Conducting Practitioner Research in Physical Education and Youth Sport

Reflecting on Practice

Ashley Casey, Tim Fletcher, Lee Schaefer, Doug Gleddie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138892187
• eBook ISBN: 9781317485476
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

There is now a widespread expectation that teachers and coaches should be reflective practitioners, an expectation written into national standards of education in many countries. This innovative book introduces the methods by which teachers and coaches can conduct research into their own professional practice and therefore become more effective reflective practitioners, improving their students' learning as a result.

As the only book on practitioner research that focuses specifically on the unique challenges of working in a physical education or youth sport environment, it uses real-life case studies and applied practical examples to guide the reader through the research process step-by-step. Examining the what, why and how of four key research methods in particular – action research, narrative enquiry, autoethnography and self-study – it provides an expert analysis of the strengths and limitations of each method and demonstrates how conducting reflective research can produce tangible results in improving both teaching and learning.

This is an invaluable resource for all those interested in enhancing their professional development as students, practitioners or researchers of physical education and youth sport.

Part I

1
Taking Practitioner Research onto the Field

Introduction

Don’t get lost. Give it a try. Go find the place that you’re wishing for.

Natsuki Takaya (creator of Fruits Basket manga series)

The drive in modern life is around improvement. Nothing, it seems, is ever right. Governments are elected on promises to make things better. We are bombarded with myriad social initiatives, while on a personal level there are countless self-help books or personal development courses which promise that things can and will get better. The internal and external pressures to improve often contain very practical implications because we are typically judged – both professional and personally – on that improvement. And yet, while a lot of the resources (both human and material) that encourage us to improve tell us what we can improve and why improving in one or more areas of our lives might be important, we feel that they often fall short of helping us understand how to improve.

Teaching and coaching are no different. Pedagogues are banded by their experiences and castigated for their ‘wet behind the eared’ naivety or ‘stuck in their ways’ dogmatism. And both are told to change. Veterans and newbies alike are asked to change, to improve and grow but aren’t, in our experiences, given the tools to make such a metamorphosis. We’ve been there, done that and bought several T-shirts (and books) that promised the world and failed to deliver. And thus, the rusty wheel turns and the cycle of dogmatism endures. We are judged by other people’s standards and forget, sometimes, to apply our own. Practitioners often have a wealth of knowledge of their craft, the people with whom they are working, and the contexts in which that work takes place. How such knowledge is developed and how it can be expanded or deepened remains somewhat mysterious, at least to many teachers and coaches. That’s not to say that we have the solution and have written it all down. This is not our purpose in writing this book. Instead, we hope/aspire/desire to provide some examples, ideas and tools that have worked for us.

Changing behaviour, and in turn professional practice, is not something we can do on request, at least not in meaningful and enduring ways. There are myths that would lead us to believe that the initial steps in change are relatively straightforward: we decide to change, we become educated about the change, we have the skills to change, and hey presto! We make a change. However, we know that change is much more complex and difficult than these myths would lead us to believe (Kelly & Barker, 2016). And if it is difficult to begin to make a change, it is similarly difficult to change professional practice in the long-term. As Goodyear and Casey (2015) explain, the difficulty comes in sustaining that change beyond the honeymoon period of innovation. This often requires a shift in thinking, moving beyond the sense of celebration and emancipation and settling in a space where the new becomes the established form of practice. In embracing the new, the practitioner must make herself or himself comfortable with discomfort, and understand that confusion, uncertainty and doubt are to be embraced. Many might argue this goes against human nature, as it seems our mission is often to seek comfort and routine. Williams (1977) suggests that emerging belief and action is highly influenced by our dominant and residual beliefs and actions. He argues that in seeking a change in ideology and practice we must reposition ourselves to make the emergent and the new our dominant way of thinking, saying and doing (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008). However, even if we manage this, our once dominant beliefs lurk in the dark corners of our practice, to ‘ambush’ us in our most challenging and difficult moments. Perhaps even to save us from the moment. But in saving us, and in working in that moment, we are drawn back to our past practices (the ones we wanted to change) and thus engage in what Evans (1985) called ‘innovation without change’.

If our aim is to avoid the status quo, and if our ambition is to break the hold of our dominant practices, then we need to better understand the world in which we live. That is not to say we need to better understand the world itself but that we need to understand our world. John Dewey describes this as a pragmatic ontology and suggests that this characterises reality as living within an individual’s experiences. In other words, ‘what you see (and hear, feel, think, love, taste, despise, fear, etc.) is what you get. That is all we ultimately have in which to ground our understanding. And that is all we need’ (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 41).

To see reality as living in our experiences we must seek to understand those experiences. We need to be able to unpack what we see, feel, hear, etc. and we need tools that help us to do that. This is what practitioner research allows us to do. It allows us to experience the village of our lives rather than the cities and continents of our world. In doing so we can effect change in our emerging, dominant and residual practices. And perhaps the village can begin to change the world.

The village

Too much research is published to the world and not enough to the village.

(Stenhouse, 1981, p. 111)

In his conceptualisation of the teacher-as-researcher, Lawrence Stenhouse envisioned, we believe, someone who could talk the local dialect, who understood the local customs and who could effect change that was meaningful to the local community. In arguing that, as researchers, we seek a global audience he was also remonstrating with us for not looking to the everyday activities of teachers (and coaches). Yet he also aspired for more. He was interested in helping pedagogues to push back against the never ceasing tide of theory and policy that pervade their lives almost daily and to apply experienced practical judgement to the plethora of ‘good ideas’ they are obliged to receive. He saw the classroom not just as a place to test theory – although this was one of his key messages – but also as a place of ‘intellectual innovation which brings in its trail a press towards social change’ (Stenhouse, 1981, p. 103).

Donald Schön (1983) similarly argued that teachers should be reconceptualized as researchers. In particular, Schön described how reflection in-action (professional knowledge used to make decisions from moment to moment) and reflection on-action (professional knowledge used to analyse past experiences to decide how to adapt for the future) represent the distinct, often tacit forms of knowledge possessed by teachers and other professionals. One of the main difficulties, however, lies in the ways professionals can make their tacit knowledge of practice explicit, so that they and others might benefit. In this way, we think, both Stenhouse and Schön aspired not only for researchers to talk to the metaphorical village, but for the village to talk to researchers and to share these conversation with the wider world.

Unfortunately, these conversations are nowhere near as common as they could be. Indeed, as we have argued elsewhere, the public reflections of teachers (or indeed the reflective teacher) are more ‘the talked about’ than the ‘actioned’ realities of education (Casey, 2013). This dearth of interaction and understanding around schools (and clubs) as individual rather than collective institutions may be as much to do with the fact that the process of self-enlightenment is not traditionally part of a practitioner’s habitual practice. Yet, as Brookfield (1995) warns, innocence is believing that we fully understand what we are doing and how we are affecting learners. Only by answering the urge to change practice, to understand practice, and challenge the conditions of practice (Kemmis, 2009) can we truly be said to understand ‘how to go on’ in practice (ibid., p. 467).

The assumed ignorance of the village and its inhabitants

A tendency among researchers is to ask questions about issues that they could anticipate to be too difficult to answer to both teachers and pupils, particularly uses about important knowledge and learning – and then be critical about the poor quality of the answers.

(Larsson & Redelius, 2004, p. 394)

Anthropologists seek to explore local cultures without, in any way, attempting to change those local cultures. Yet one of the criticisms of anthropology has been the incredible difficulty of that very objective. By being in a position to observe behaviour and custom, some have argued that outsiders run the risk of changing the very thing they came to see (this is known as the Hawthorne effect: see McCambridge, Witton & Elbourne, 2014). Early missionaries, on the other hand, were overt in their desire to change what they deemed as ignorance and install their own practices and beliefs in place of the customs and traditions they found on arrival. Do researchers – in asking deliberately difficult questions and then offering criticism of practitioners’ limited responses – run the risk of running roughshod over the behaviours and good practices of the very people they come to engage with? How could an outsider possibly know more about the complex contexts, relationships and lived curriculum than the person in the midst of all of this?

Armour (2006) writes of the unheard and under-represented nature of teachers’ lives and asks that, as researchers, we take the time to help them to articulate their experiences or those of their peers. And yet we know that teachers and coaches and other practitioners articulate their experiences with their peers constantly. So perhaps Armour is hoping that researchers may value practitioners’ lives enough to actually listen to what they have to say, and help to include their lives in research texts.

In a similar way to Armour (ibid.), Connelly and Clandinin (1988, 1990) suggested that teachers lead storied lives and that often these stories are discounted by researchers who position themselves as experts attempting to fix teachers up. Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) commitment to better understanding teachers’ stories, and in turn their experiences, positioned researchers and practitioners on a level playing field. They stated: ‘when both researchers and practitioners tell stories of the research relationship, they have the possibility of being stories of empowerment’ (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 4).

The positioning of the teacher-as-researcher by Stenhouse, Schön, Clandinin and Connelly, as pioneers in the field of education, will be exemplified in this book. Yet we also hope to show that the busyness inherent in teaching and coaching means that it is impossible to deny the difference between what practitioners feel they could achieve and what they actually ‘pull off’ (Lawson, 1993). As a consequence, teachers and coaches adopt what Sparkes (1988) called ‘micropolitical strategies’ when it comes to surviving and thriving at work. Yet this ‘wheeling and dealing’ (ibid., p. 157) in the ‘arenas of struggle’ that are professional knowledge landscapes are unlikely to be shared with outsiders. Practitioner research allows us to see into the microcosms of schools and sports clubs and better understand what actually happens there. It also allows us to move beyond the idea that teachers and coaches are limited in their understanding and stops researchers resorting to criticism as their first response to apparently unchanging practices and to what they see as ignorance (Larsson & Redelius, 2004).

Practitioner research

The term reflective practitioner has become the ‘watchword’ for the twenty-first-century pedagogue yet it has been described as a ‘talked about’ rather than an ‘actioned’ notion of the professional practitioner (Casey, 2013). That said, because of the rise in the perceived importance of reflective practice and the expectations of practitioners to engage in such endeavours, practitioner research is a growing field of study in physical education and youth sport (Tinning, 2014). However, the multiple ways of doing practitioner research – of which the specifics are often unfamiliar to teachers, coaches, and teacher/coach educators alike – often results in a gestalt form of personal inquiry. This gestalt borrows the most convenient parts of different approaches while failing to consider the epistemological and ontological obligations as well as the practical work that has occurred over generations to refine and develop each approach.

Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2007, p. 25) described the term practitioner research as ‘a conceptual and linguistic umbrella to refer to a wide array of education research modes, forms, genres, and purposes.’ They argue that the expression encompasses a range of educational research methodologies and methods including but not limited to: action research; teacher research; self-study; narrative (or autobiographical) inquiry; the scholarship of teaching and learning; and the use of teaching as a context for research (ibid., p. 25). It is useful here to explore their definitions of each of these genres further before explaining how the selection that we included in this book are relevant:

Action research: a methodology commonly used in collaborations between teachers and university-based researchers for the alteration of curriculum and common practices in schools through problem-posing, data collection, analysis and action.

Teacher research: a term which refers to the increase in teacher inquiry in North America in the 1980s.

Self-study: the personal studies of teacher educators in higher education.

Narrative inquiry (or autobiographical inquiry): refers to the knowledge-bearing stories written by teachers following systematic reflections around their biographies and experiences of school and teaching.

The scholarship of teaching and learning: the studying, understanding, and enhancement of teaching and learning in primary and secondary schools and universities.

The use of teaching as a context for research: the trend for researchers to adopt the role of teacher in an effort to understand the complexities and problems of teaching.

(Adapted from Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2007, pp. 25–26)

In grouping these six genres of research, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2007) went on to justify their choices by exploring the shared features that cut across all. The primary aspect of all forms of practitioner research, they said, is the notion that the practitioner himself or herself takes on the role of researcher. Secondly, practitioner research works on the premise that, in order to comprehend and therefore improve practice, the interplay of power relationships and the workplace has to be expressly understood in the context of daily work. Finally, the very same professional context is the site of any practitioner inquiry and the ‘problems and issues that arise from professional practice are taken up as topics of study’ (ibid., p. 26).

Despite the plethora of practitioner research approaches shown above we decided to choose three from Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (2007) list: action research, narrative inquiry and self-study. We then added autoethnography because of its features that allow for a rich exploration of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• Foreword
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• PART IV
• PART V
• Index