Embedding practitioner research as a pedagogy for social justice in physical education teacher education

Introduction: Over the past four decades, research in physical education teacher education (PETE) has increasingly focused on social justice pedagogies, advocating for proactive engagement in challenging the status quo of systems of oppression in PETE, including capitalism, imperialism, racism, LGBTQI + phobia, and ableism. Simultaneously, practitioner research has gained traction, encouraging educators to bridge theory and practice. Purpose: Considering a Freirean social justice lens, grounded specifically in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (conscientização and praxis), the aim of this study is to investigate practitioner research as a pedagogy for social justice within PETE. Specifically, we aim to explore pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) experiences with practitioner research as a pedagogy of social justice. Methods: The context of this study is the SRASI project, a collaboration between teacher educators and PSTs in two PETE programmes, one in the North of Ireland and one in the South of Ireland, that happened throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The study involved three teacher educators and twelve PSTs from the North and five teacher educators and twenty-four PSTs from the South, with support from international experts in social justice and PETE. Multiple data collection methods were considered, including recorded meetings with the PSTs, two focus groups with PSTs and generated artefacts that were analysed guided by an inductive-deductive coding process. Findings: Three themes are presented: (1) Planting foundations to start building PSTs’ awareness and social justice content knowledge; (2) Co-drafting and enacting the action plans as a catalyst to reinforce their awareness and social justice knowledge: Conscientização as a difficult process; and (3) Perceived school cultures and school placements influencing the practitioner research and praxis. Conclusion: By embedding practitioner research within a social justice framework, this study demonstrates how PSTs can move beyond theoretical understandings of social justice to engage in cycles of critical reflection that, at times, lead to action, in response to lived experiences of injustice during school placement, although this is not always possible.