Aim: Given the release of the Céim - Standards for Initial Teacher Education (Teaching Council, 2020), Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) programmes in Ireland have experienced profound changes in their curricula, pedagogies and assessment. Mapping and sharing current signature pedagogies in Irish PETE will facilitate this adaptation to the Céim standards process.
Methods: Through the PETE Ireland community, all member institutions were invited to share samples of their signature pedagogies in a structured template. A total of five institutions, with respective practices were collected. The practices were deductively analysed according to the PhysEd project, Signature Pedagogies framework (Shulman, 2005), followed by inductive analysis.
Findings: Initial mapping of signature pedagogies in Irish PETE shows that Experiential Pedagogies (EP), (Auto)Biographical Pedagogies (ABP) and Pedagogies of Professional Learning (PPL) come to the fore. Specific pedagogies refer to Vignettes and Narratives in ABP, Peer Teaching and Living the Curriculum in EP, and Community of Learners and Practitioner Enquiry in PPL. A Metacognitive Learning Pedagogy was also identified relative to Retrieval Practice. Interestingly, several examples highlighted combinations of signature pedagogies through interactive (horizontal alignment) or iterative (vertical alignment) pedagogical designs, either within the same signature pedagogy or combining two signature pedagogies.
Conclusion: It is evident that PETE programmes in Ireland are adopting multiple signature pedagogies, as standalone or in combination, to maximise the value and effectiveness of the learning experiences for student-teachers. Further work is needed to deepen the understanding of the rationale of the adopted pedagogical approaches, as well as the experiences of PE teacher educators and student-teachers. Critically, PETE Ireland, as a setting for this work, demonstrates how important it is to create communities of teacher educators for collaborative professional development that improves PETE as a whole and its adaptation to national policy.