Abstract:
Globally, teacher educators in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) programmes are challenged to respond to significant policy and curriculum reforms, shape their enactment, and prepare future teachers for an ever-evolving educational landscape. This presentation reports on an ongoing ethnographic study of Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) professionals embodying policy work in Western Australia (WA). The research focus and direction, embodying policy work, applies and extends Bernstein informed concepts of the pedagogic and corporeal devices to offer new directions for inquiry and explore the considerations these raise for PETE professionals and their practices. The study affirms the importance of policy work in PETE while directing attention to the complex interconnections between contexts and people’s actions, and the potential meanings generated and ascribed to different forms of policy work and identities in-situ. It foregrounds the corporeality of policy work and specifically, the rules that connect contexts, people's actions, and potential meanings as integral to the policy work of PETE professionals. The first part of the presentation outlines this theoretical framing of the study which facilitates the exploration of three sets of rules: (i) contextual rules of embodying policy work; (ii) rules of/for embodying actions; and (iii) rules of/for embodying potential meanings. The focus is on how these rules are crucial to advancing understanding of professionals' policy work at an in-situ level and the fundamental implications of these for possibilities in the continued transformation of PETE. Next, the presentation outlines how the heuristic framework has been employed in designing and undertaking the ethnographic study, which has centred on one higher education institution in WA. Data has been generated through participant observation, interview, and documentary methods. Ongoing data analysis exploring the three sets of rules is explained and illustrative examples and preliminary findings associated with contexts and contextual rules of embodying policy work are presented. The presentation concludes by considering the importance of such work in expanding visions for the sustainable transformation of PETE amidst global, national and institutional changes and outlines future research directions.