Pre-service teachers’ negotiation of meaning in their Physical Education Teacher Education programme: a two-year follow-up ethnography

ABSTRACT

Background:

Research demonstrates the benefits of communities of practice (CoP) for teachers’ professional learning in Physical Education (PE). However, much less is known about how CoPs can be used to understand pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) professional learning in their Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) programmes. Negotiation of meaning (NofM) is a crucial concept regarding learning inside of a CoP. Hence, understand how meaning is negotiated in initial teacher professional development might allow the enhancement of the social learning strategies in PETE programmes.

Purpose:

This article draws on the CoP theoretical framework, and specifically the concept of NofM to understand how PSTs negotiated meaning during a two-year PETE programme. In particular, the focus is on the challenges faced by PSTs throughout the PETE social interactive process.

Participants and settings:

The setting was a PETE programme in Portugal. In year one, the participants were three university teacher educators (TE) and 25 PSTs. In year two, the participants were three PSTs from year one who were in their school placement, a university supervisor (US) and one cooperating teacher (CT).

Data collection and analysis:

This study was an ethnography with a two-year longitudinal design. Data were collected through the ethnographer’s participant-observations (first author), meetings of the PSTs with the mentoring team (TEs, US, CT), and the ethnographer’s field diary, reflexive log, and audio-recordings. Data analysis involved the constant-comparative grounded theory method.

Findings:

Analysis resulted in the identification of three key challenges during the course units, for PSTs in the first year of their PETE programme: (a) the diversity and disconnections within the course units; (b) (the lack of) membership; and (c) the absence of democratic spaces in PETE class discussions. In the year two of PETE during the school placement, three challenges were identified for the negotiation of meaning (NofM): (a) the lack of dialogue with and focus on pedagogical practice by the cooperating teacher; (b) working together and the pressure to individualise PSTs’ education process; and (c) unreachable support and supervision from the university.

Implications:

We suggest that PETE programmes should emphasise pedagogical strategies that create spaces for the cultivation of CoPs. For instance, we suggest PST engagement in continuous and planned group work across curricular years (e.g. peer-teaching and micro-teaching experiences) to increase work group membership. We recommend the emphasis on discussion sessions mediated by a facilitator (e.g. TEs, CTs, or US) where the different working groups could share their repertoire of learning experiences as a CoP. Moreover, we suggest optimisation of a base of pedagogical knowledge regarding course units’ integration between the TEs of the PETE to systematise the process and also, an increased connection between the university and the host school. Additionally, we propose continuous professional development by the CTs to facilitate the requirements of the PETE programme.

KEYWORDS:

• Communities of practice
• negotiation of meaning
• pre-service teachers
• ethnography
• PETE programmes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The regulatory policy in the university states that “It is in this contact [school placement] that the PST gets to know the contours of the career, becoming, little by little, a member of this educational community, called by the authors [Lave and Wenger (1991)], the community of practice. Thus, it is understood that the school placement work group, constituted by the PSTs, Cooperating Teacher and University Supervisor, should function as communities of practice, leading the PSTs to generate new knowledge and new skills.”

2 Names were changed at this early version to preserve the peer review integrity.

3 A course unit is referred to in many countries as a module or a unit of study.

4 Different from the traditional curriculum where teachers deposit information on students (also known as banking education), democratic spaces imply a kind of teaching in which the students actively participate in understanding and defining the personal and political realities of social life (Freire 1987).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal) through the (SFRH/BD/141505/2018) grant awarded to the first author.