Conference Agenda

While numerous studies have explored teacher autonomy within the PE context (Haerens et al., 2010, 2018; De Meyer et al., 2016; Huhtiniemi et al., 2019; Lonsdale et al., 2013; Oldervik and Lagestad, 2021; Van den Berghe et al., 2015), there is limited research that specifically examines the perceptions and reflections of PE teachers, particularly in a comparative manner with other regions. Furthermore, there is a paucity of research investigating the perceptions and reflections of PE teachers in KRI. Therefore, this study specifically focuses on autonomy in PE lessons by examining how PE teachers in both Finland and KRI utilize and reference autonomy in their teaching practices. The aim of the study was to examine fifth-grade physical education (PE) teachers’ reflections and perceptions about PE teaching in Finland and Kurdistan region of Iraq (KRI), using analyses of in-depth interviews with a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach.

When examining the use of autonomy in PE, Deci and Ryan (2000) self-determination theory constitutes an important theoretical lens. Deci and Ryan (2000) assert that three basic psychological needs exist in all humans: autonomy; relatedness; and competence. This article focuses on autonomy. Indeed, autonomy is essential for optimal motivation, integration, wellness, and well-being in PE, which leads to intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation refers to performing an activity because it is inherently interesting and provides its own reward by satisfying one’s basic needs for autonomy, competence, and/or relatedness (Deci and Ryan, 2000). Intrinsic motivation comes from within and leads to the kinds of behaviors that one wants to perform. If students feel that an activity has an inner value for them, this can lead to increased inner motivation, as indicated by Deci and Ryan (2000). We argue that intrinsic motivation is especially essential for students to create lifelong delight in movement. Intrinsic motivation is also closely connected to learning. Previous research has demonstrated that autonomy has a particularly positive effect on motivation in PE, and especially inner motivation (Deci and Ryan, 2000). According to Cheon and Reeve (2013), students will benefit from teachers’ adoption of an autonomy-supportive teaching style.

Over the past two decades, research in physical education (PE) has increasingly emphasized learning‑oriented perspectives that attend to the why, what, and how of teaching movement in school contexts (Larsson, 2021). This shift has broadened the field by incorporating perspectives on movement learning (Barker, Bergentoft & Nyberg, 2017), meaningful PE experiences (Beni, Fletcher & Ni Chróinín, 2018), and aesthetic experience (Maivorsdotter & Lundvall, 2009). Despite this expansion, ball games continue to be criticized for reproducing traditional sport discourses that emphasize competition rather than educational purposes such as equity, inclusion, or the cultivation of movement capability (Mustell, 2025).

A substantial body of research highlights the complexity of teacher communication during PE lessons. Teachers often rely on both direct teaching behaviors (e.g., explicit instructions or demonstrations) and indirect behaviors such as tone of voice, encouragement, and intonation (Jung & Choi, 2016). However, studies suggest that PE teachers frequently struggle to articulate learning objectives in ball‑game contexts (Modell & Gerdin, 2022) and tend to prioritize student activity over movement quality (Larsson & Nyberg, 2017). Research on communicative practices in PE has also shown that teachers’ motivational cues (such as “go faster!”) can unintentionally reinforce a governmental logic privileging activity levels over conceptual or aesthetic understanding (Öhman & Quennerstedt, 2008). Within this broader research landscape, spontaneous teacher exclamations, such as “good!”, “great!”, and “brilliant!”, constitute a pervasive yet under‑examined feature of PE teaching. In the lesson analyzed in this study, the teacher expressed 228 such exclamations within 60 minutes. Rather than dismiss these exclamations as incidental “cheering,” the present study situates them as potentially meaningful elements of PE pedagogy.

The study has two central aims. First, it seeks to describe and explain how teacher exclamations function transactionally during a volleyball lesson and how they contribute to the co‑creation of purposeful learning contexts shared by teacher and students. Second, it aims to identify how exclamations support student learning of PE content and foster aesthetic sensibilities related to ball‑game participation. By examining exclamations as part of a dynamic instruction–action–expression structure, the study conceptualizes them not as peripheral comments but as pedagogical acts that help shape the rhythmic, emotional, and meaning‑making dimensions of PE lessons.

The study is grounded in John Dewey’s concept of aesthetics, developed in Art as Experience (1934/1980), where aesthetics refers not to beauty but to the quality of experience—how individuals meaningfully engage with their environment on emotional, cognitive, and embodied levels. From this perspective, learning emerges through organism–environment transactions in which actions and perceptions form a unified, purposeful whole.

Building on Dewey, Garrison (2010) characterizes teaching as an aesthetic and ethical endeavour, in which teachers “call into existence” the educational good they seek for their students. Teaching is therefore not merely the transmission of content; it is a creative, relational act through which teachers shape environments that enable shared, meaningful experiences.

Applied to ball‑game teaching in PE, this framework highlights that teachers must do more than provide technical instruction. They must stage purposeful contexts, drawing students’ attention to moments where they can respond aesthetically and emotionally to unfolding play.

Within this study, teacher exclamations such as “good!”, “great!”, and “brilliant!” are conceptualized as micro‑actions that help call specific qualities of experience into existence. These exclamations operate as expressive cues that orient students toward the intended purpose of the activity and contribute to the shared construction of a cohesive learning environment. In this sense, PE teachers act as artists working with students’ experiences as their medium, co‑creating the aesthetic and pedagogical contours of the lesson

The mandate of teacher education is to prepare future teachers for the complex realities of school teaching, and teacher education is widely regarded as playing a crucial role in enhancing the overall quality of education (Korthagen, 2016). Education always involves teaching. And as Biesta (2019) underlines teaching is about bringing something to the educational situation that was not already there - something the students were not asking for going into the education situation. Biesta (2013) emphasizes the importance of risk in pedagogical practices to awaken students for the world – in other words, education needs to break the silence. However, the silence in PETE seems to be continuous.

Research on Physical education teacher education (PETE) documents that PETE education (often) confirms rather than challenges the students’ understandings of physical education (PE) and what the teachers role is and should be (Mordal-Moen & Green, 2012; Østerlie & Kristensen, 2023). The PETE program`s seems to have limited impact on PETE students` established beliefs (Mordal-Moen & Green, 2012; Philpot et al., 2020), even though their perceptions of their role as a PE teacher seems to change during the PETE program (Westlie et al., 2024), many PETE students struggle to open themselves to new and alternative ways of practicing and thinking about PE (Hordvik et al., 2020). In line with this, PETE program traditionally has focused on “physical-education-as-sport-technique” (Kirk 201) as the dominant idea of the idea of PE, which emphasizes the technical, reproductive and quantitative approach in PE in general and PETE in particular. Quennerstedt (2019) underlines that PE becomes a drama, where both teachers and students work to keep up the appearance of “effective” PE – trying to uphold something that should look like PE in terms of what and how. Moreover, research highlights PETE students’ athletic background and how it continues to be rewarded in PE (Aasland et al., 2019; Evans, 2004; Mordal-Moen & Green, 2012). Hence, many students begin the PETE program without any experience of failing – not mastering – activities done in PE.

In this presentation and in the context of PETE education, I invite pushing and breaking the boundaries with which PETE educators and students are comfortable. By borrowing Nancy Stark Smith's concept of "Failing successfully" I discuss how we can break the silence of PE and PETE and how a focus on the fear of failure and risk-taking can become a significant asset for gaining teacher competence in PETE.

This self-study examines my 35-year career as an academic working within a research-intensive university that has been progressively reshaped by neoliberal logics of performativity, competition, and managerial control. Over three decades, I have inhabited the ambient atmosphere of precarity marked by restructurings, redundancies, and the encroachment of audit culture. These experiences have produced both vulnerability and creativity; moments of capture by bureaucratic apparatuses and moments of escape through relational, intellectual, and pedagogical lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

Theoretically, the study draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts of the apparatus of capture, plane of consistency, and rhizome to re-imagine how an academic life is continually territorialised and deterritorialised within a neoliberal institution. The apparatus of capture describes how universities codify and measure diverse forms of academic work through rankings, metrics, and performance-based funding (such as New Zealand’s PBRF). The plane of consistency offers a counter-image of becoming; an open, relational field where new assemblages, collaborations, and ideas can emerge despite institutional pressures. The rhizome provides a metaphor for mapping the unpredictable, non-linear, and proliferating pathways of an academic career: connections made, ruptures endured, and creative survivals enacted.

As a self-study of teacher education practice (S-STEP) (LaBoskey, 2004; Ovens & Fletcher, 2014), this project extends the methodology by interrogating the material and political conditions under which Physical Education Teacher Educators themselves labour. While much self-study research has explored identity, pedagogy, and reflection, this project situates those concerns within a broader analysis of precarity, understood as both a structural condition and an existential experience of contingency, vulnerability, and care. Following Dewey (1938), self-study here is not conceived as a bounded reflection on practice but a process of engaging in a “continuous mapping” that traces how self, practice, and context co-evolve over time.

Aim and Objectives

The central aim was to examine how precarity, as a defining feature of the neoliberal university, shapes and reshapes the academic self over time. Specifically, the study asks:

1. How has my work as an academic been shaped through experiences of precarity, restructuring, and managerial capture across a 35-year career?
2. What “lines of flight” have emerged (practices, relationships, or creative acts) that enabled continuity, meaning, and resistance within this context?
3. How can self-study, understood as continuous mapping, offer a methodological and ethical response to living and working precariously?