A Narrative Inquiry into pre-service PHETE student's advocacy for social justice

Advocating for more culturally responsive and socially just forms of health and physical education (HPE) that brings attention to racism, colonialism, sexism, and other social issues has been largely overlooked by Canadian... [ view full abstract ]

Advocating for more culturally responsive and socially just forms of health and physical education (HPE) that brings attention to racism, colonialism, sexism, and other social issues has been largely overlooked by Canadian physical and health education teacher education (PHETE) researchers (Halas, 2014). Research shows pre-service teachers’ beliefs and values shift very little by engaging in teacher education programs (Hickey, 2000). For this reason, we chose to explore how we might engage PHETE students in thinking differently about social justice issues that arise through PHE. The study featured an autobiographical intervention with 120 pre-service PHETE teachers at two different universities. Phase one included the above intervention with 4 PHETE classes couched between a pre and post survey on social justice (Schaefer & Gleddie, in process). Phase two of the study, presented in this session, was a narrative inquiry alongside 7 of these pre-service teachers. The objectives were to better understand how the students experienced the intervention as well as their experiences of learning about social justice in teacher education. Phase two data was analyzed using the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space (temporality, sociality and place) while looking for resonant threads across their experiences. Although still early in the analysis phase the threads that have become apparent through the analysis are:1) Questions around PHETE teacher knowledge; 2) Invisible marginality; 3) Weight of the world; 4) Enduring gender roles/ stereotypes; 5) The power of relationships. Phase two showed that each of the students found the autobiographical narrative inquiry to meaningful for a variety of reasons. It has also shown the complex nature of how pre-service teachers conceptualize social justice, how they experience learning about advocating for social justice, and how much pressure they feel to advocate for a physical and health education that attends to social justice issues.