Empowering pre-service teachers as practitioner researcher toward PE inclusive practices (PST-PRIPE)
The Portuguese law (DL54/2018) stipulates mandatory policies aligned with inclusive education commended by the Salamanca Statement (1994). The UNESCO (2015) Guidelines for Quality Physical Education (QPE) highlights the inclusive potential of PE, focused on allowing access, participation, and achievement in the domains of physical literacy and civic engagement, academic achievement, social inclusion and gender equity, and health and well-being. In order to explore the potential of QPE, it is necessary to ensure the place of PE in the core curricula, to encourage inclusive and innovative approaches, and to invest in teacher education and professional development. Inclusive QPE demands looking at diversity not as an obstacle but a challenge to the organisation and alignment of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment (Kirk, 2020; Penney et al., 2018). Enacting the inclusive demands of government policies (Alves, 2019a, 2019b) and following the guidelines of QPE constitute a key challenge for PE and the whole educational system (MacPhail & Lawson, 2020). The sustainability of inclusive practices depends on adopting a positive attitude towards diversity, valuation and belief in social learning, and gaining confidence and competence to find ways to assure access, participation and achievement to all students (Ainscow, 2005; Cast, 2018). Teachers need to experience evidence of the benefits of inclusive practices by training, school support, and university collaboration through in-service and pre-service inclusion-oriented programmes (Batista, 2020; Korthagen, Loughran, & Russell, 2006; MacPhail & Lawson, 2020; Penney et al., 2018; Rouse & Florian, 2012).
Despite the efforts of pedagogy and didactic courses to change PE towards a meaningful participation and learning, pre-service teachers (PSTs) remain unprepared to solve problems of marginalization, exclusion and underachievement (Fisette, 2013; Graça, 2015; Kirk, 2020). University and schools need to mind the communicational gap (Nóvoa, 2012; Zeichner, Payne, & Brayko, 2014), working together to change PSTs’ perspectives and practices from the highly dominant teacher-centred, multi-activity, sports skills approaches, restrained by their own apprenticeship of observation and their need to control students’ behaviour, towards a student-centred PE curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, attending to student diversity and inclusion barriers (Amaral-da-Cunha et al., 2019; Amaral da Cunha et al., 2018; Batista, 2020; Batista & Moura, 2019; MacPhail & Lawson, 2020; Teixeira, Batista, & Graça, 2016).
This participatory action research study framed upon the scaffold of community of practice (CoP) – composed of university PE teacher educators and school PE cooperating teachers – aims to explore how PE pre-service teachers (PST) learn and gain understanding on how inclusive approaches can be orchestrated to answer the diversity of students’ potential, expectations, and needs. The research questions that will guide the research are: 1) what challenges and difficulties do PSTs face to address students’ diversity? 2) how do PSTs design, develop, and reflect on their practices to create an inclusive learning environment? 3) what is the evidence of the students’ outcomes in access, participation and achievement in PE. This 18th month project – a partnership of Faculty of Sports (FADEUP) with four cooperating schools – will include four main phases: 1) building the foundations of a teacher education CoP for inclusive practices; 2) diagnosing students’ diversity and preparing PSTs to inquire about their practice for inclusion; 3) development of inclusive practices; 4) post-intervention analysis and reflection on the overall experience. The study will include PSTs and their teacher educators, cooperating teachers, and students of the school placement classes.
Kemmis et al.’s (2014) practice architectures framework will be used to focus the analysis upon the inclusive experiences and interpretations coming into being at each school. Three interconnected analytical levels will be considered, the subjective (students’ and PSTs’ personal experiences), the intersubjective (PSTs–CoP dynamic interaction) and the practice architecture levels (inclusive teaching practice fulfilment). Trustworthiness of the qualitative analysis of data will be sought by ratifying emergent themes related to the three levels of the practice architecture through triangulation of data sources and methods, active search for negative evidence, by debriefing researchers’ interpretations, and member checking. Additionally, quantitative methods might be used according to studies developed by PST. With this exploratory study, we expect to learn about the critical barriers and possible pathways to improve QPE, inclusive teaching, and teacher education. Evidence and lessons extracted from the research will try to advance the endeavour of inclusive education within academic and professional communities.