical activity. Our research focuses on complex meanings that individuals experience in physical activity. Research has intimated (Kretchmar, 2000) that developing more meaningful experiences of physical activity and movement may help promote and maintain active lifestyles than those that do not.
The lack of understanding about the moving body also serves to undermine how ‘movers’ make meaning of their bodily movements, but more importantly for those that work with the moving body, such as fitness trainers, gym instructors, community sport practitioners, physical education/outdoor education teachers, learning about the subjective and intrinsic qualities of the moving body must complement the richness of knowledge that has occurred in the technical, cognitive and social fields in each of the sub-disciplines.
Traditionally, in schools and pre-service teacher education, the discourses of physical education have been heavily shaped by sports, fitness, skills and drills and a culture of competition. It is therefore important that researchers/educators begin to understand the meaning of movement for children and adolescents in educational settings so as to allow them to find ‘deep’ meaning in their experiences. For example if physical education is ‘about’ learning through, about and in movement, then developing an understanding of the diversity of experiences that bodies can have during moving activities such as golf, soccer, bushwalking, kayaking, tai chi or yoga, must account for not only the scientific rational objective approach most often used (e.g. technical, skills, cognitive), but must also seriously engage with the subjective intrinsic qualities of that experience as experienced by the individuals with which we work.
To date the literature in physical education/sport relating to the moving body has not been abundant but that which has been available for four decades is conceptually rich and has provided untapped intellectual resources for theoretical development of a phenomenology (lived experience) of movement. But this work needs to continue and there are many opportunities for Honours, Masters and Doctoral students to pursue projects/studies related to intrinsic and subjective qualities of movement, the moving body and how individuals might make meaning from their engagement with movement in school, health or community settings.
The study of movement as a broader, more complex, individual and social and spatially sensitive and temporally aware phenomenon and its implications for education relate also to the physical, emotional and mental health debates individuals and society now confronts.
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