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.

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.