The complexity of becoming HPE teacher: A study of HPE teachers’ performances of self in the moments of teaching

Abstract

The compulsory education school system in New Zealand aims for teachers who support students’ individual learning and asks teachers to encourage students to become their individual best. Although the national curriculum conceptualises learning and teaching as a complex and personal task, the dominant education literature portrays the teaching-learning relationship as linear. Thus, I focused on HPE classes to find out how individual teachers navigate the landscape of future-oriented teaching in contemporary times and on the complexity of performing a teacher identity as a HPE teacher that encourages students’ learning. My research also explores the enabling and constraining factors in teachers’ pedagogical practices in HPE settings. The unique contribution of this thesis is not only the presentation of an empirical study which is theoretically underpinned by complexity thinking; but also the presentation of teachers’ teaching as a fluid, emerging, adaptive, and self-organising process in a moment in time that is constructed through the individual elements and their relationality within a codified and constrained educational system. Complexity thinking synthesises the idea that teachers are situated in multiple, interconnected, social systems that both enable and constrain the ways in which teachers perform their identities as HPE teachers. Within an overarching complexity thinking conceptual framework, I adopted an emergent methodological and analysis process that enabled me to remain open to multiple ways and levels of capturing, analysing, and representing complexity in this research. Methodologically, I use bricolage to map how seven participants in five different schools in Auckland perform their roles and identities as HPE teachers. Using a range of methods, including observations, interviews, audio-recorded reflections after each observation and interview, photovoice, a focus group meeting with all participants, audio-recorded reflections after the focus group meeting, and a review of the schools’ websites, I was able to engage with teaching as a dynamic process of performing a self as a teaching identity. By zooming in and out of the systems of interactions between a macro-level (education system), a meso-level (institution, schools), and a micro-level (teaching moments), I was able to present the dynamics of teaching HPE in a variety of situations. Situational maps, as entry points into teachers’ presentations and perceptions of themselves as teachers, as well as the use of poetry in some instances, support the analytical and representational processes. The results highlight the fluid identity performances of teachers that are enabled within the constraints operating at different levels of the education system. This research suggests that teachers perform a variety of teacher identities in HPE contexts. The identity that emerges in a particular moment cannot be pinned down in any predictable way because this identity is affected by the forces and relationships inherent in a pedagogical context in which the teacher’s self becomes entangled. My findings challenge the widespread belief that teaching can be distilled into a set of rules learned in a teacher training programme. This study offers a nuanced, multi-levelled understanding of the complexity of teaching and the endless, entangled becoming teacher process within the moments of teaching.