After about three years of formally putting personal thoughts to paper in order to expedite a more deliberate reflection habit within myself and hopefully growing it in the community, what are my outcomes? I must say that every one of my articles were written as a result of an observation, some experience, some reading and connecting it to what I think I need to do better as a Physical Education (PE) teacher. The role of a PE teacher beyond tangible specific outcomes within specific sports/fitness domains deliverables are seems vague to me, even now. When asked, which is often, what do we do in the department, I end up struggling with answers that are full of words that attempts to be all encompassing but ending up vague. This is especially so when compared to the academic subjects where results of test and exams are very popular indicators of success. In the same vein, I don’t hear these departments putting much emphasise on the need to have broad and holistic educational aims that are non-technical but they get some respite from it as tangible operational outcomes in the near future seems more popular than long term benefits as key performance indicators. However, the broad educational aims and needs are constantly being acknowledge at the policy and whole-school publicity level.

If the above sounds pessimistic, it probably is to some level as the energy I derived from probing is a result of a personal lack of understanding and wanting to overcome it. A deeper comprehension of Physical Literacy and the place of it in life is an approach that I took to make sense of what I am supposed to do as a teacher. It is difficult for me to accept that our main job is sending out pupils into the real world only with outcome-focused experiences in fitness, health and selected games, even though I accept that this could be sufficient after all.

This maybe an unfair oversimplification. I find outcome-focussed experiences occupying a lot of the discussion for PE planning. There is a lack of attention to why we do things. There is lack of depth in the underpinnings of why we do things. There is a lot of emphasis on the what and how of fitness, health and activities. I will go out on a limb to say we are expected to operate as instructors, train like instructors, do professional development like instructors and usually give up to that role. There is also intention and effort being put in by PE teachers in developing pupils holistically but this is usually assumed separated from the focus of PE, where technical clarity of established skills reigns supreme. There is a lack of leveraging on the role of voluntary non-survival movement and what this means in leading a better life. Is this Physical Literacy?

The above preceding paragraphs could very well be a result of misinformed expectations due to own lack of capacity to embrace PE as an activity driven subject. It is a vicious cycle where the more energy put into exploring the whys results in less time in the whats and hows, which potentially effects the interest level of pupils and external observers where the active robustness of a PE session is an important evaluation of success. Again, is this sufficient?

Recently again, I ponder on the role of a Physical Literacy (PL) position to help in our understanding and role as PE teachers. In whatever educational community we belong to, we have loads of clear directions of what needs to be done through subject syllabus, model scheme of work, model lesson plans and countless examples of activities. What we may not have is the clarity of why we do what we do.

For example, we are clear that we want PE to be effective in creating a generation of responsible citizens that can take care of themselves in health through a responsible lifestyle that includes physical activities and knowledge of health and fitness. If wanting to go deeper, a brief summarised thinking like this may not affect sufficiently the understanding of the role of physical movement in individual development. How has movement evolved from important survival needs (we use to move for survival) to just as important recreational needs (we move to improve quality of life beyond that for survival)? This understanding takes much effort from an individual teacher to encourage exploring and delving deeper but it needs institution support structures, i.e. training, professional development and practise. I imagine no amount of formal words and directives can create this type of personal teacher thinking. It is often that this is the furthest thing from the mind of a technically skilful teacher imparting specific skills to their pupils, e.g. a passing drill is just a passing drill for better game play.

It seems that the above paragraph is hinting on the necessary need to have a philosophical stance. Is it possible to understand physical literacy without a philosophical stance? If without an explicit and/or implicit study and understanding of movement and life philosophy, does literacy statements sound like repeats of syllabus statement? The understanding of philosophy and its role to teaching is part of any teacher training but how effective is its attempt to connect to everyday teaching practises and its long term application? Is it taken merely as a teacher-training subject with its uses only limited in that period of internship? In a life-skill subject like PE, where most teacher are successful exemplars of leading a physical life (see previous article on learning from failures of the physical life to understand PE better), it is sometimes difficult to see the role of PE as more than just expected physical movements. I feel that students also do not explicitly see the subject deeper than its current movement form, corresponding with teaching intervention experienced. It has a status of a seemingly dead-end subject where no future connection is necessary other than being expected to replicate learned movements and behaviour. However, PE activities are usually loved for its instant fun and play element.

• What do we need to change and exactly why?
• Is this even something that we want to explore further to teach better?

I also keep revisiting the notion of why we need to consider the learning process in PE at a level that is beyond the observable. For me, this is a major contributing factor to understanding physical literacy and strengthening a personal teaching philosophy, connecting it to the role of movement in life and how it came to be. This was compounded by a recent discussion amongst colleagues on how best to introduce the squat technique to students, representing the many discussions over close and open skills that takes up a lot of time in our fraternity. The textbook answer to the proper squat involves much technical specifications that are mainly internally focused. I see a difference in cues used by experts to identify and evaluate movement and the cues that are presented to novice learners that corresponds to how learning takes place.  

The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation is a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so the result would not depend on the machine’s ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test results do not depend on the machine’s ability to give correct answers to questions, only how closely its answers resemble those a human would give.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

The Turing Test is an evaluation of artificial intelligence ability to think like a human. If this test is valid, an assumption will be that humans think and therefore learn much like an advance computer and therefore it is appropriate to test a computer for human thinking process by using parameters that are typical for it, i.e. inputting instructions that are binary, decomposed actions, etc. The Chinese Room argument is a retort to this test. A key point for me here is that cognition may be a multi-faceted process that is not merely be reverse engineering a desired outcome superficially and then putting it together to facilitate the cognitive process.

Searle’s thought experiment begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in constructing a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that they are talking to another Chinese-speaking human being. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Chinese_room_thought_experiment

The Chinese Room argument points to the fact that we place values on symbols as part of a thinking ‘machine’, to make sense of it or to be able to respond because we are expected to for survival or otherwise. It suggest that we can have absolutely no idea what a symbol means but can fully respond to it by some conversion process that is not the ‘learning’ cognition that is expected. This conversion process is behind closed doors (embedded somewhat) and may not be obvious to an external observer of outcomes. The teacher may be feeding symbols, e.g. cues and commands, thinking that learning is being facilitated intimately when in fact a conversion process is taking place that is just coping with the teachers expected outcomes.

The question I pondered for a while is what if this is acceptable for us as teachers. Meaning, it may not be our business as teachers to intervene at detailed processes behind closed doors but just focus on the effective feeding of information. Of course, my gut feel is that if we are thinking about this then it ought to be our business also. If we are not thinking about it, it is no surprise when some of us do not explicitly seek out processes deeper than teacher input – learner output level, i.e. we spent a lot of time at being masters of implementation strategies.

I liked the perspective offered behind these two simple illustrations to my lay mind. It got me thinking deeper even if not in the best possible direction as intended. My conclusion at this stage is that as teachers, we balance what we feed under the door with the need to also make a deliberate attempt to facilitate what is happening behind that door. We may not have the time, the expertise nor in the right fields to be overtly concern with theoretical sound combinations of cues that directly and indirectly facilitate learning. We also have to consider the holistic development of the child that involves the affective and the different domains involvement of daily school life that have its own influences to learning processes.