‘The elephants in the room’: the multiple challenges that limit the impact of school-based professional learning for physical education teachers

Background: Our study concerned a school-based professional learning (SBPL) innovation enabled through the Fulbright Specialist Program (FSP) at two non-government Australian co-educational schools. The SBPL focused on helping nine participants, four primary and four secondary specialist physical education (PE) teachers, integrate Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) pedagogy into their lessons for Year 4 to 6 (nine to 11 years old) and Year 7 to 10 (11 to 16 years old) students. We wanted to find out: (1) What challenges, if any, our teacher participants faced engaging in our SBPL, including the extent to which institutional social conditions may have come to influence their involvement and (2) What effect our innovation had on the progressive aims of quality PE (QPE). We sought to answer: How might institutional social conditions come to affect SBPL for PE teachers? Method: We had two delivery phases. Phase 1 situated Kevin (our FS), as a teacher educator with extensive experience of TPSR, in both schools for five weeks between February and March (school Term 1) 2023. Some in-school support was additionally offered by John, also an experienced PE teacher educator. Phase 2 occurred after Kevin departed Australia and involved John working with the teachers in a less ‘hands-on’ way in Terms 2 and 3, 2023. Our data were collected from semi-structured interviews and an extensive reflective journal, 93 pages and almost 50,000 words, complied by Kevin. These were then analysed by John, Jason and Michael using configurative thematic analysis. Results: While many teachers had an enduring ‘sporting habitus’, there were some signs of a shift towards embracing our version of QPE. Nonetheless, those teachers existed in interdependent relationships with senior management with a power balance in favour of the latter. Such power asymmetries effectively marginalised PE by making only practical facilities available with no classroom allocation for teaching theory, and by reducing teacher autonomy and capacity for teaching QPE. Teachers were also constrained in how much TPSR knowledge they learned, by school management at both sites not providing dedicated time for our SBPL, and by being time poor particularly through an administrative burden which impacted their work. Further, many described a degradation of status through their association with PE. Conclusion: The social environments of both schools had a stifling effect and a profound bearing on the impact of our SBPL, which often felt like an add-on for both the participants and researchers. We consider that TPSR SBPL needs to be more reflexive and less prescriptive, where providers should look beyond static, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches and must address the social contexts of their innovation. Through it providing us with a radically processual and relational lens on the issues, our use of figurational sociology allows us to reframe debates in this area by helping us better understand why PE as a long-term process has remained largely unchanged for 70 years, and why PL has had only a limited effect in facilitating change.