Teachers learning to use student voice in primary physical education – ready, steady, go!

Abstract

Primary physical education lags behind student voice developments in research and practice internationally (Gillett-Swan and Baroutsis, 2023) and in post-primary physical education (Howley and O'Sullivan, 2021; Iannucci and Parker, 2022a). Furthermore, evidence is lacking on how to guide primary teachers learning to implement student voice pedagogies in physical education successfully. This research begins to fill this gap by focusing on the research question: What direction can be taken from primary teachers’ experiences of learning to enact student voice in physical education? Insight on what mattered in teachers’ learning to enact student voice can guide how to promote student voice pedagogies as everyday primary physical education pedagogies. Within a professional learning community (n = 10), nine primary teachers enacted student voice pedagogical strategies over a six-month period. Data sources included recordings of monthly collective meetings with teachers (n = 7), mid-point (n = 4) and/or end-point (n = 6) individual interviews with the teachers, blog posts (n = 2), conference presentations (n = 2), and three focus groups with children (n = 12). Drawing on teachers’ and children's experiences, a roadmap for teachers getting started with enactment of student voice pedagogies is presented with attention to: starting small, starting smart, and not stopping. Teachers valued the outcomes of enactment of student voice pedagogies for the children in their classes in ways that changed their teaching approaches and sustained their commitment to student voice pedagogies. The roadmap presented can be used to support teachers learning how to enact student voice as an everyday pedagogy in primary physical education.