Pedagogical reorientation and qualitative self-transformation. Teachers’ and students’ experiences with physical education informed by the Practising Model

Abstract

The focus of this thesis is teaching and learning in Norwegian lower secondary school Physical Education (PE), which is informed by a pedagogical model known as the Practising Model. The overall aim of this study is to broaden our understanding of the phenomenon of practising in PE. To accomplish this task, the following overarching research question has guided the study: How do lower secondary school teachers and students experience the exploration of a PE practice informed by the Practising Model, and how can these experiences contribute to the further development of the model? Conducted as an Interactive Action Research study, this project involved close collaboration with PE teachers. As a joint venture, we have reflected upon previous practices and new possibilities, designed new teaching units, actioned them, observed the outcome, evaluated experiences, and refined our pedagogical approach before once again testing it in practice. Qualitative data were collected through the observation of 21 PE sessions, nine workshops with teachers, nine teacher interviews, 22 student interviews, and 21 student diaries. The theoretical perspectives applied comprise phenomenological philosophy, existential pedagogy, and the Joint Actions in Didactics framework. In Article 1, the most prominent finding connects to one of the teachers’ changed role enactment. The need for such a change was sparked by a reconceptualisation of established roles and teaching strategies. This led to epistemological breaches and task overload. We also identified the emergence of too many different didactic sub-milieus, each with a unique learning trajectory. This made it difficult for the teachers to provide adequate support to all students. On these grounds, we suggest that it is crucial to demarcate the overarching theme and clarify responsibility before putting such a pedagogical reform into play. The critical turning point for the teacher emerged as a conceptual shift, where he left the role of an organiser and instead pursued the role of a close, curious, and questioning teacher who drew on various teaching styles. In Article 2, we first discuss the relational aspect of practising and how three levels of intersubjectivity - primary, secondary, and narrative - affect students’ experiences. Secondly, we investigate the bodily aspect by discussing how a dialectic orientation between deliberation, conscious reflections, and embodied actions led to a creative and awakened goal-directedness that nurtured future-oriented and meaningful repetitions. This supported the development of new movement capabilities and helped students discover new ways of experiencing meaning in movement landscapes. Lastly, we address the emotional aspects, where we found that affective modes such as excitement, joy, and uncertainty worked as affordances that provided direction and meaning. Uncertainty turned out to be the essential mode to handle, where agency, just right challenges, in-depth reflections, creativity, problem-solving strategies, felt progress, and active repetitions over time emerged as crucial components for keeping uncertainty within the productive span. We conclude that educative and meaningful experiences can grow from the practising of movement capabilities. In Article 3, we show how pointing as appeal enabled teachers to relinquish control while still providing trust and responsible availability. Pointing as appeal is about appealing to, evoking, or (re)directing students’ attention, actions, or attitudes. This nurtured and supported students’ discontinuous experiences, allowing them to dwell on challenges, endure uncertainty, tensions, negativity, and discomfort and continue their search for answers. The second main finding concerns the students’ development of new movement capabilities and a patient attitude. Practising constantly threw students back onto themselves, forcing them to rethink the situation, take a stance, and continue from a different starting point. We argue that such experiences contribute to the development of a patient attitude. Furthermore, we conclude that practising appears to be able to expand the classic pedagogy of continuity by providing the conditions for discontinuity as a subjective and existential element of education. This can help students discover and develop new sides of themselves that hold significance within and beyond PE. In the narrative of this thesis, I demonstrate how our pedagogical collaboration challenges, disrupts, and changes existing practice architectures, that is, existing ways to think and talk about pedagogy, enact pedagogical ideas, and, not least, relate to each other in practical pedagogical scenarios. This shows that pedagogy informed by the Practising Model and transformed through Interactive Action Research holds the potential to provide a fresh design to the school subject of PE – a design that can break the mold of traditional practices by providing new and distinct sayings, doings, and relatings. Moreover, a revised version of the Practising Model is proposed, incorporating a fifth critical element of identifying and preserving challenges and tensions, two new experiential dimensions: patience and intersubjectivity, and suggestions concerning teachers’ operational forms. Here, I describe a tripartite division of the teachers’ possible role enactments, where pointing as appeal is considered the most appropriate for pedagogy informed by the Practising Model.