Researching Sport EducationPartners

Researching Sport Education
Partnerships in action
Dawn Penney, Gill Clarke and
Mandy Quill
Introduction
Contributing to research-based knowledge is not an aspiration which all
educational institutions, teachers and learners will share. On the other
hand, if research is to be seen as useful for learning and teaching, then a
basic aspiration of researchers in this field must be that the learning
teacher, the learning learner and especially the learning school will be
learning from, among other things, research.
(McIntyre and McIntyre, 2002: 4)
In this chapter we discuss the process of developing physical education
through school based research. Significantly this has been the basis for the
work reported in this book. Our intention is to encourage critical reflection
and much needed debate about how we view research, what we understand
it to be, when it can occur and who can undertake it. It is our contention
that establishing teacher-led research in schools, developing ‘teachers
as researchers’ and thus embedding research in teaching and curriculum
development demand that we challenge many commonly held perceptions
of research. Here we therefore describe the respective roles of university
based researchers, teachers and students in research that, as a research team,
we were agreed should be undertaken as a collaborative endeavour. The intention
was never to do research ‘on’ Sport Education in schools, or ‘on’
teachers, or ‘on’ students. Rather, the hope was to develop a set of relations
and roles that would involve university researchers working with teachers,
and teachers and in some instances university researchers working with students
in developing Sport Education as a research based innovation in
schools.
Such an approach is not easy or straightforward. In a review of teaching
and learning research capacity in the UK, this type of research was identified
as ‘the most difficult sub-field to conceptualise and in which to see a
clear way forward’ (McIntyre and McIntyre, 2002: 4). Such research cannot
be rigidly structured or neatly sequenced. Research undertaken from this
collaborative stance and as an integral rather than separate element of