School Physical Education and Teacher Education

Collaborative Redesign for the 21st Century

Ann MacPhail, Hal Lawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000030297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

Setting a common international agenda for physical education, this book asks how physical education and physical education teacher education can be reconfigured together so that they are responsive to changes in today's fast-paced, diverse and uncertain global society.

It argues that only a revolutionary move away from national policy silos can reinvigorate physical education and lead to improved, equitable outcomes for children and youth, and both novice and veteran teachers. Drawing on developing success stories in diverse places, this book emphasizes three important strategies:

• international-comparative analyses, which facilitate cross-border knowledge generation, innovation, professional learning and continuous improvement;
• solid, dynamic partnerships between teacher education programmes and exemplary school physical education programmes; and
• knowledge-generating teams consisting of exemplary teachers and teacher educators.

Each chapter provides viable alternatives and rationales framed by unique national and local contexts. Significantly, these chapters announce that the work that lies ahead – and starts now – is a collective action project. It necessitates collaborative research and development among policy leaders, researchers, teacher education specialists, physical education teachers and, in some cases, school-age students.

This is essential reading for all researchers with an interest in physical education or teacher education, and an invaluable source of new perspectives for physical education students, pre-service and in-service teachers, and educational administrators and policymakers.

Chapter 1

Grand challenges as catalysts for the collaborative redesign of physical education, teacher education, and research and development

Ann MacPhail and Hal A. Lawson

School Physical Education (PE) and companion Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) programmes in higher education in diverse parts of the world share an important developmental trajectory. For example, they have been developed in response to the dominant model for a universal school in the host nation, which encourages ideas about “a one best PE system”. Leaders emphasize “reforms” and “improvements” in existing programmes, practices, and policies. “Dis-connects” between PE and PETE are commonplace. Conflicts among PE teachers, even in the same school, are not unusual, at the same time that PETE faculty-researchers engage in international contests for the one best PE model for the universal model for a school. Above all, equitable opportunities and outcomes for all manner of children and youths remain elusive (Lawson, 2018), particularly in national, state/provincial, and local contexts in which elite sport performance dominates the PE agenda.

Meanwhile, an international research and development enterprise emphasizes standardization founded on commonalities and similarities involving PE, PETE, and their relations. Examples start with three international handbooks, which provide valuable reviews of theory, research, and practice. Like all such reviews, The Routledge Handbook of Physical Education Pedagogies (Ennis, 2017), The Routledge Handbook of Primary Physical Education (Griggs and Petrie, 2017), and The Handbook of Physical Education (Kirk et al., 2006) emphasize retrospective accounts of progress indicators and collective achievements. These handbooks, like other international research and development literatures, are essential repositories for PE and PETE pedagogy. They summarize what American sociologist Dan Lortie (1975) called “the shared technical culture” for teachers and teacher educators, recommending optimal practices and policies for the important work of helping young people around the world adopt health-enhancing, physically active lifestyles.

However, these handbooks are selective in two important ways. They minimize the importance of national and state/provincial contexts, oftentimes offering the impression that the knowledge bases they summarize will travel easily across national and regional borders. At the same time, they convey the impression that societies, schools, communities, families, and young people are in a relatively stable state, enabling PE professionals worldwide to prioritize reforms and modest improvements in schools, teacher education programmes, and public policies. Put another way, these handbooks emphasize an inward-looking perspective. They risk promoting the assumption that today’s PE programmes and schools, like PETE programmes and higher education institutions, will be more or less the same tomorrow.

An international framework for strategic planning, proactive leadership, and adaptive designs offers an important, timely alternative. It encourages PE and PETE professionals and other key stakeholders to perform regular assessments of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. In shorthand, these strategies are called SWOT assessments. Twin SWOT assessments are recommended: (1) ones directed at the internal environments, i.e. intra-professional strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; and (2) ones directed toward external environments, i.e. local, state/provincial, national, and international fixtures, challenges, and changes. While some of this SWOT work can be framed as futures-responsive, it also has the potential to yield programme and policy catalysts which may shape more desirable futures for PE, PETE, teachers, children and youths, and schools and communities.

All SWOT assessments yield important knowledge regarding the unique features and developmental trajectories of nations, world regions, states and provinces, and local contexts. Nevertheless, the multifaceted process of globalization is a homogenizing force. It helps to explain cross-border commonalities and similarities alongside unique characteristics. Toward this end, the field of international and comparative education is founded in part on the advantages gained by cross-national studies focused on commonalities, similarities, and differences. It emphasizes manifest needs, vexing problems, and promising solutions.

Drawing on this international-comparative perspective, this book presents the results of a specialized SWOT analysis. Grand Challenges are identified and described in the following chapters, illuminating dramatic and somewhat variable changes underway in nations around the world. While modest reforms and incremental improvements in PE and PETE may be fit for purpose, these grand challenges also may necessitate the strategic redesign of PE, PETE, and their relations (Lawson, 2018). Either way, teachers and teacher educators confront inescapable questions regarding how best to respond (e.g. via reform and improvement strategies) as well as whether and how to assume leadership for bold redesign strategies. Each chapter provides viable alternatives and rationales, albeit framed and limited by particular national and local contexts.

Significantly, these chapters announce that the work that lies ahead – and starts now – is a collective action project. It necessitates collaborative research and development among policy leaders, researchers, teacher education specialists, PE teachers, and, in some cases, school-age students. No wonder: each grand challenge is an adaptive problem without easy answers (Heifetz et al., 2009). In other words, the work that lies ahead is not merely implementation of what may be considered as optimal practice models and strategies. It also involves strategic innovation and bold redesign in schools and community education systems, which are like moving targets because their leaders also are wrestling with adaptive problems caused by emergent grand challenges.

Whether in school systems, PE, or PETE, responsive research and development initiatives outstrip the expertise of one or a few authorities. Thus, it is timely and important to marshal the talents and expertise of international experts, especially eminent physical education teacher educators, expert PE teachers and policy stakeholders. Team-based writing is a practical necessity because addressing internationally-relevant grand challenges requires collective action, albeit with important reminders. For example, contextual uniqueness rules out the idea of a singular generalizable solution.

In other words, while professionals everywhere may confront the same or comparable grand challenges, the context matters. The implication is that singular “one size fits all” solutions no longer are good currency. To wit: continuous quality improvement strategies are fit for purpose in some contexts, while bold redesign is needed in others.

This book provides a framework for all such understanding. More than social analysis, it offers practical strategies and innovative policy proposals for practising and prospective teachers and teacher educators. This new rationale can be hailed as “unity with diversity” founded on international-comparative analysis.

The importance of an international-comparative framework

This book is a sequel to Redesigning Physical Education (Lawson, 2018) which also offers an international-comparative perspective. Framed by an American-style analysis in the initial chapters, teams of authors representing mostly English-speaking, Euro-centric nations provided developmental treatises of reform, improvement and redesign initiatives in their host nations. One of the benefits from the book is enhanced understanding of international commonalities, similarities, and uniqueness; and particularly what leaders have done in response to emergent needs and challenges, while striving to create a more desirable future.

Changing contexts

The timing is right for more such collaborative, international-comparative analyses. The context for schools, higher education institutions that serve as organizational homes for PETE programmes, and policy is changing rapidly and dramatically. In contrast to relatively stable nations with firm boundaries, today’s global societies change rapidly and even dramatically. For example, unprecedented numbers of people continue to cross borders, bringing diverse languages and cultural traditions from sender nations to receiving nations that provide new homes. Meanwhile, successful technological innovations and new policy designs in one nation are being evaluated to determine their import and transferability for a host nation – and with special interest in how emergent models and strategies developed elsewhere hold promise for emergent and persistent challenges in the host nation.

Cross-border learning, development, lesson-drawing, and knowledge generation

All such international-comparative analysis undertaken with the possibility of cross-border transfer of innovative institutional designs, policies, and practices is ripe with uncertainty, complexity, and risk. Few innovations developed in one nation transfer easily and effectively to others because the national, regional, and local contexts differ, and each nation’s somewhat unique social institutional designs matter.

On the other hand, a particular nation’s developing success story is noteworthy as leaders address one or more vexing problems that also challenge other nations. Although the direct technology transfer is not feasible or advisable, there is much to be learned from international-comparative analysis. In fact, new knowledge developed in one nation has practical import for other nations, which raises an important practical question. How can its potential be realized and maximized?

Schön and Rein (1995) developed the idea of “lesson-drawing” to describe this cross-border, knowledge-sharing and learning-rich process. It is founded on several ideas which also are foundational for this book. For example, diverse nations oftentimes confront identical and comparable challenges – as indicated in the structure of this book. While myriad forces and factors are at play as proposed solutions are crafted, implemented, and evaluated in a host nation, there is much to be learned and gained as this process unfolds. Kurt Lewin’s (1952) framework for an action-oriented science has particular relevance. Assuming he was correct when he claimed that one of the best ways to understand any phenomenon is by attempting to change it in its naturally-occurring context(s), it follows that PE- and PETE-focused innovations developed to address a grand challenge in one nation have import for others.

Drawing on Lewin, failed, partially effective, and successful innovations provide insights into the phenomenon of interest – a special grand challenge. More specifically, they enhance agenda-setting, also known as problem-setting (Lawson, 1984), focused on the grand challenge. Experiences in one nation recommend alternative ways to frame the needs, opportunities and problems in other nations, perhaps nominating a special language or discourse system. Here, comparative social analysis paves the way for strategic social action across borders and in context-sensitive ways.

This priority for nation-specific, contextual sensitivity derives from disciplines known variously as international-comparative studies, globalization studies, and sustainable development studies. In contrast to rough-cut, early twentieth century frameworks founded on flawed assumptions regarding international commonalities and important similarities, international-comparative research and development, operating under several names, is more nuanced. For example, the idea of Regional Development Studies emphasizes nations’ social geographic, demographic, and economic development features, including claims that nations in particular parts of the world have enough in common to be considered, studied, and perhaps improved together. At the same time, inherited classifications such as post-industrial nations, industrialized nations, and developing nations continue to be applied in particular regions of the world.

Framing and addressing international grand challenges: key assumptions

This book is structured to enable Physical Educationists and paediatric Kinesiology specialists to draw on salient frameworks and strategies derived from international-comparative analyses and regional development studies as they strive to make progress in meeting physical activity, sport, and health-related needs of children and youths worldwide. The main assumptions need to be made explicit in order to prevent misunderstanding and facilitate strategic, collective action in particular nations.

• As globalization advances, physical educationists and paediatric Kinesiology specialists in diverse parts of the world must address emergent and future needs and priorities, herein called Grand Challenges.

• Although these grand challenges play out somewhat uniquely in host national contexts, salient commonalities and similarities recommend the generic inventory presented in this book.

• Although a particular grand challenge may not be evident or prioritized at this time, the steady march of globalization predicts its eventual emergence with needs for strategic action.

• Educators, broadly defined to include educational policy leaders, are already wrestling with some of the same grand challenges, and their efforts are manifested in innovations in schools and education systems overall.

• The foundational efforts of Physical Educationists and paediatric Kinesiology specialists to address one or more grand challenges in particular parts of the world offer important lessons for colleagues in diverse nations worldwide.

• Lesson-drawing from real-world efforts in particular nations to address one or more Grand Challenges is not to be interpreted as imperialism, a thinly-veiled colonial initiative, or yet another homoge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Grand challenges as catalysts for the collaborative redesign of physical education, teacher education, and research and development
• 2 The aims and outcomes challenge: preparing physical education teacher educators and teachers for twenty-first century redesign imperatives and accountability requirements
• 3 The standards-based curricular reform challenge: shared responsibility through networking
• 4 The alignment and coherence challenge: developing university–school partnerships for the simultaneous improvement and redesign of school programmes and teacher education
• 5 The innovation challenge: maintaining programme standards and developing cohesion while developing and testing alternative designs in new kinds of schools
• 6 The interdisciplinary challenge: preparing teacher educators and teachers to span knowledge, organizational and international boundaries
• 7 The professional socialization challenge: teacher education for a preferable future for physical education
• 8 The cultural competence challenge: readying schools and university programmes for student, teacher and faculty diversity
• 9 The digital age challenge: preparing physical and health educators to understand and support “online” youth
• 10 The PE school curriculum challenge: the shared construction, implementation and enactment of school physical education curriculum
• 11 The research and development challenge: better aligning teachers’ and teacher educators’ needs, priorities and demands
• 12 The evidence-based decision-making challenge: developing research-supported, data-informed, structures and strategies in schools and teacher education programmes
• 13 The professional development challenge: achieving desirable outcomes for students, teachers and teacher educators
• 14 The public policy challenge: preparing and supporting teacher educators and teachers as change agents and policy entrepreneurs
• 15 Learning to plan and planning to learn during turbulent times
• 16 Developing commitments and capacity to learn with, and from, each other
• Index