Experiences and Beliefs that Led Me to This Study

This section is about my background that led me to pursue this study, thus the first

person pronoun will be used. Apart from the appropriateness of the methodology illustrated in the rest of the chapter, experiences and beliefs illustrated here could

provide additional explanations about why I chose to study PE teachers’ professional development and employ life history and grounded theory. In addition, some

explanation below may also help readers to understand the lens through which I conducted this study.

My research interest in teachers’ professional development began with the initial

purpose of understanding and facilitating my own development as a PE teacher. I undertook a two-year full-time Masters degree after completing one year of teaching

at a high school. In an attempt to improve my own teaching by learning from the knowledge of experienced PE teachers, in 2002 I wrote my dissertation on the

development of teachers’ practical knowledge. The data were analysed using the grounded theory method (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), because it appeared to be

systematic, and therefore the most valid choice in a situation (particularly in Taiwan) where qualitative research had just begun to establish its status and often needed to

answer challenges from predominant positivists. Due to a concern to validate what I wanted to do, I continued my intention to use grounded theory when I began this

doctoral study, although, as the study progressed, I found myself to be more in tune with grounded theorists who hold positions different from positivists (Charmazs, 2000,

2005; Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Additionally, my research interest in PE teachers’ CPD could also be linked to one of the research questions in my previous study – the

development of teachers’ practical knowledge. I was fascinated by stories about how the key participant became a PE teacher, and arrived where she was, both personally

and professionally. This experience reinforced in me a belief that any profound understanding about a teacher’s perspectives should not be separated from his or her

personal history, and this informed my intention to use a life history approach in this study.

It is also important to note that an understanding of the personal beliefs developed

through my own learning and teaching could help readers to understand how I have interpreted participants’ life histories in this study. Before becoming a teacher, I used

to believe that what I learnt in PETE – sports skills, motor learning and PE pedagogy – provided sufficient training to make me a competent PE teacher. However,

after I engaged in PE teaching, I encountered a so-called reality shock about the limitations of my prior learning realising, for example, that without proper classroom

management, I could barely teach pupils anything. For me, at that time, improvement in management was gained through trial-and-error and self-reflection rather than

through in-service training courses, because there were no courses relevant. Accordingly, when I undertook the Masters degree, I was interested to study the

nature and origin of teachers’ theory-in-use. My concern about the practical aspects of PE teaching became even stronger after a further year of teaching at another high

school. Therefore, while I undertook interviews with the aim of investigating participants’ concerns about PE teaching in this study, I was already interested in

issues associated with the difference between what they wanted to do, and what they actually did in practice. It was important, therefore, for me to be critically aware of my

prior position and the potential bias as a result. At the same time, I found that my interest in the link between theory and practice in participants’ arguments sometimes

resulted in a great amount of interview data that seemed interesting but that was not central to the focus of this study.

While my first year as a teacher happened to coincide with the initial implementation

of the Grade 1-9 Curriculum, like many participants in this study, I also took many school-based in-service training courses and designed a so-called school-based

curriculum. However, my previous engagement in teaching and curriculum reform was like a two-edged-sword, which could help my understanding of participants’

expressions toward the curriculum reform on the one hand, and might replace their real intentions by the taken-for-granted assumptions I held on the other. Therefore, the

use of a grounded theory method was also an attempt to avoid imposing preconceptions upon the participants’ arguments, although in practice I found myself

engaged more in a process of ‘constructing’ theory than ‘finding’ it.

Since I first began studying PE teachers, I have always held a personal aspiration to understand why different PE teachers do what they do. This interest could have been

stimulated by questions about the contradictory behaviour of my own high school PE teacher, who was also a coach of the soccer team I joined. After I undertook PETE

training and worked as a PE teacher, I kept wondering how he, who had experienced similar training to mine and had been very skilful, could be so enthusiastic about

coaching but so indifferent to PE teaching. During my Masters study, I developed an understanding that those PE teachers who became indifferent to teaching had perhaps

failed to adjust their pedagogies in order to attract pupils to PE, meaning that they gradually lost interest in the whole process of PE teaching. Therefore, I felt it would

be important to develop in-service training courses that could help to solve difficulties encountered in teaching. Although the above assumption could be partly true, through

the conduct of this study, I have gradually formed new insights suggesting that teachers’ actions are linked in more complex ways to the lived school culture and

social context. Similar to what Hargreaves (1995) came to understand, I came to recognise that in many cases, the teacher was “not personally unskilled or uncaring,

but rather people of a particular time and place” (p.10). Accordingly, an important belief that permeated throughout the analytic work undertaken in this study was to

address the relationship between the participants and the lived context, and how the participants interacted with and were impacted by it. In particular, this attempt can be

clearly illustrated in the last chapter of the research findings – the dynamics of PE teachers’ practice. However, rather than being driven by a preconceived framework,

the findings were developed through a series of deliberate analytic steps and grounded in the collected data.

The above section has outlined my personal experience which underpins (or possibly

undermines) this study. The following sections provide an overview and analysis of the research approach, methods of data collection, process of fieldwork, data analysis

and other methodological issues associated with this study.