Exploring pedagogy and practice: meaningful physical education (MPE) in elementary pre-service teacher education

In this paper, we share how three physical education teacher educators (PETE), working in different universities in Ireland, adopted a Meaningful Physical Education (MPE) approach (Beni, Fletcher & Ní Chróinín, 2017) for one 12-week semester. Guided by the principles of collaborative self-study (Roberts & Ressler 2016) and informed by research on communities of practice (e.g. Patton & Parker 2017), the paper examines our exploration of the MPE approach with pre-service teachers (PST). Building on previous work focused on learning about meaningful PE (LAMPE) (Ní Chróinín et al. 2017), we sought to simultaneously apply MPE-appropriate methodologies and principles through the contexts of our differing individual modules over one semester. Our central research question was: how does our engagement with the principles of MPE impact our pedagogical approaches?