Workplace Learning in Physical Education: Emerging Teachers’ Stories from the Staffroom and Beyond

Pre-service and beginning teachers have to negotiate an unfamiliar and often challenging working environment, in both teaching spaces and staff spaces. Workplace Learning in Physical Education explores the workplace of teaching as a site of professional learning. Using stories and narratives from the experiences of pre-service and beginning teachers, the book takes a closer look at how professional knowledge is developed by investigating the notions of ‘professional’ and ‘workplace learning’ by drawing on data from a five year project. The book also critically examines the literature associated with, and the rhetoric that surrounds ‘the practicum’, ‘fieldwork’ ‘school experience’ and the ‘induction year’.

The book is structured around five significant dimensions of workplace learning:

1. Social tasks of teaching and learning to teach
2. Performance, practice and praxis
3. Identity, subjectivities and the profession/al
4. Space and place for, and of, learning
5. Micropolitics

As well as identifying important implications for policy, practice and research methodology in physical education and teacher education, the book also shows how research can be a powerful medium for the communication of good practice. This is an important book for all students, pre-service and beginning teachers working in physical education, for academics researching teacher workspaces, and for anybody with an interest in the wider themes of teacher education, professional practice and professional learning in the workplace.

About the Authors:

Tony Rossi is with the School of Human Movement Studies at the University of Queensland in Australia. He researches workplaces associated with human movement studies, particularly schools, where he pays close attention to the changing nature of teachers’ work, specifically where it relates to the health of young people. In addition, he has directed his research towards Sport for Development projects in marginalized and underserved communities in Australia and elsewhere. From January 2015 he will be in a new position in the School of Exercise and Nutrition Science at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

lisahunter is with the Department of Sport and Leisure in the Faculty of Education at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She has an eclectic range of research interests including surfing festivals and female surfing; female experiences of physical activities; young people and embodied subjectivities, and has methodological interests in visual methods, narrative and ethnography

Erin Christensen is with the Faculty of Education at the University of Newcastle in Australia, a position she took up after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Queensland. Her research focuses on the micropolitics of teachers’ workplaces as well as on children’s voices in sport, physical activity, adventure education, and school physical education

Doune Macdonald is with the School of Human Movement Studies at the University of Queensland in Australia where, at the end of 2013, she completed a ten-year tenure as the Head of School. She is internationally recognized as a curriculum scholar and theorist and recently led the development of the Australian Curriculum for Health and Physical Education. Her research interests span education, physical activity and youth, educational and health policy, and her current projects focus on the outsourcing of the physical education curriculum and the health work of teachers.