Contemporary Developments in Games Teaching

Richard Light, John Quay, Stephen Harvey, Amanda Mooney, Richard Light, John Quay, Stephen Harvey, Amanda Mooney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135101503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación física

The teaching of games is a central component of any physical education or youth sport programme. Contemporary Developments in Games Teaching brings together leading international researchers and practitioners in physical education and sports coaching to examine new approaches in games teaching and team sport coaching that are player/student-centred and inquiry-based.

The book aims to bridge the gap between research and practice by exploring contemporary games teaching from pedagogical, policy and research perspectives. It offers interesting new commentary and research data on well-established models such as Teaching Games for Understanding (TFfU), Game Sense, Play Practice and the Games Concept Approach (GCA), as well as introducing innovative and exciting approaches emerging in East Asia, including Singapore and Japan.

Representing the most up-to-date survey of new work in contemporary games teaching around the world, this book is invaluable reading for any student, researcher, in-service teacher or sports coach with an interest in games teaching or physical education.

Part I

Recent pedagogical and policy developments in games teaching

1 Game as context in physical education

A Deweyan philosophical perspective

John Quay and Steven Stolz

The issue of context and physical education

It was 30 years ago when Bunker and Thorpe (1982: 5) made the claim that ‘traditional methods’ of teaching physical education ‘have failed to take into account the contextual nature of games’. Their aim was to problematise the teaching of particular techniques before these techniques had been con-textualised within a specific game. They understood that when the game as context is missing, questions of what to do with a technique and when to apply it emerge for students, along with the broader question of why one needs to learn the technique in the first place. As a response to this problem they envisaged a model for teaching in physical education that ‘starts with a game and its rules which set the scene for the development of tactical awareness and decision making, which, in their turn, always precede the response factors of skill execution and performance’ (p. 8). In other words, the game con-textualises the tactics or strategies, and the strategies contextualise the skills. Their model is widely known as teaching games for understanding (TGfU), which contrasts with more traditional technique-orientated models, the traditional methods, which are known in this way as the technical approach or the ‘skills approach’ (Brooker, Kirk, Braiuka and Bransgrove 2000: 20), or sometimes as fundamental motor skills (FMS).

In this paper we focus first on the shift in context between these two models, FMS and TGfU, and the ramifications for physical education. This is the shift from learning techniques before a game to learning techniques, tactical awareness and decision making in the context of a game. We then explore the notion of the game itself as context by questioning who is involved in the creative development of the game, referring to Almond's (1983) work on ‘games making’. In addition we investigate the further contexts within which the game itself sits. In a physical education setting games are usually considered to be competitive to some degree, thereby positioning a game within an aspect of the context of sport (but not necessarily labelling a game as a particular sport). We understand sport as context through the model of ‘sport education’ designed by Siedentop (1994). And then sport itself is part of the broader social context, for which Hellison's (1995) model of taking personal and social responsibility in physical education (TPSR) provides a widely known approach.

Our purpose in this paper is therefore to examine the notion of context as it influences games-based teaching in physical education. We are cognisant that other authors have approached the notion of context in physical education via concepts such as ‘the naturalistic context’ (Brooker, Kirk, Braiuka and Bransgrove 2000: 9) and ‘situated learning’ (Kirk and MacPhail 2002), however, our understanding of context is, we believe, different. We would argue that this term – context – has largely been taken for granted by physical educators and thereby left unquestioned as to its deeper meaning. Without being clear about what is meant by context, especially as this relates to education, our analyses remain open to misunderstanding. To provide this increased level of clarity we specifically turn to the educational philosophy of John Dewey. Here we note, like Armour (2010: 5), the ‘sobering’ fact that ‘Dewey got there before us’ in the consideration of many educational issues, including those of physical education. Dewey's work illuminates many of the issues we face in physical education today. Awareness of Dewey's important contribution to physical education stretches back at least 40 years, when Park (1969: 55) identified three significant aspects of Dewey's educational philosophy – ‘the assumed historical dualisms’, ‘experience’ and ‘the play-work-recreation complex’ – that he believed could assist physical educators in better comprehending their work. Of these three it is experience which we wish to focus on in this paper, and how context is understood through this lens. We begin with Dewey's account of environment as another way of considering context, always aware that environment must itself be understood via experience. And as we shall show, it is experience itself that provides the sense of context, which we wish to embrace.

Context as experience: a Deweyan perspective

Dewey considers ‘every experience in its direct occurrence’ to be ‘an interaction of environing conditions and an organism’ (1939: 544). This may sound fairly simple, and it is, however, it should not be perceived simplistically. What Dewey means by environment here needs further explication in order to adequately convey the richness he perceives in this term, a term that offers a way into understanding the notion of context. One possible misunderstanding concerns the contemporary use of the term environment to mean the natural environment: the natural world that is considered to exist separate from human beings, although effected by us. Dewey (1938a: 33) acknowledges that ‘a natural world … exists independently of the organism’, but he also stipulates that ‘this world is environment only as it enters directly and indirectly into life-functions’. But these life functions are not merely physical. ‘Environment … is not equivalent merely to surrounding physical conditions. There may be much in the physical surroundings to which an organism is irresponsive; such conditions are no part of its true environment’ (Dewey 1911: 487, italics added).

For Dewey there is a ‘true environment’ that does not simply equate to the natural physical environment. But how is one environment truer than another? The key to understanding what Dewey means by a true environment lies in his emphasis on interaction. However, this is not to be understood such that ‘organism and environment’ are ‘given’ as independent things and ‘interaction is a third independent thing which finally intervenes’ (Dewey 1938a: 33). Instead, interaction has the deeper sense of transaction or integration. ‘Integration is more fundamental than is the distinction designated by interaction of organism and environment’ (p. 34). For ‘the organism brings with it through its own structure, native and acquired, forces that play a part in the interaction’ (Dewey 1934: 246). And correspondingly ‘the processes of living are enacted by the environment as truly as by the organism; for they are an integration’ (Dewey 1938a: 25).

An experience is always what it is because of a transaction taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his environment, whether the latter consists of persons with whom he is talking about some topic or event, the subject talked about being also a part of the situation; or the toys which he is playing with; the book he is reading (in which his environing conditions at the time may be England or ancient Greece or an imaginary region); or the materials of an experiment he is performing.

(Dewey 1938b: 43–44)

Thus ‘even when a person builds a castle in the air he is interacting with the objects which he constructs on fancy’ (Dewey 1938b: 44). So interaction, integration, transaction, is not merely between an individual organism and physical conditions or surroundings, as if a person is ‘in’ the environment. For ‘an organism does not live in an environment’, like an object contained in a box; instead, ‘it lives by means of an environment’ (Dewey 1938a: 25). In other words, an organism is involved with an environment; it doesn't just sit amongst a collection of things. A person and his or her environment are in this sense ‘involved’ with each other in an integrated way. Hence ‘the words “environment”, “medium” denote something more than surroundings which encompass an individual. They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his [sic] own active tendencies’ (Dewey 1916: 13).

Some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly than some of the things close to him. The things with which a man varies are his genuine environment. Thus the activities of the astronomer vary with the stars at which he gazes or about which he calculates. Of his immediate surroundings, his telescope is most intimately his environment.

(Dewey 1916: 13)

Environment, in other words, cannot be understood in isolation from organism or person. Environment, true environment, is a factor within experience, not something that exists outside of experience. Thus a more complete description of experience suggests that ‘experience is a matter of interaction of organism with its environment, an environment that is human as well as physical, that includes the materials of tradition and institutions as well as local surroundings’ (Dewey 1934: 246).

Importantly, this means that ‘no complete account of what is experienced … can be given until we know how it is experienced or the mode of experiencing that enters into its formation’ (Dewey 1930: 417, italics added). And educationally speaking, ‘when we give names to this distinction [between what and how] we have subject matter and method as our terms’ (Dewey 1916: 196).

Therefore, the entities that we contend with in experience, be they solid objects, other persons, knowledge concepts or flights of fancy, are contended within a particular mode of experiencing. What is experienced as environment cannot be separated from the mode of experiencing the how. Environment and organism are integrated in experience. In educational terms what is subject matter, content or curriculum, and this is integrated with how as method, process, pedagogy. Curriculum as what is therefore an aspect of the environment, while pedagogy as how is the mode of experiencing.

Dewey (1916: 361) encapsulates this integration in his understanding of ‘education through occupations’. A what experienced and a how of experiencing sit within an occupation, describable via the pronoun who. Here an occupation, as who, is not merely an adult job, in the way we would tend to interpret this term in its more mundane or everyday meaning. An occupation for Dewey, in this sense of who, is holistic, it is qualitative, and it cannot be separated from his understanding of interest (a term perhaps more easily understood educationally as ‘engagement’) as this connects deeply with self. For ‘the genuine principle of interest is the principle of the recognized identity of the fact to be learned or the action proposed with the growing self’ (Dewey 1913: 7). Thus ‘wholes for purposes of education are not … physical affairs. Intellectually the existence of a whole depends upon a concern or interest; it is qualitative, the completeness of appeal made by a situation’ (Dewey 1916: 232). A whole for the purposes of education is an occupation (Figure 1.1).

Who circumscribes how and what. In this way how and what are also occupational. As how, ‘an occupation is a continuous activity having a purpose’ (Dewey 1916: 361). As what, an occupation is ‘an organizing principle for information and ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth’ (p. 362). This has ramifications for our understanding of the notion of context and contextualisation in physical education. When we are dealing with the entities of physical education (such as other people, physical objects, knowledge concepts, or even flights of fancy) as what is experienced (subject matter, curriculum) this always occurs within a how or mode of experiencing (method, pedagogy). This integration is...