1,721,003 research outputs found
Professional Learning of Secondary Health and Physical Education Teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand: An Ethnographic Study
No full textProfessional learning remains critical for teachers to enable them to draw on student-centred pedagogies, work with new technologies, and maximise the benefits of modern education environments. Teacher professional learning can occur in different communities, spaces, forms, and networks. However, questions about the value of learning through the top-down, short-term, and one-size-fits-all approaches of teacher professional learning have been raised in the past 2 decades. Research showing that teachers benefit from ongoing, multidimensional, and active learning has led to a move from traditional professional development towards a greater focus on professional learning. More recently, the complexity of teacher professional learning has attracted the attention of many scholars, which has stimulated a rethinking of the nature of teacher professional learning and what constitutes effective professional learning for health and physical education (HPE) teachers. In response, this study adopted complexity thinking as a framework to examine the professional learning of HPE teachers in this thesis.
This ethnographic study was undertaken within a secondary school HPE department in New Zealand. The study focused on the experiences of five full-time HPE teachers and spanned a duration of 20 weeks. Various forms of data were gathered, including participant observations, daily researcher fieldnotes, semistructured interviews, and examination of relevant artefacts and documents pertaining to teacher learning. Data analysis via thematic analysis was conducted during and after the data collection process.
The results of this study highlight that teacher professional learning is dynamic, nonlinear, multifaceted, and, to a large extent, self-directed. The findings show that professional learning of HPE teachers takes place across 10 distinct spaces, broadly categorised into teaching spaces, school spaces, and spaces beyond the school. For individual HPE teachers, these learning spaces vary in their configurations, structures, and affordances. Through an in-depth examination of the individual HPE teachers’ learning trajectories, it became evident that each teacher had a personalised learning journey shaped by their unique experiences, needs, preferences, and goals. Consequently, each HPE teacher developed their own unique professional learning networks, comprising diverse people, relationships, communities, spaces, tools, and resources that they could access. In conclusion, this study contributes empirical evidence that enhances the understanding of teacher professional learning within the domain of HPE. The results of this study indicate the importance of HPE teachers’ agency to access a variety of learning spaces to improve their practice
Chinese Physical Education Teacher Education Students' Professional Growth: Cooperative Learning within Professional Learning
No full textResearch shows that while policymakers and researchers value cooperative learning (CL) highly for its educational benefits, it is often used superficially, or not at all, by schoolteachers globally because of their misunderstandings and limited experience with CL. Correspondingly, attention needs to be given to the ways in which professional learning can provide student teachers with theoretical understandings of CL and experiences practising it during their initial teacher education (ITE) programmes. This thesis investigated how cooperative learning professional learning (CLPL), in a physical education teacher education (PETE) programme at a Chinese university, influenced students’ perspectives on and their implementation of CL. The interconnected model of professional growth was used as a theoretical lens to view the study.
Utilising an interpretive, qualitative case study methodology, I collected multiple types of data from 20 PETE students, a teacher educator, and seven associate teachers. The data sources included focus groups, semistructured interviews, postlesson interviews, classroom observations, concept maps, reflective journals, instructional materials, and field notes. An interactive cycling coding approach was used to analyse the data.
Findings of this study showed that the PETE students developed their knowledge of, commitment to, and beliefs about CL during the CLPL. Eight of the PETE students endeavoured to construct a positive CL environment during their school practicum but encountered problems, such as forming heterogeneous groups. The critical role of microteaching, reflection, and coaching facilitation in supporting the PETE students’ professional growth and confidence using CL was identified.
Although CL is a part of education policy and research in China, student-centred pedagogies have not been evident in physical education in authentic educational settings. The outcomes of this study suggest that in school physical education contexts, where CL is new, student teachers’ perspectives will be enhanced by microteaching experience in university course work and coaching facilitation by a CL community of practice in school practicum. This research has implications for CL in ITE, particularly PETE, through identifying the interconnectedness of professional learning, student teachers’ school-based practice, and changes in their perspectives on CL in physical education
Asian Minds, Asian Bodies: An Exploration of Asian Students’ Experiences of and Perceptions About Secondary School Physical Education
No full textThe purpose of this research was to explore Asian students’ experiences of and perceptions about
Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) secondary school Physical Education (PE). I drew on Bourdieu’s
concepts of capital, habitus and field to explore what factors act as barriers and enablers to their
engagement levels. My research is timely because of the rise of the Asian population in NZ and the
limited literature available on this topic in NZ.
Purposive sampling was used to select participants for this study. A mixed methods approach
included an anonymous web-based survey and two focus groups at one Auckland co-educational
secondary school, to collect data. The quantitative and qualitative data were integrated, where the
analysis of 97 survey responses identified trends in the data and the focus group helped explain the
results. The quantitative data is presented in a table format where the percentages display the level of
engagement and identified barriers and enablers. The two focus groups provided deeper insight into
the Asian student’s experiences and thoughts about PE and the perceived barriers and enablers to
their involvement in PE. I used a reflexive thematic approach to analyse the data, where each stage
played an essential role in identifying patterns and themes within the data set.
In the findings I identify five themes that act as barriers and/or enablers to student engagement. Peer
culture was the most dominant factor followed by the perception of skill and ability, teacher attention,
stereotypes and family views. Aspects of the findings aligned with the current literature regarding how
these factors decreased students’ participation levels in class. In the discussion I argue that PE is a
socially constructed field with uncertain boundaries. PE can be redefined by teachers, and Asian and
non-Asian students who occupy the field. Individuals created their own understanding of PE that
differed from the dominant habitus and valued different forms of capital. Some Asian students
understood how skills and athleticism is a form of physical capital that can be exchanged for social
capital. A few students were like a ‘fish on land’, alienated when their habitus did not fit into the PE
field
ESOL student's perceptions: An explorative study on language learning in school team sports
No full textRecent research suggests that second language learners require extra attention to ensure they succeed in mainstream classes (Barnes, et al., 2019; McCarthy, 2020). As such, the New Zealand education sector should arguably consider more opportunities for second language learners to be involved in extended use of English within the wider school community, and beyond what an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) class
offers.
This thesis examines the perceptions of five ESOL students from an Auckland co-educational high school regarding their participation in a school team sport, and the
influence these experiences had on their language and communication skills. Data for this
study were gathered through focus group and semi-structured interviews, and then were
thematically analysed (Braun & Clarke, 2013). The Learning Beyond the Classroom model
(Benson, 2011; Reinders & Benson, 2017) and Affordance Theory (Menezes, 2011) were
used to understand the language affordances in school team sports, and the analysis
considered language learning in school team sports through the dimensions of location,
formality, pedagogy, and locus of control.
Four core themes were identified. First, ‘the value of the sporting context’ reflects the
perceived value the participants placed on sport. Second, ‘motivations to learn’ highlights the
motivations of the participants and how and why sport provides an ideal context for learning
language. Third, ‘the importance of coaches and teammates’ highlights the key role coaches
and teammates play in language learning. Fourth, ‘it is up to me’ captures the participants’
realisation that, although sport provides opportunities, it is up to themselves to take advantage
of these opportunities. This study concludes that school team sport is a language learning
setting that can accelerate language learning of the English language for an ESOL student
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
