Adapting the boundaries in primary physical education: an account of my learning,my educational influence and improved practice

In this paper I explore how I have come to theorise my work as a critical emancipatory practice as a lecturer in primary physical education (PE). I give an account of what I understand to be the epistemological foundations and practices of practitioner research and my potential educational influence in my own and other practitioner-researchers’ learning. I explain how I have generated my living educational theory of practice and discuss the changes in my learning from a propositional approach towards a dynamic epistemology of practice that is grounded in inclusional and dialogical ways of knowing. Within my paper I position myself as a professional educator and researcher, and share the exciting and transformational experiences of teaching and learning in evolving action research cycles of practice. I view my learning to date as an active act, working with the novice teachers I support to offer improvement and change in our future practice. I celebrate my reconceptualised view of education as a learner from within my practice and explain my move from knowledge transfer to knowledge co-creation. I make an original contribution to educational knowledge by explaining how I try to inspire others to research their practice and contribute to a new scholarship of educational enquiry.     

Exploring Self-Study to Improve My Practice as a Mathematics Teacher Educator

While supervising a student teacher in school, an incident occurred that highlighted a contradiction between my practice and my beliefs and prompted me to question why I do not always live the values I profess. The aim of this article is to investigate how self-study can help me to understand the complex and context-based situations of my practice. I draw on the work of other teacher educators to examine the potential of self-study to improve my practice. Through this exploration I have begun to transform the way that I comprehend teaching and learning in teacher education. I identify several tensions and challenges in implementing the methodology within my professional context. I believe that self-study can help us in our roles as teacher educators to develop more reflexive self-awareness and to problematize taken-for-granted assumptions relevant to our contexts of practice.     

Horse Riding 101: The role of experience in reframing teacher education practices

For this self-study of my teacher education practice, I positioned myself as a novice in the unfamiliar context of learning to ride a horse. This gave me an opportunity to re-experience being an authentic learner and thereby to deepen my understanding of how an individual learns to teach. I recorded my experiences in an electronic journal and analysed what happened over many months of weekly horse-riding lessons. Central to my learning process was feeding key ideas, insights and tentative analyses into discussions with my students and critical friends. As I analysed their responses further, two themes emerged through pattern analysis. First, being a neophyte in horse riding allowed me to empathise strongly with my students' novice status. Second, permitting them to see the development of my expertise through horse riding was helpful to my students. Re-positioning myself as a learner challenged my view of myself as a teacher educator and transformed my teacher education practice.     

Flashcard: Alternating between Visible and Invisible Identities

This article addresses how my experiences as a black deaf female viscerally and simultaneously shape me. I use the metaphor of flashcards. Flipping over flashcards or “flashing” depicts how certain contexts incite and/or promote the visibility or invisibility of identities, particularly between the familial and educational contexts. Also, I utilize moments from my childhood to narrate alternating reflections of lived experiences (visible) and the theoretical constructs (invisible) that inform and shape these experiences.     

Towards a Dynamic Systems Approach to moral development and moral education: a response to the JME Special Issue,September 2008

Abstract

This essay tells my story of using the moral orientations of justice and care to help me think about an incident of cheating in a seminar I taught. My story takes as a starting point the idea that teaching is a relational activity and that morality fundamentally concerns relations among people. These moral orientations gave me options to think about exploring, with my students, what it means to make moral choices in our everyday life. This narrative is about my own moral choice‐making in this dilemma and it reveals how using these psychological constructs helped me in my reflective practice of teaching. It also reveals the conflicts I faced in attempting to solve this dilemma and the questions and conflicts which still remain.     

Biography,Identity, and Inquiry: The making of teacher,teacher educator,and researcher

This is a self-study of my professional and cultural biography and identity, a history which directed me first toward the work of urban teaching and then into teacher education and research into comparative educational issues of racial and national identity. I use this inquiry to demonstrate how biography and identity influences the lived experience of teaching and the researcher's stance. I also examine areas where preservice urban teacher education programs must improve. My personal recommendations describe experiences that would have better prepared me for urban teaching. Suggestions include expanding coursework in the historical, political, and sociocultural influences on urban education and in designing culturally responsive curricula. I also recommend restructuring field experiences to offer richer classroom-based learning opportunities for preservice teachers and extending fieldwork into urban communities. Finally, I suggest ongoing inservice teacher education in learning-community models that respond to educators' context-specific teaching concerns.     

A Teacher Educator's Fate: Seeking contexts to engage student teachers in thinking about learning to teach

Through self-study I believe I can gain a better understanding of myself, of my students, and of the process of teacher education. Exploring the ways in which I respond in writing to pre-service teachers helps me to better understand my practice and the learning-to-teach experiences of pre-service teachers. This paper reports on my written responses to 160 stories of learning to teach at four different intervals across an 8-month teacher education program. Importantly, writing about my learning through self-study has challenged me to represent the ways in which I plan to apply my newfound knowledge to my practice.     

Assuming my Transformation: Transforming my Assumptions

As a White, middle-class, English-speaking female of the type commonly found in teacher education programs, I have had to learn how to use my perspective to challenge the assumptions of the “typical” student teachers for whom I am a teacher educator. This self-study describes how I have been transformed by this learning process. Studying my teaching has provided me with opportunities to challenge my own assumptions about teacher education and to confront my issues of control and ambiguity as they relate to teaching.     

Exploring pedagogies to elevate inquiry: teaching action research in the third space

ABSTRACT

This study chronicles a semester long inquiry focused on the impacts of pedagogical strategies informed by the tenets of third space theory on my own practices and understanding of students’ learning outcomes in an action research course. As I applied new instructional strategies to promote discourse and critical inquiry, I reflexively explored how these approaches enhanced my impacts on students’ learning and praxis of action research. This paper first provides a brief introduction to third space theory and then describes how I infused this framework into my course approach, the different types of data collected and analyzed to gauge the impacts of new pedagogies, and findings that emerged. These are summarized in relation to the conditions that both undergirded and elevated students’ engagement, and directions for further research to advance the praxis of action research across teacher education contexts.     

Education research for the Anthropocene: the (micro)politics of researcher becoming (2017 Radford Lecture)

This lecture asks: How can education research address the big questions of our time, and what has politics got to do with it? It will trace moments and movements of researcher-(un)becoming to explore the (micro)politics of a lifetime of educational research. Politics is understood as both intimate and immense, as the intertwined politics of global conditions, and of the nation, with the intimately personal. It is about the researcher lives we all live. The approach was generated in a recent visit to Oulu, north Finland, where doctoral students asked me to present ‘tales’ of a researcher life. The lead student wanted to know how to manage a doctorate while raising three young children. As I have wandered back and forth over a lifetime of presentations, the shapes of key influences emerged. Relations with Aboriginal people and Country have been there since before the beginning, and are incorporated into my ways of being in the world. Feminist theories and their libidinal flows have been fundamental in shaping both my life and research, including their uneasy alliance with Aboriginal onto-epistemologies. Doctoral students have emerged as a strong generative force in my intellectual directions, moving me into all sorts of worlds I would never have entered otherwise. And finally, Place, the places where I have lived and worked have been the crucial grounding of my body and being, primal and prior, but also the basis of thought. In further elaborating these different influences, they culminate in the contemporary force of the Anthropocene, calling us to consider how the world is asking to be named, and how we can learn to be human differently, for the wellbeing of the planet. In developing this address into a paper, I have decided, in consultation with, and supported by the editor Nicole, to preserve its original content as far as possible. The knowledge contained in the address belongs with the oral performance and images as much as with the very few written words that were used in the powerpoint slides. A small selection of images is also included.     

The Unity of Teaching,Learning, and Doing (November 2, 1927)

The unity of teaching, learning, and doing is our school's instructional policy. Our school's foundation stands upon this slogan, and there is no task more important than making this slogan crystal clear. But, strangely enough, I never gave a speech about this theme in my school, and my comrades never expressed serious questions about the slogan. Everyone seemingly believed this to be the daily diet at Hsiao-chuang School, and there was no point in wasting breath discussing it. But recently I ran across two things which made me feel that among our comrades there were some who really did not understand the meaning of our instructional policy. One occurred when I saw one instructor's notes. His activities were divided into three phases, called the teaching phase, the learning phase, and the doing phase. This is the separation of teaching, learning, and doing, not the unity of teaching, learning, and doing. The second occurred when I read an article by a colleague on Hsiaochuang School in Notes on Rural Education [Hsiang-chiao tzuhsün]. In it he says, "The extracurricular activities at Hsiaochuang School are the teaching, learning, and doing of agriculture." But, there is no term "extracurricular activities" in the dictionary of the school that unifies teaching, learning, and doing. "Extracurricular activities" is a declaration that life is divorced from curriculum and that teaching, learning, and doing are divorced from one another. This spring Mr. Shen Hung started an education unit for movie performers. On the enrollment announcement it said they used the "teaching," 'learning," and "doing" methods. When I saw the announcement, I felt that Mr. Hung had not completely understood the unity of teaching, learning, and doing. If he had really understood, he certainly would have written the "teaching, learning, and doing" method and certainly would not have written the "teaching," 'learning," and "doing" methods. His misunderstanding is of the same sort as the two misunderstandings mentioned above. Having experienced these two reminders in succession, I felt that unless I talked this matter over thoroughly with everyone beginning with the fundamentals, there might be a really great misunderstanding. If there is misunderstanding in thought, contradictions will inevitably arise when applying the thought. Therefore, it is imperative to discuss this matter at least once. When I came back to the country and saw that teachers here just concerned themselves with teaching and students just concerned themselves with receiving teaching, I knew for sure that there was need for reform. This situation was worse in the universities. The instructors were called professors [literally, transmitters of teaching], and everyone thought that to be called "professor" was an honor. Their methods were called pedagogy [literally, teaching transmission methods]. It was as if they were using knowledge as a rescue operation. It was at that time that I proposed replacing "teaching transmission" with "teaching and learning." At the Nanking Upper-Level Normal School discussion meeting on educational affairs, I stood at the podium for two hours but could not get it passed, and, as a result, I did not get the title Chairman of Educational Curriculum. But, in 1919, in response to an article in Shih Pao [a Shanghai newspaper] by Chiang Monlin, a leader of the new educational tide, I wrote an article on the unity of teaching and learning, advocating that teaching methods ought to be based on learning methods. At this time, the head of education in Soochow approved the use of the teaching-learning method. After the May Fourth Movement, our colleagues at Nanking Upper-Level Normal School became incomparably stronger, so I changed all of the "teaching methods" in the curriculum to "teaching-learning methods." This was the beginning of putting the unity of teaching and learning into practice. Later, when the new education system was promulgated, I went one step further and proposed that as things are done, so they are learned, and as they are learned, so they are taught. Therefore, teaching methods should be based on learning methods and learning methods on doing methods.     

Negotiating authority through jointly constructing the course curriculum

Understanding how authority is negotiated in teacher education classrooms can inform efforts to foster democratic teacher education practices and prepare future teachers to teach democratically. We know very little, however, about how authority is negotiated in different classroom contexts, particularly in teacher education settings. This qualitative study examined how authority was negotiated in an undergraduate teacher education course in which I – as the teacher of the course – involved students in actively determining the content, method, and assessment of the course through jointly constructing the course curriculum. Using self-study methodology to understand more deeply the problems embedded in my practice as a beginning teacher-educator, I generated themes from the data using the constant comparative method. The findings suggest that deriving legitimacy from mutually recognized sources, working from shared purposes, and confronting students’ deeply rooted familiarity with authoritarian teaching practices present potential frameworks for negotiating authority in teacher education – while illuminating the challenges of teaching democratically in authoritarian contexts. Such insights are important for helping future teachers experience alternatives to conventional teaching while accounting for the complexity of learning to bring democratic values to life in classrooms at all levels.     

A narrative inquiry of cross-cultural lives: Lives in the North American academy

In a series of three papers, I examine the identity development of three Chinese women teachers as they moved back and forth between Eastern and Western cultures and languages amid the rapidly changing events of the last four decades. This life-based narrative inquiry, situated between non-fiction, fiction, and academic discourses opens up possibilities for establishing a link between cross-cultural lives and identities, cross-cultural teacher education, and curriculum studies in multi-cultural contexts. In this third paper, I explore the three teachers' lives in the North American academy, particularly my own intellectual development at the doctoral studies level. I trace the dynamics of the interaction with my dissertation supervisor as he and I struggled to find ways for me to think in an inquiry-oriented way. I reach back to my upbringing to show how a Chinese spirit of knowing in cross-cultural teaching and curriculum-making was disruptive with the inquiry-oriented spirit of my cross-cultural studies. My story is complicated by the fact that I was trying to learn to think narratively - a way of thinking still comparatively new in the academy.     

Becoming an urban science educator

This autobiography examines research in which I was involved while learning to teach science in an inner city high school. As an experienced science educator I had mainly experienced schools associated with students from the middle class. When I came to a university in an inner city environment I had to learn first how to be streetwise in the city and then, when I began to teach, I had to negotiate with students my right to teach them. Most students were very resistant to my efforts to teach them science. The paper describes many of the difficulties I experienced as I endeavoured to teach science to students who were ethnically, curriculum to the interests and extant knowledge of students is emphasised. Implications of my experiences are described for three aspects of urban high schools: teaching science, identifying and enacting appropriae science curricula, and educating prospective science teachers.     

Reflective journals: making constructive use of the “apprenticeship of observation” in preservice teacher education

Many scholars have characterized the “apprenticeship of observation” as a “pitfall” to be avoided or a barrier to be overcome in preservice teacher education, but directly challenging students’ experience-based beliefs often leads to resistance, making students feel discounted or disrespected. In my introductory educational psychology course, students write biweekly journals reflecting on their own lived experiences in light of course concepts and ideas. These reflections are then shared in a variety of ways, serving as a vital context for further investigation and discussion of how these concepts and ideas translate into the classroom. In this paper, I share typical journal questions and excerpts from the responses of two recent classes to show how students can engage journal questions at differing levels; how even the experiences of my mostly privileged and successful students have at some points echoed, and thus can illuminate, the struggles of the less privileged, the rebellious, and the failed students who most need good teaching; and how students’ own shared reflections can be used nonthreateningly to help them confront their unconsidered assumptions about teaching and learning. Finally, I discuss choice, respect, and agency as three essential conditions for effective use of student journals in preservice teacher education.     

Teaching as a Healing Craft: Decolonizing the Classroom and Creating Spaces of Hopeful Resistance through Chicano-Indigenous Pedagogical Praxis

This paper builds upon the edict for self-determination in El Plan de Santa Bárbara: a Chicano plan for higher education (1969), which calls for “strategic use of education,” by placing value on needs of the community (La Causa, p. 9). For me, this passage translates into valuing needs of community-college students entering my classes and life. I believe it is my obligation, as an educator, to problematize ways in which knowledge has been defined, framed, presented, and researched by dominant ideologies informing institutions of learning at all levels. In essence, this work is a meditation allowing readers to witness how I am weaving together various strands of myself including the personal, emotional, professional, intellectual, and spiritual. It captures how my participant-observation of MAS-Tucson educators, while describing their use of barrio pedagogy and critically compassionate intellectualism, has been enhanced by my re-reading of Elena Avila’s (2000) Woman who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health. This paper represents an ongoing epistemological exercise about my own teaching and scholarship, resulting in an emergence of my own modality as an apprenticing practitioner of Chicano-Indigenous pedagogy.     

School Smarts: A Reflection of Pedagogical and Personal Insights

Recent studies show that many college instructors still believe that Latino students lack the “school smarts” for academic success. This essay challenges the notion of school smarts in order to highlight Latino students’ numerous strengths. I share my model for a mentorship program that facilitates better student–faculty communication and deepens a student-centered learning environment in a large general education course. Establishing the program led me to reflect on how the enduring belief in school smarts affected my own academic training. Directly challenging deficit thinking, I argue that Latino students contribute to a transformative educational process in which faculty are also learners.     

Teacher as knower and learner: Reflections on situated knowledge in science teaching

I argue from an understanding of current feminist philosophy that a teacher's practice reflects changing experiences, knowledge, values, and identities, and as such can be productively thought of as a site for learning as much as a site for expounding upon what is known. This suggests a vision for what constitutes effective practice different from that commonly held in science. I argue that praxis proceeds from the personal epistemological standpoints of the teacher (defined as standpoint theory). This knowledge is only partially applicable to particular situations in the classroom. The hallmark of feminist pedagogy, if conceptualized as derivative from standpoint theory, is to “take everyday life as problematic” (Smith, 1991, p. 88). Implicit in such a conceptualization is that pedagogy starts from an explicit recognition of everyday life and both builds from and questions that beginning. This is true for students and also for the teacher, and is the root of my claim that through teaching, the teacher becomes a learner. The immediate circumstances in which teaching occurs present different and unique qualities from those in which the teacher's knowledge and value were created. As a teacher, I am therefore continuously confronted with the inadequacy of my knowledge. The circumstances and children's activities tell me that I need to do things differently. In this situation, the act of teaching as an assertion of knowing becomes a recognition of not-knowing. Teaching becomes an occasion for learning about subject matter, children, and self. I recount an example of teaching in a first-grade classroom to give this argument substance. This story is an example from my own teaching in which parallels between scientific theorizing and storytelling are drawn and capitalized upon as a vehicle for critical thinking in science. This became an occasion for reflecting upon the appropriateness of those values because of the multicultural qualities of the classroom. J Res Sci Teach 35: 427–439, 1998.     

塔德波尔——一个学生的第一课

意识到那一天将是多么重要,我简直无法入眠。昨天,妈妈在麦金利小学为我办理了入学注册。我的年龄终于够了,可以与所有其他的大孩子一起上学了。我自幼儿起就已经认识了字母表与数字,但我盼望着学会阅读,这样我就能独自看故事书。更重要的是将会与别的孩子在一起玩耍。我穿第一天上学时的衣服时,闻到了油煎熏猪肉的味道,就匆匆下楼了。