Exploring pedagogy and practice: meaningful physical education (MPE) in elementary
pre-service teacher education
Sweeney, Tony, Bowles, Richard and Coulter, MauraORCID: 0000-0001-9406-2349
(2020)
Exploring pedagogy and practice: meaningful physical education (MPE) in elementary
pre-service teacher education.
In: 2020 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting (AERA), 17 - 21 Apr 2020, San Francisco, CA, USA.
In this paper, we share how three physical education teacher educators (PETE), working in
different universities in Ireland, adopted a Meaningful Physical Education (MPE) approach
(Beni, Fletcher & Ní Chróinín, 2017) for one 12-week semester. Guided by the principles of
collaborative self-study (Roberts & Ressler 2016) and informed by research on communities
of practice (e.g. Patton & Parker 2017), the paper examines our exploration of the MPE
approach with pre-service teachers (PST). Building on previous work focused on learning
about meaningful PE (LAMPE) (Ní Chróinín et al. 2017), we sought to simultaneously apply
MPE-appropriate methodologies and principles through the contexts of our differing
individual modules over one semester. Our central research question was: how does our
engagement with the principles of MPE impact our pedagogical approaches?