The role of teacher educator professional learning in reconfiguring physical education

Abstract

This paper explores a professional learning (PL) journey by author 1 as purposeful action to become a more knowledgeable physical education (PE) teacher educator. Although the context is PE, our paper is applicable to other teacher educators across multiple disciplines, who seek to be reflexive in their professional development. The learning journey examined is the completion of a part-time human movement science graduate certificate. The research questions being the following: (1) How can completing further context-specific PL facilitate engaging innovative practice? (2) What unintended consequences, if any, resulted from completing the PL reported? Our research uses autoethnography with author 1’s self-voice provided through diary extracts. These extracts are interpreted with figurational sociology and the extant literature as our academic voice, supported by anonymous formal student satisfaction data from an undergraduate unit, currently taught by both authors. This unit is central to our study, as gaining knowledge to teach it was the main reason for author 1 undertaking the graduate certificate. In answering the first research question, author 1 gained rich insights and connections to his own teaching context through ongoing reflexive opportunities during his study programme. Concerning our second research question, several unintended consequences occurred from author 1 undertaking the study beyond learning new subject matter knowledge. Specifically, a range of new pedagogical and assessment approaches were experienced by author 1 and appropriated into our unit. This self-study documents contextualised PL as an example of how author 1 faced up to ‘new times’ in his work context.