International Portal of Teacher Education

Source: Studying Teacher Education, Vol. 8, No. 1, April 2012, 19–33
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)

In this article, the authors aimed to explore their pedagogical approaches for engaging teacher candidates in thinking about physical literacy and scientific literacy, respectively.

Methods
The authors employed self-study research methodologies to explore their literacy practices and developing pedagogies of teacher education.
Data were gathered over one academic year using a collaborative blog and bi-weekly meetings.
The authors are two beginning teacher educators and critical friends who are committed to literacy education.

Conclusions
The authors conclude that regular communication, both asynchronously in the form of a blog and synchronously in the form of face-to-face meetings, provided an opportunity for them to challenge their developing understandings of theory and practice in teacher education classrooms.

Discussion and debate about the existence of turning points in their data provided signposts for how they came to understand their pedagogies of teacher education differently as a result of collaborative self-study.
Self-study provided a methodology that allowed them to develop their understandings of physical literacy and scientific literacy. Significantly, they learned that collaborative self-study provided a means for them to challenge one another to live their values as teacher educators.
After coming to terms with the successes and challenges of developing physical and scientific literacy pedagogies in their respective methods courses, literacy gave them ideas about the goals and paths that they intended to share with their teacher candidates.

The collaborative self-study provided support and encouragement from a trusted colleague as well as a safe space to explore and reframe problematic aspects of practice. This self-study helped the authors to understand many conceptual similarities between the constructs of physical literacy and scientific literacy.