One of the privileges of working in a university is the opportunity to ebb and flow back and forth between teaching, writing, learning, and trying to make a difference in the spaces we are passionate about. In this blog, I will share a bit about a practitioner partnership that affords us with the opportunity to learn and hopefully make a difference in HPE classrooms. A practitioner partnership is a relationship between researchers and teachers where we work in partnership to work on problems of practice, to help define the problem, explore and trial solutions and reflect on what worked,what didn’t work, what helped and what didn’t help.
This practitioner partnership focuses on social justice in the field of health and physical education. Starting in 2023, Alan Ovens and I invited five HPE teachers from across Auckland to work alongside us to articulate some of the issues they cared about and/or we important in their schools, to consider what they might do to, In 2024, three of these teachers have returned along with a fourth teacher. So what have we done so far? We started with a wananga that focused on building relationships and understanding context, and a second wananga that explored understandings of social justice and what teaching for social justice might look like in practice.
In 2023, the first group of teachers identified issues and actions they wanted to trial. Hollee**was working on a culturally responsive approach based on Pacific values. David was infusing health education into practical contexts. Shelly was using the Sports Education model in the context of kio rahi. Alex had strong focus on student voice. Tara strived to increase the engagement of girls in practical PE.
This year, we have just completed our second wananga and are in the process of firming up projects. Alex is doubling down on student voice for a second year. Shelly is using Hellison’s teaching personal and social responsibility (TPSR) model to focus on social responsibility with a year 10 class. Tara is focusing on boys that haven't succeeded so far in her senior PE classes. She has a strong focus on improving the results of those students. Casey, our newest partner, is looking for strategies to improve her ability to better include all of the students in her neuro-diverse class.
In this blog today, I want to talk about three observations of the process rather than the outcomes. That will come in further blogs. The first observation is the power of slow thinking and deep reflection. A profound ‘aha’ moment for me was understanding the conversations with the HPE teachers as 'Talanoa', a definition that comes from Pacifica communities as form of dialogue that is inclusive, participatory, and transparent. The wananga's have provided an opportunity to work alongside teachers and have dialogue that focus on some of the questions we're thinking about, but also zooms in and out of individual school contexts and broader educational issues. The opportunity to think slowly is rare for teachers who are confronted with 1000s of problems within a single day that require fast thinking. It's a wonderful opportunity to take them out of their incredibly busy and complex contexts and slow down and discuss and share and think out loud.
The second observation from the wananga's is the power of a community. As Alex was talking about a website that he has created for his students, the rest of the teachers were searching for it, and looking for resources. As we talked about school management, learning management systems, websites, NCEA tasks and blogs, the other partners were searching, evaluating and harvesting new resources. The community itself has solved many of the problems that we have talked about early on in the sessions. Teachers talking with teachers is a very powerful way of learning. And in many cases, we've had the opportunity to see teachers solve each other's problems or reframe some of their own problems. The power of the community is really incredible.
The third point to come out of our initial meetings is our growing understanding of the complexity of schools. HPE teachers have known for many years that access to spaces is fluid and uncertain. Access to equipment is contestable. More recently, all teachers have negotiate new timetable changes, implementation of NCEA standards, dealing with diverse student needs, new learning management systems, poor attendance and vaping, smoking, drugs and fight clubs in changing rooms and toilets, students using phones and now phone bans at schools. In isolation, each issue can be addressed. However, collectively each issue impacts on each other making teaching an incredibly complex task.
Over the coming months, we look forward to sharing some of the successes, some of the challenges, and some of the enablers experienced by these HPE teachers. We look forward to sharing these in future blogs.
**All names are pseudonyms
