Cultural Humility in Physical Education Teacher Education: A Missing Piece in Developing a New Generation of Socially Just Physical Education Teachers

ABSTRACT

The increased pluralism in today’s United States society, including our public school student population, has called for physical education teacher education (PETE) programs to train teachers who can respond to the educational needs of students from diverse backgrounds. However, concerns have been raised with educator preparation programs’ ability to prepare teachers to address diversity in our schools. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to discuss the movement toward teaching for social justice in PETE with focus on preparing teachers for cultural diversity; this includes special attention to cultural humility as a missing component in physical education teacher preparation. We discuss the current state of diversity in PETE, leading to a discussion of social justice as a theme in teaching and teacher education in physical education. Next, we detail the underpinnings of social justice pedagogies in physical education and the need for infusing cultural humility in PETE.     

试论吉罗克斯的后现代教育观——激进教育中的边界教育学

吉罗克斯作为美国当代激进教育学派和后现代教育的代表人物,其思想继承了早期美国激进主义教育的特征,其中不乏许多激进的、批判的观点和理论。尤其是他从文化政治学的视角去关注教育,注重教育哲学,不乏为一创新之举。文章主要阐述他的一个全新的教育理论——边界教育学,并对其哲学基础和政治视角加以分析。     

Border Pedagogy: A Study of Preservice Teacher Transformation

In our increasingly interconnected global society, learning to think about ourselves in a border context, making crossings and connections, reflecting on our position and power, and articulating a vision of social justice are necessary civic skills. Developing educational border crossers who have moved beyond stereotyping and the tourist's gaze to have a sensibility for social justice can enrich public life and stimulate the deepest forms of civic engagement. This study examines a teacher education program's nascent efforts to develop multicultural competencies, specifically border pedagogy, in future teachers.     

Re-thinking Theory and Practice in the Preservice Teacher Education Classroom: Teaching to learn from learning to teach

This paper addresses the relationship between theory and practice in preservice teacher education. Using Giroux's (1994) distinction between a "pedagogy of theory" and a "pedagogy of theorizing", it explores the difference between prospective teachers learning about education in teacher preparation courses and learning from it by critically reading the educative process in their own preservice education classrooms. Challenging the idea that preservice education is merely preparation for a practicum conducted elsewhere and in the future, this paper proposes that teacher education classrooms become practicum environment in-and-of-themselves, where practice gets theorized and theory is not only considered for practice but is indeed practiced as it interrogates practice.     

School mining clubs in Kono,Sierra Leone: the practices and imaginaries of a pedagogy of protest against social injustice in a conflict-affected context

ABSTRACT

This paper takes as a case study the pedagogical practices emergent from the educational interventions of a civil society organisation in the conflict affected region of Kono, Sierra Leone. Using a cultural political economy approach, it highlights the possibilities of pedagogy being leveraged to protest against perceived and experienced social injustices. In so doing it contributes to understanding of a context-specific model of teacher agency, rooted in the local and global challenges faced by pupils and their communities. It thereby illuminates an alternative to the generic and decontextualized framings of pedagogy frequently offered in human rights and peace education curricula.     

Service Learning and Early Childhood Education: Intersection of Developmentally Appropriate Practice and P.A.R.E.

ABSTRACT

Service learning (SL) is both a pedagogy and philosophy adopted by many early childhood teacher educators. Extant research suggests the incorporation of service-learning can be effective for facilitating preservice teacher learning of curriculum, pedagogy, approaches to diverse learners and families as well as establishing a professional identity. To guide the intentional adoption of SL and its assessment in early childhood teacher education programs, the authors present the Developmentally Appropriate Practice /P.A.R.E. model and illustrate how the model might be applied in a teacher education program. Challenges to incorporating service-learning in early childhood education programs and future areas of research are described.     

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy for Teachers of Color

ABSTRACT

This study utilizes the conceptual framework of culturally responsive pedagogy and theoretical suppositions about the culturally responsive teacher educator to examine the learning experiences of teacher candidates of color. Findings from the case study of a teacher educator’s and teacher candidates’ of color teaching and learning experiences in a semester-long course revealed the following: (a) The teacher educator’s culturally responsive content was characterized by resistance, revelation, and support and (b) culturally responsive teacher educator pedagogy involved instructional approaches of modeling change and building community. Implications for culturally responsive pedagogies in the teacher education classroom and professional development are explored.     

What is critical about critical pedagogy? Conflicting conceptions of criticism in the curriculum*

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the problems of cultivating a critical attitude in pedagogy given problems with accounts grounded in critical social theory, rational liberalism and pragmatic esthetic theory. I offer instead an alternative account of criticism for education in open, pluralistic, liberal, democratic societies called 'pedagogy of difference' that is grounded in the diversity liberalism of Isaiah Berlin and the dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber. In our current condition in which there is no agreement as to the proper criteria for assessing attitudes and actions, for a critical attitude to gain a foothold one must learn to evaluate proposed beliefs and behaviour-based standards within a particular tradition as well as those drawn from another viewpoint. To know oneself, one must engage others who are different. But to engage others in a meaningful way one must be immersed in a tradition to which one is heir or with which one chooses to affiliate.     

Critical liberal education: an undergraduate pedagogy for teacher candidates in socially diverse university settings

This article addresses the lack of attention universities have given to adjusting liberal education, the undergraduate major for teachers in California, to the increase of multi‐ethnic, multi‐racial, and social class heterogeneity in state universities. This article argues for a revised pedagogy for undergraduate liberal arts education for teacher candidates in California called critical liberal education. This pedagogy emphasizes the interdisciplinary knowledge and inquiry skills of a traditional program in conjunction with intercultural competence, civic engagement and an ethical stance toward social justice. This pedagogy brings liberal arts education in line with living in our complex multicultural democracy to create analytic, engaged teacher‐citizens for the twenty‐first century.     

An Introduction to Mathematics for Social Justice

Abstract

In this introduction to the PRIMUS Special Issue on Mathematics for Social Justice we provide a brief history of social justice in the context of undergraduate mathematics pedagogy and explain the purpose and motivation behind this movement in undergraduate education.     

Policy,practice, and reconversion in Spanish educational reform: teaching and teacher education in physical education

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, reform of the Spanish education system has been justified by reformists as a response to the social and economic changes that have occurred in Spanish society since the democratic transition in the 1970s. Consolidation of democracy, development of technology and economic convergence with the advanced nations of Europe have been seen as the major challenges for educational reform. Restructuring and legitimation processes derived from the requirements of the new reform have been conceptualized as a policy of reconversion, the main purpose of which is to maintain, or achieve, a strong competitive position in the international market. In this paper, conceptualizing educational reform as a reconversion process will allow us to link aspects of the new curriculum (content, pedagogy and assessment), school organization, teaching and teacher education in physical education with wider economic, social and cultural influences and explore the tensions and conflicts between policy and practice in PE in schools. The paper will argue that there is a widening gap between the interests of progressive educationalists and the direction of market‐driven education reform.     

Situated learning theory and the pedagogy of teacher education: Towards an integrative view of teacher behavior and teacher learning

Lave and Wenger have greatly influenced existing views of learning and teaching, but relatively little has been written about the implications for the understanding of teacher behavior and teacher learning, and for the pedagogy of teacher education. Based on their work, a three-level model of learning is used to analyze the friction between teacher behavior in practice and the wish to ground teachers' practices in theory. Supported by empirical data on teacher learning and brain research, this model reconciles the situated learning perspective with traditional cognitive theory, and leads to concrete implications for the pedagogy of teacher education.     

Shoring up the pillars of modernity: Teacher education and the quest for certainty

Teacher education is set within countervailing influences. On the one hand, governments seek to minimise their expenditure on the welfare state as they make their national economies competitive within global markets. This is associated with a centralising tendency which is typified by an increasing standardisation of the means and ends of education, including teacher education, especially in England. On the other hand, consumer culture, social fragmentation and intellectual ferment all combine to exert centripetal influences on teacher education. In England, the government's reaffirmation of a highly bureaucratic modernist structure for teacher education can itself be questioned on economic grounds. The emerging knowledge-based, high-value 'new' economy is ill-served by thinly-disguised Taylorist management regimes which impose conformity and engender low levels of trust. Nor will a back-to-basics pedagogy resonate with young people whose affinity for a conformist Protestant ethic may be wearing increasingly thin. The argument is theorized using Toulmin's concept of modernity.     

Student Teacher Supervision—A Team Approach

Abstract

The recent reform in teacher education in Israel was aimed at raising the level of the teaching core mainly by elevating student admission standards in order to select better candidates, lengthening and improving the curriculum, and granting an academic degree to the graduates. In order to learn whether the reform succeeded in attracting better teaching students, this paper reports findings from a study of a wide sample of first‐year students in all the teacher education programs under the reform, before and after. An improved educational level in the general population has enabled Israeli academic teacher colleges to become more selective and raise their admission requirements. At present, students who are accepted have a higher entry level than in previous years, but they represent a similar social and educational stratum as before the academization of teacher education. The assumption that raising admission requirements and granting an academic degree would attract a qualitatively different group of candidates was not fulfilled.     

“Promoting Acceptance” or “Preparing Warrior Scholars”: Variance in Teaching for Social Justice Vision and Praxis

A growing body of research explores theoretical models of teaching for social justice in P-12 classrooms and in teacher education. However, many of these models fail to account for the relationship between teachers’ social justice frameworks and their classroom practices. In this article, I use vignettes drawn from a recent study of secondary English Language Arts teachers to illustrate how differences in social location and sociopolitical emphasis affect teachers’ approaches to justice-oriented curriculum, pedagogy, and social action. This article concludes with implications for teaching and teacher education, including strategies for using these findings in preservice classrooms.     

A Collaborative Self-Study: Advocating for Democratic Principles and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy in Teacher Education

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a collaborative self-study of three teacher educators and how they understood, practiced, and promoted democratic education in response to the divisive rhetoric of 2015–2016 at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) in Southern California. The prevalence of neoliberal ideologies throughout the 2016 election season challenged our understandings of democratic education. Therefore, we explore how teacher educators promote democratic education and pedagogy during times of political uncertainty.     

Border Crossings: Collaboration Struggles in Education

Abstract

In this article, a qualitative program evaluation of a state-funded educational renewal effort between a university and a local school district is reported. The collaborative venture illuminated some of the dilemmas, paradoxes, and solutions inherent in reforming American education. More important, this venture revealed the complexities inherent in the ever-popular desire for collaboration between higher education and other culturally distinct organizations (e.g., local school districts). Works by W. G. Tierney (1993) and H. Giroux (1992) are the theoretical anchors for the analysis of this case study. A primary conclusion is that educators who are interested in reform must not only encourage border crossings but they must also provide the border “crossers” with the technical, political, and cultural frameworks to support these efforts.     

Elaborating pedagogical content knowledge: what it means to know students and think about teaching

The purpose of this study was to examine how a teacher understood her students and then thought and made decisions about content, curriculum and pedagogy. Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and Deweyan philosophies of experience and education provided the theoretical frameworks. Data were collected through observations (N?=?38) and interviews (N?=?38) over four months and analysed using constant comparison. Findings indicated that this teacher possessed a broad repertoire of knowledge about students that she used to think and make decisions about content, curriculum and pedagogy. The connections between knowing students and thinking about teaching were more sophisticated and interconnected than is typically recognized or articulated in teacher knowledge literature. Three themes are used to explain how this teacher understood her students’ emotional and social lives in and out of her classroom, and ways it influenced her thinking and teaching. The discussion centers on the need for more comprehensive analyses of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge.     

Review and Abstract

ABSTRACT

Case studies have pointed out that teachers’ disciplinary knowledge affects their pedagogy; however, the results are not consistent. There is a need for quantitative research to examine the relationship between teacher knowledge and practice, particularly in social studies where content-specific studies are mostly qualitative. The authors used history as an example and surveyed all public and private junior high school social studies teachers in Taiwan to examine if disciplinary backgrounds significantly affect teachers’ knowledge, conceptions about the discipline, and their teaching practices. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses show that disciplinary backgrounds significantly affect teachers’ subject matter knowledge and pedagogy. Evaluations of effect sizes suggest that academic backgrounds can serve as useful proxies for teacher recruitment. The results also indicate that nature-revealing courses affect teachers’ subject matter knowledge and pedagogy.