‘We united to defend ourselves and face our struggles’: nurturing a physical education teachers’ community of practice in a precarious context

ABSTRACT

Background: Physical Education (PE) teachers around the world often struggle with different experiences of precarity such as job insecurity, high workloads, lack of infrastructure in schools, and others. Communities of practice (CoP) are recognised as an important democratic strategy for teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD). A democratic CoP seeks to promote spaces where teachers can empower themselves by taking risks and collectively struggle to overcome their challenges. The majority of studies regarding CoPs and PE have, however, been conducted in privileged, global north countries with PE teachers who were predominantly white and middle-class. Much less attention has been paid to critically examining PE-CoPs with teachers in precarious contexts in the global south countries.

Purpose: This study investigated the process of nurturing a democratic PE-CoP in a precarious, Brazilian school context.

Methods: Ethnography and action research framed this 2-semester study. Participants included six PE teachers, a facilitator, and a critical friend.

Data collection/analysis: Data sources included: (a) lead researcher observations collected as field notes; (b) weekly teachers’ meetings and researchers’ meetings; and (c) teachers’ interviews. Data were analysed using an inductive and iterative thematic process.

Findings: Results indicated the development of a democratic PE-CoP in a precarious situation through an ongoing and dynamic progression where teachers built their own practice to overcome the marginalisation of PE and were supported to exist. In this untenable context, the nurturing of a democratic CoP focused on teachers’ survival and ‘defending themselves’ while learning to struggle together to change their micro-context.

Implications: Nurturing a democratic CoP created a space for the negotiation of what was meaningful and useful for these teachers in their reality. In these contexts, we suggest that teachers’ CPD must include not only content knowledge but also the quest for better professional conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional learning community
• physical education teachers
• continuing professional development
• situated learning
• precarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Conscious about different terms adopted to classify countries around the world and assuming the problematic involved in this classification, we chose global south and north terms that align with the literature used in this paper. We decided to use global south because we acknowledge that the term is more favourable than ‘third world’, ‘developing world’ or ‘undeveloped world’. We acknowledge that the global south term does not integrally refer to a geographical south, but it is more related to lower-income countries (e.g., Brazil, China, Mexico, and India).

2 Ethical approval for this study was received from the Ethics Committee of the first author’s university (number 2.441.430). All teachers signed letters of informed consent.

3 For more information about the action research and to see the facilitator’s actions in details, see Gonçalves et al. (2020).

4 The teachers learned three Brazilian approaches to teach PE: saúde renovada (a health-based approach), estudos culturais (a cultural studies approach) and crítico superadora (a critical approach).