Rethinking teacher knowledge in physical education: what do physical education teachers need to know?

Debates about what makes a good physical education teacher and what knowledge is needed to be a good physical education teacher have flourished in the literature and within and beyond educational institutions for decades. This is in no small way connected to historical and sustained ideological debates about the contested nature of the meaning of physical education and its aims, content and pedagogy. There are no definitive answers to the unresolved question of what physical education teachers need to know and it is impossible to formulate a definitive knowledge base because the knowledge needed will be different depending on the context, course and each person’s ideological position. Ideological differences have, however, supported helpful debate and discussion about the current nature and purposes of the knowledge base, and the necessity and reality of reconstructive thinking and acting in physical education initial teacher education (PE ITE). This chapter seeks to navigate a path through several of these debates and provoke your (re)thinking around what physical education teachers need to know. We open the chapter with a brief overview of some different perspectives on the characteristics of teacher knowledge and knowledge production. We give a summary of some of the main theories, ideas and concepts that have given direction to PE ITE programmes. For the sake of clarity, we then divide our discussion into four knowledge areas: content knowledge (also referred to as subject matter knowledge); pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (where we pay special attention to knowledge of movement observation, a knowledge form which is arguably becoming a dying art); knowledge of pupils; and self-knowledge and reflection. These areas are neither mutually exclusive nor comprehensive. The selection of these four areas was informed by a number of different conceptualisations of the various content, forms and categories teacher knowledge assumes (Shulman, 1987; FeimanNemser, 1990; Grimmett and MacKinnon, 1992; Fernandez-Balboa, 1997; Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1999; Rovegno, 2003).