Back in the Curriculum Race: (Re)inventing Teaching and Learning Through Physical Education

• In Event: Situated Learning in Physical Education: Four Teaching Initiatives From Teaching Games for Understanding

Abstract

Overview
“We have reconceived the curriculum; no longer is it a noun. It is instead a verb: currere” (Pinar, 2004 p.19)
This paper presents research from a SSHRC funded project investigating the educational potential of Inventing Games (IG), a unit of Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU). Preliminary data suggest that as students invent games, they not only develop physical skills and tactical games awareness, but also the skills and attributes required for democratic engagement, including decision making, negotiation, and ethical insight through processes we are calling situated ethics, building on Varela (1999).
Theoretical Context
Traditionally, Physical Education in developed countries has been dominated by Cartesian dualism, which sets learning through the body apart from learning through the mind, and also privileges the latter (Butler, 1998). In the early 1980s, several Physical Educators challenged this situation with a radical approach to games education (Bunker & Thorpe, 1982). TGfU encourages students to construct knowledge as they play adapted forms of traditional games within four classifications. Its proponents argue that students can then transfer this knowledge effectively between games and across classifications. Inventing Games (a unit of TGfU) offers students open-ended opportunities to experiment with game making. As they invent their own games, students make collective decisions, explore the purpose and consequences of rules, and consider notions such as fairness and justice. Put another way, they navigate a creative balance between order and chaos (Davis, 2006), as they create and refine enabling constraints to define and redefine games that are fun, fair, and inclusive (Butler, 2006).
Methodology
This two-year action research project brings two researchers, six practicing Physical Education teachers, and their students together in a community of practice in British Columbia, Canada. At the time of writing, the teachers have attended four introductory workshops and been interviewed twice by the researchers, before and after the workshops. They will teach Inventing Games units with their students, and classes will be recorded. Researchers and teachers will meet regularly to co-create pedagogies intended to promote the emergence of situated ethics and other forms of learning.
Analysis
Digital recordings, photographs, and transcripts of interviews, classes, and discussions (between teachers, researchers, teachers and researchers, teachers and students) will be gathered into NVivo. Emergent themes about teaching and learning will be identified and analyzed using grounded theory and critical theory. Particular attention will be paid to moments of aporia as they are encountered by researchers, teachers, and students.
Findings
Preliminary findings suggest that many students design enabling constraints that provide optimal learning situations in all domains (physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and ethical). These situations include moments of aporia that promote difficult knowledge (Pitt & Britzman, 2006).
Significance
In the behaviorist traditions underlying most Physical Education practices in the last 200 years, the discipline has been viewed as education of the physical, thus limiting educational outcomes to skilled performance, health, and fitness. The authors believe that when the discipline is viewed as a means of broad education through the physical, it can be usefully theorized within contemporary poststructural conversations.

Authors

• Joy I. Butler, The University of British Columbia

• Timothy F. Hopper, University of Victoria

• Claire Elizabeth Robson, The University of Calgary