Tim Hopper

Game-as-Teacher: Modification by Adaptation in Learning through Game-Play.

This paper will explore how game-play in video games as well as game centered approaches in physical education (PE) such as Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) can draw on complexity thinking to inform the learning process in physical education. Using the video game concept of game-as-teacher (Gee, 2007), ideas such as enabling constraints from complexity thinking (Davis & Sumara, 2006) and information-movement couplings from motor learning (Davids, Button, & Bennett, 2008), learning will be framed as emergent, adaptive and self-organizing. To explain these concepts the following examples will be used (1) an auto-ethnographic narrative of the authors memories learning to play tennis with his father, (2) an account of a beginner learning to play as an avatar in the video game Guild Wars, and (3) a group of beginners learning to play tennis using a TGfU approach. Drawing on the authors narratives and the video game concept of game-as-teacher, the paper concludes by emphasizing the principle of modification by adaption as a way to engage players of different abilities to experience worthwhile game-play in PE.

Self-study of an elementary generalist physical education teacher educator: school-integrated teacher education and structural coupling

This paper will focus on my last 8 years of teaching generalist pre-service teachers (GPTs) to teach elementary physical education (PE) within a school-integrated teacher education (SITE) course design. Self-study as a method of inquiry will be used to chart structural shifts in the course and my assumptions about teaching GPTs how to teach PE based on the (1) changes made to course structure, (2) aspects of the environment that afforded these opportunities to change, and (3) events that emerged that indicated the changes should become permanent aspects of the course. It is proposed that situating aspects of the course in a local school triggered these changes. Scholarly articles written on the SITE course, GPT comments and critical anecdotes on core experiences in the course are used to describe and reflect upon the evolution of the teacher education course to its present iteration, embracing complexity thinking as an organising construct. The paper concludes by describing how my learning to decentre my role as teacher, moving away from the rationalist insistence on pre-determined learning outcomes and focusing instead on creating an effect on learners. In essence, learning to create the conditions in my course for learning to emerge in different ways for GPTs within a collective consciousness of becoming a teacher.