From the Publisher…

Reflections on the Past, Visions of our Professional Future

As many of you know, this year celebrates the 125th anniversary of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance (AAHPERD). At the recent Indianapolis national convention the national associations that form AAHPERD were invited to reflect on what’s happened in the 25 years since our centenary, and to predict our professional future. As the outgoing NASPE President I had the pleasure of sharing my personal thoughts. You can find them in this month’s issue.

But my real pleasure this month is sharing a special treat for pelinks4u readers - an online presentation by Dr. Mike Metzler who teaches at Georgia State University. Mike, as many of you know, has contributed extensively to the past 25 years of physical education’s history. In October, at the Physical Education Teacher Education conference in Myrtle Beach, Mike gave a presentation entitled, “That was Then…This is Now: Celebrating PETE’s Past While Facing the Challenges in its Future.” In it, Mike highlighted significant events that have changed the way we teach physical education. He helped us understand why we do what we do today. And he noted issues that he felt needed to be resolved for us to move forward and enjoy a successful future.

Dr. Metzler graciously agreed to recreate his conference presentation specifically for pelinks4u readers, and using the latest technology you can read, or watch and listen to the presentation this month. Whether you prepare future teachers, or teach in the K-12 system, don’t miss this insightful presentation. It’s vital for all of us to learn from our past as we try to make informed decisions affecting our future. Mike’s presentation provides a great background to get you thinking about our next steps. Also contributing to this presentation was Dr. Lynn Housner from West Virginia University and another longtime, highly respected contributor to physical education teacher preparation. pelinks4u thanks both of them.

And finally, on the same theme of futuristic thinking, NASPE just announced an exciting new initiative called PE2020. It’s an invitation to you, your students, and everyone you know inside and outside of our profession, to imagine how they would like physical education to look in the year 2020 and beyond. pelinks4u is excited to support this initiative because clearly the contradictory implications of a declining economy and worsening student health affect our profession. This is an opportunity, not a catastrophe. But we must act to determine our own professional future and not simply be shaped by the actions of others. PE2020 seeks your input to help plan our future. Visit the web site www.pe2020.org for more information, or click on the PE2020 logo on our web site.

Build a Shared Vision for Physical Education in the Year 2020 and Beyond

That was Then…This is Now:

Celebrating PETE’s Past While Facing The Challenges In Its Future
by Mike Metzler, Georgia State University & Lynn Housner, West Virginia University

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO VIEW THE ACCOMPANYING POWERPOINT SLIDES WITH THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE, OR JUST LISTEN!

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Hello. My name is Mike Metzler, and I am a PETE professor at Georgia State University. The co-author of this paper is Lynn Housner, also a PETE professor, from West Virginia University. Lynn and I were asked to do the summary session at the 2009 NASPE PETE conference in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Our paper was entitled, [slide 1] That was Then…This is Now: Celebrating PETE’s Past While Facing The Challenges In Its Future, and we are very are pleased that pelinks4u is allowing us to present our combined paper and slides to you. Due to a previous commitment, Dr. Housner was not able to be present in Myrtle Beach. However Lynn made a major contribution to what we said at the NASPE PETE conference, and deserves a full portion of credit for what you might find agreeable, as well as all of the blame for anything that rubs you the wrong way. Since he could not be there in person, I told Lynn that I’d give him up in a heartbeat, and there you have it.

We are going to start by highlighting some of the many notable achievements by the PETE professoriate over the last 40 years. Along the way, I’ll ask you to identify some of the most significant events in PETE history since 1970 - adding to our own list of major events and development in each decade. And, because we just can’t leave well enough alone, we’ll go from touting PETE’s successes to discussing some of the challenges facing our collective future - things that will require taking a long hard look at who we are and what we do, even suggesting that we re-examine some of our core values as a community of researchers, scholars and teacher educators.

[slide 2] The year is 1971. The event is the publication of the themed January issue of Quest, “Educational change in the teaching of physical education.” [slide 3] In that issue, Shirl Hoffman carries on a self debate over the question of “Which is better? - the traditional “PE method” or some of the more innovative, theory-based methods that had been introduced in the previous several years.” [slide 4] He was referring, mostly, of course, to Mosston’s Spectrum of Teaching Styles, and also to the pedagogy used for movement education and other inquiry-based instruction.

In the end, Hoffman admits that he couldn’t really answer his own question, because there existed no empirical knowledge base from which to do so. He lamented, [slide 5] “The writer confesses that he does not know what behaviors constitute good teaching and welcomes enlightenment. Regardless of the real or imagined merits of any method, new alternatives for teaching are always worthy of at least systematic and patient exploration.” (p. 56). Other articles in that same monograph, by Kate Barrett, Bill Anderson, Sylvia Fishman and Anderson, and Neil Dougherty presented similar assessments of the state of research on teaching physical education: lots of questions, lots of gaps in our knowledge base, and lots of frustration - but beneath all that, lots of hope.

[slide 6] Some of that hope was actually in the process of being fulfilled as those articles were published in 1971. In another Quest monograph, published in 1977 Larry Locke declared that there was indeed, “New hope for the dismal science of research on teaching physical education.” Much of that hope came from his review of research on teaching that had been completed from 1970 to 1972. From that, he surmised [slide 7]:

“By stretching things a little we have accumulated no more than 50 studies, but the movement is underway and gaining momentum. If we have any dream of a physical education in which the instructional process is informed by knowledge born of disciplined inquiry, then the new forms of research on teaching are our foothold on the future.” (p. 11).

The 50 or so studies completed between 1970 and Locke’s 1977 article represented nothing less than the initial row of building blocks for an empirical foundation for teaching and teacher education called for by Hoffman, Barrett, and others. From that modest foundation, we began to build a respected field of study with four main components: 1) research on teaching and learning, 2) research on teachers, 3) research on teacher education, and 4) teacher education programming. The PETE professoriate can claim an impressive, if not long, history of significant events and developments that have served to move us forward in the four main areas just mentioned. What I would like to do now is touch on a sampling of what we consider to be the most important of those events and developments over the last four decades.

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