So recently, it has been crazy. The amount of administration to support teaching seems to have almost overwhelm actual direct teaching matters. It is almost seems that because there is less direct focus on teaching but nonetheless an incredible amount of very genuine and sincere efforts to prep for eventual teaching scenarios, we drop the metaphorical ball of ensuring learning takes place. The preceding words do sound like a tired teacher rather than reality. However, encouraging events that happened recently was one sharing at an ASEAN (Association of South East Asia Nations) sharing opportunity. Another, was a request by a committed teacher-training establishment from a infighting suffering country requesting for help in wanting to implement a more comprehensive physical education (PE) training programme and lastly, a local nation-wide sharing opportunity that is yet to take place (at point of writing this paragraph). Do we need more space and time to think of teaching and learning?
All the mentioned recent events for me are encouraging because these are stuff that drives me but still overwhelming because of the need to carve out time to have the motivation and energy to want to embark on being better at it. Something I realised recently that enforced a long held belief, we need time to think about teaching, time that is not indicated in some scheduled weekly slots labelled “Professional Development Time”. It is space and time that comes with joy and satisfaction in teaching and learning for teachers. There is no amount of scheduling that will provide this time. Rather there is a need for a whole village of teaching support, inspiration and motivation that will spark these spontaneous occasions of thought and reflective inspiring moments. My recent class experiences may be telling me that I desperately need this time.
There needs to be a very strong belief in our attempts to educate physically and this means much more than ensuring physical fitness and teaching a certain number of games. Many a times we unfairly relegate our efforts to merely ensuring physical fitness and the teaching of X number of games. We do not need teachers trained over multiple years to do that, honestly. Our roles are more complicated than what we give ourselves credit for.
The request for help from the small foreign teacher-training centre was eye opening. I have long believe in the idea of physical literacy that is connected very closely to existing cultural social environment. The needs of that country are very different from what I was brought up in. The centre’s main administrator (a Singaporean) was sharing how she introduced long distance running and the reactions her trainee teachers faced when back in their villagers doing long runs. It made almost no sense for a rural village deep in the outback wanting their residents spent precious energy running for recreation. The concept of running for fitness appeals to the individual trainees but rejected by their village culture. For many in the developed world, we might spent time on running as a vital part of PE. So is PE even necessary for such movement-for-survival culture? Can we transplant a PE training programme that is probably heavy in consistent outcomes across individuals to a culture that have very different concept of movement for recreation and living well? What is evergreen and overlapping in our needs and theirs? Definitely not fitness and optimum movement solutions I think. The preceding questions are good for anyone trying to figure out what they spending their entire professional life doing as PE teachers.
Corbin (Corbin C. B., 2021), in a very recent exploration cited historian Roberta Park, in the late 1980s, as predicting PE to be the renaissance field of the 21st Century, just like medicine that blossomed in the 20th century after being in the shadows before that. This is a very lofty ambition to pin to a subject which started out as mainly movement replication that was heavily influenced by gymnastics and athletics, described in the paper as originating from European countries. In the 20th century, Park suggested that PE morphed into sports-dominated PE. Park made the renaissance comment in the believe that as we research deeper into the needs and wants of PE, without doubt it will have to take on a more complex layer for individual development.
Corbin went on to mention the emergence of Conceptual Physical Education (CPE) as means to deliver knowledge, especially higher-order thinking. CPE is delivering physical skills together with the knowledge of what and why. This was initially also referred to as Fitness Education (FE). Corbin tracked the history of these PE approach in the United States of America and mentioned programmes that attempted to implement this push to leverage on PE more than what it was. In the USA, such attempts have been on-going for many decades and includes college level PE offering. They are ahead of many in terms of exploring longitudinally and living through the growth of PE. Incredibly, the Society of Health and Physical Educators (more known as SHAPE) was founded in the 1880s.
Corbin went on to recognised the recent emphasise on Physical Literacy (PL) as being aligned to the direction on CPE in the area of developing knowledge that allows the correct decision making when it comes to personal wellness. This is an interesting paper, long and probably not too attention grabbing to those not on a mission to connect the past to present for reflection. My purpose in delving into it very superficially is to really part of figuring out where we are at the moment. Sometimes it scares me to think that I have merely been babysitting play without a clear educative purpose. Just like a classroom teacher who works towards a topic at any one time, what are our directions? Just like a classroom teacher, we also have the dilemma of how to ensure deep learning and replicating desired solutions. Unlike a classroom teacher, our broad yet differentiated aims means that every student has a different outcome. What we can try to do is to deliver a consistent enacting and thinking process for students to develop in expected areas, albeit in their own directions.
I relooked at some data that I collected from my cohorts some time back on what PE means to them. Bit worrying for myself, I see nothing explicit or directly aligned to where I think PE should be via the students’ perspective. The data suggest a big emphasis on fitness activities expectations (externally regulated), on wanting to be with friends (relatedness), on wanting to play games of own choice (autonomy), etc.
I was probably not asking the right questions for my expected findings and even if the questions were more valid to my concerns, I expect responses will still be similar, i.e. away from explicit awareness of learning taking place. I don’t expect learners to be clear of the learning processes they going through at first, focusing only on their final successes in skill and knowledge acquisition. Teachers are the ones who should be clearly aware of learning processes taking place. Without teacher awareness, final movement outcomes may not directly point to most effective intervention. Successful teacher intervention in predetermined direction requires deliberate emphasis on learning and this takes time. Quick outcomes are usually preferred due to time constraints with short term learning taking place probably in spite of our efforts.
Works Cited
Corbin, C. B. (2021). Invited Commentary: Conceptual physical education: A course for the future. Journal of Sport and Health Science(10), 308 -322. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2020.10.004
Reinventing The Game - RTG 