Introduction
'Five Principles of Transformative Pedagogies in PETE' is the first chapter in a book titled 'Teaching about social justice issues in physical education (Walton-Fisette, Sutherland, & Hill, 2019). In this chapter the authors have proposed five principles that may help physical education teacher educators manage the complexity of initial teacher education. Although individual teaching contexts and practices may align more strongly with individual principles, the authors argue that the ability to enact a transformative pedagogy lies in the consideration of, and relationship between all five principles.
Enacting a transformative pedagogy in physical education teacher education (PETE) requires teacher educators to simultaneously and flexibly juggle institutional policies, professional accreditation standards, programme expectations, resource limitations and student receptivity. Theoretically, it involves accommodating the relational, distributive and participative aspects of social justice in respect to advocacy for equitable distribution of access to educational services and to outcomes, recognising social and cultural difference, acknowledging and valuing the diversity of students we teach (Cochran-Smith , 2009). Transformative pedagogy should enable students to actively participate in decision making as a form of embodied action (North, 2008). Enacting a transformative pedagogy is b yno means an easy task.
In this chapter we propose five principles that may help teacher educators manage this complexity and guide them with their own efforts towards enacting a transformative pedagogy. We propose that transformative pedagogies require embodied awareness, a focus on diversity, the enactment of democratic principles including student voice, active questioning of your own practice, and a critique of the mechanisms of oppression. Although individual teaching practices may align more strongly with individual principles, we stress that the ability to enact a transformative pedagogy lies in the consideration of, and complex multi-layered relationship (Ovens, 2017a) between all principles. In the following discussion we firstly examine the concept of transformative pedagogies before outlining the five principles that underpin this concept.
Transformative pedagogy
Ukpokodu (2009) suggests that transformative learning occurs when a person develops an awareness of their habits of mind, develops new viewpoints and perspectives, and comes to see some aspect of the world in a different way. The process of transformational learning relies on pedagogies that move away from knowledge transmission and toward communicative learning where a learner searches for meaning through reflecting on values, social norms, and assumptions through which a truth claim is made (Mezirow,2009). Mezirow calls for transformative learning opportunities (pedagogies) that challenge taken-for-granted frames of reference and open these frames for possible change.
When we apply this to the context of PETE, transformative pedagogies enact teaching approaches that enable PETE students to examine the educational, moral, and political influences that guide their work as professional teachers, encourage reflective thinking, and foster dispositions for social justice (Ukpokodu,2009). Transformative pedagogy must cater for both personal and social change (Tinning, 2019). While personal change does not guarantee social change, it is difficult to envision any social change in PE without personal change in teachers.
It is important here to stress that transformative pedagogies are not generic and enacted by using some pre-set strategies. Referring specifically to the context of PE/PETE, Tinning (2017) described transformative pedagogy as an “educational perspective” that concerns itself with questions of justice, democracy and ethics. The important point here is Tinning’s use of the word ‘perspective’. Rather than a teaching strategy, a perspective is a particular attitude that guides professional decision making and actions. In other words, the practice of transformative pedagogy embodies and is guided by principles designed to promote equity and social justice rather than enact some teaching strategies that have proven successful in some educational context. There is no single transformative pedagogy or model waiting to be discovered (Walton-Fisette, et al, 2018).
In the following section we outline a small but powerful set of principles that can guide teacher educators through the complexity of their individual contexts. Transformative practices will always be woven around the context of the practice, the learners and the breadth and scope of a PETE program (Ovens, 2017a, Philpot, 2016). While implementing these principles requires a commitment in time and effort, they also cannot be reduced to a teaching method that is learned through transmission and then enacted with no consideration of the teacher, learner, and context (Freire, 1970; Ovens, 2017b). Rather, the principles help teacher educators to be adaptive and willing to challenge the status quo in the quest to find those novel and innovative solutions that are effective in their own settings.
Principle 2: Recognise and work with diversity
This principle is based on the belief that awareness of the diversity in communities is critical to fostering social justice. As a concept, diversity rejects the notion of a 'normal' group and 'others' and instead constitutes diversity and difference as central to the mixture of students in each lesson. Recognising diversity extends beyond awareness to valuing diversity as a key pedagogical resource. Working with diversity includes introspectively recognizing that one’s own values and beliefs define how we frame our world and the possible implications of acting on these perspectives. A lack of understanding of diversity is a barrier to teaching for social justice (Walton-Fisette et al, 2018) and PETE students need to understand diversity before they embark on developing the agency to address injustice (Ukpoduku, 2016).
Diversity encompasses many characteristics including ethnicity, socio-economic background, home language, gender, sexuality, special needs, disability, and giftedness. Teaching needs to be responsive to diversity within ethnic groups, for example, diversity within first nation’s people and immigrant populations. Evidence shows teaching that is responsive to student diversity can have very positive impacts on low and high achievers at the same time. By seeing and respecting the similarities and differences among persons and cultures, the teacher can use diversity to enhance the learning within the lesson. Acknowledging other cultures and worldviews and recognizing that factors such as race, class, and culture frame how people interpret, understand, and explain others’ words and actions can transform silences into productive discussions.
Social justice issues of diversity related to physical education featured in literature highlight issues of body shape (Tinning, 1985), disability (Fitzgerald, 2012), gendered bodies(Gerdin, 2016), discrimination based on sexuality (Sykes, 2011) and obesity (Burrows, 2016). Recent literature further examines how the intersectionality of these identities serves to privilege and oppress groups in society. The transformative pedagogical work that examines diversity such as examinations of media photographs to develop an awareness of and to challenge to dominant portrayals of gender and race (Oliver, 2001; Oliver and Kirk, 2017) and ethnicity (Legge, 2010) are explicit attempts to disrupt frames of reference and enable students to notice and name concepts they are unfamiliar with. To build on this, inclusion of diversity can come through greater inclusion of cultural activities and games (e.g., Indigenous games) and disability games (e.g., boccia, goalball), and greater critique of dominant forms of PE in schools. In addition to recognizing diversity and how it may oppress students, further work is required to provide PETE students with the pedagogical skills to address injustice.
Principle three: Involve students as co-contributors to course design
This principle is based on two key notions. The first is that transformative pedagogy should employ practices that interrupt and call into question the logic underpinning existing or prevailing ways of thinking, seeing and saying. Involving students in course design in PETE disrupts the logic that they do not have a right and a responsibility for their own learning. It also respects that students should get some say given they are the recipients/users/direct beneficiaries of the course they are enrolled in. The second notion is the deliberate repositioning of the student as a subject of pedagogy. Rather than being passive consumers of course content, students are expected to harness their own capacities and engage their potentiality for developing professional skills, broadening their perspectives on teaching, considering the rationales underlying pedagogy, and assess their own developing perspectives toward teaching. By requiring students to co-contribute to course design, the students are involved in the educational process of producing a course that is meaningful, inclusive, challenging and professionally worthwhile.
This principle leads to four implications for PETE pedagogy. Firstly, it means that emancipation is the starting point and not the outcome of the course pedagogy. PETE students begin as equal participants in the pedagogical process and share the responsibility for the production of the course. Secondly, it sets up the possibility for novelty and creativity to frame course content and activities. New roles and new responsibilities allow new ways of knowing and being to emerge. Thirdly, this principle challenges the intentionality inherent in pedagogy as a vehicle for incorporating stock knowledge and particular values about teaching. Fourthly, it makes transparent the decision making central to the power and production ofa course. Students can be invited to contribute to decisions such as what assignment tasks will be undertaken, how will achievement be assessed, when will work be due, and how will final grades be determined.
Principle four: Question your own practice
This principle is based on the notion that we (PETEs) should pay more attention to how the instructional practices and structures we use embody social justice theory (based on Giroux, 1994). PETEs must concurrently teach about and enact social justice and social theory. The distinction between ‘teaching about’ and ‘enacting’ is subtle, but important. When the pedagogy in a course has a singular focus on teaching about social justice, the core ideas and concepts become knowledge to be learnt or absorbed by student teachers and applied in school contexts. In other words, we often see teacher educators teaching about social justice in ways where the concept becomes reduced to theory taught through a transmission pedagogy and the teaching is either telling (the lecture), modelling (the demonstration lesson or microteaching), or apprenticeship (the practicum) (Ovens, 2013). In contrast, we suggest that theory should be put into practice so that the focus shifts to examining how the core ideas and concepts central to social justice become enacted within and lived through the instructional practices andstructures of the course. PETEs should consider the coherence between their advocacy for social justice pedagogies and their own pedagogical practices.
The central point of this principle is that while PETE students may be encouraged to ask critical questions in their teacher education courses, they are often not encouraged to ask the same question of their teacher education courses (Segall, 2002). A common example is the way teacher educators highlight the importance of questioning how teachers meet the individual needs of their students, but rarely do they turn this critique on themselves and ask how their own teacher education lessons meet the individual needs of their student teachers. If theory is not reflexively applied to understanding one’s lived practice, the pedagogy involved becomes an exercise in separating theory from practice, while effectively disguising the process of doing so (Segall, 2002). By teaching a detached theory of social justice, power, oppression, and privilege, students are anesthetized from challenging their own education and the methods used to ensure that theory is disconnected from everyday practice because it becomes content to be learnt rather than lived (Segall, 2002).
Principle five: Address the mechanisms and consequences of oppression.
This principle is based on the need to understand those attitudes and behaviors (e.g., racism, sexism, ageism, heterosexism) that perpetuate oppression and acknowledge the real social and economic disadvantages that oppressed people face in society. When discussing social justice in lessons or staff meetings, it is important to dismantle structures that sustain oppression and not simply focus on the psychological harm of oppression. This requires a careful examination of systems of power in conjunction with an emphasis on social change and student agency both inside and outside of the classrooms (Hackman, 2005)
The context of PE offers many examples such as oppressive language and images about body size, shape and health; oppressive teaching practices that favour able bodies or create gendered classrooms; and oppressive facilities that privilege sport over other forms of movement. A transformative pedagogy has the dual aim of drawing attention to some of these taken for granted structures (consciousness raising) and educating to enable prospective PE teachers to challenge these structures (taking action). A transformative pedagogy in PETE can illuminate examples of how PE teachers have recognized oppressive structures and worked to facilitate changes in their schools. This can be seen in the attempts of physical education to change discourses around healthism, ‘healthy’ bodies, the position of sport in PE or sport-as-PE, and gender.
In countries such as Australia and New Zealand where PE curricula have been replaced by a new curriculum area called Health and Physical Education (HPE), new possibilities for transformative practice emerge as the field of HPE is less bound by history and is unencumbered with sedimented teaching practices (McIntyre, Philpot & Smith, 2016). At a policy level, HPE introduces new ways to orientate school practice (Bowes & Ovens, 2014) and endorses examinations of how bodies are socially constructed and oppressed or privileged (Tinning, 2012). The transformative potential of this curriculum is catalysed (or not) upon enactment in both (H)PETE and school HPE, where the dispositions and practices of individual teacher educators and teachers intersect with curricula to endorse or challenge the mechanisms of oppression relevant to PE.
Practicing the principles
More than 15 years ago, Gard and Wright (2001) suggested that rather than transforming society, PE was deeply implicated in the reproduction of society. More recently Tinning (2019) cautions that PE educators are more likely to get swept up in the wake of social change rather than creating the social change.
Transformative pedagogies are not workshops or one-off activities whereby initial teacher education programmes can ‘tick off’ that they have addressed cultural, gender or religious differences. The transformative potential of transformative pedagogy is exponentially more powerful when a social justice perspective is infused as a normal taken-for-granted practice through a PETE programme, across many courses and educators (Nieto, 2000) and ultimately within schools’ PE programs (Philpot, 2017). Real empowerment of PE teachers that can lead to the transformation of the subject area paradoxically requires the field of school PE to be disrupted sufficiently to be ready for change. The work of transformative pedagogues plants seeds for change that may require many years to germinate (Gerdin, Philpot & Smith, 2018). Transformative teaching should be conceptualized as a process that strives for greater democracy and social justice rather than an outcome. Given the broader social forces in the world beyond education, a truly equal and democratic world is more aspirational than probable.
We are cognizant that this chapter is largely descriptive of the broader principles of transformative pedagogy and, as such, fails to provide pragmatic teaching strategies. In our own roles as physical education teacher educators we are acutely aware of structural constraints around enacting these principles, yet we reflexively recognize that, in many instances, we choose to constrain ourselves and fail to exercise the agency we have when we work with PETE students. Ultimately, we hope that these principles provide a framework through which the examples of practices that follow can be read and critiqued.
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