Integrated movement education – an emerging signature pedagogy in PETE?

Background: Scholarship in physical education teacher education (PETE) repeatedly calls for developing new or innovative ways of educating PE teachers, echoing a broader agenda for developing, proliferating, and studying new signature pedagogies in teacher education. Despite myriad calls of this nature, there remains a dearth of empirical research that describes and analyses new or emerging signature pedagogies of PE.Purpose: The purpose of this article is to contribute knowledge regarding a potentially emerging signature pedagogy in PETE – integrated movement education – that has a distinct logic of integrating different movement practices, in this case, dance and ball games.Methods: Signature pedagogies have a surface structure consisting of concrete acts of teaching and learning, deep structures encompassing more profound intentions for learning, and implicit structures regarding the pedagogy’s moral or ethical dimensions. With a theoretical starting point in Shulman’s structures of signature pedagogies, the study identifies the ‘signatures’ of integrated movement education, drawing on qualitative data collected during a physical education and sport didactics course for first-year pre-service PE teachers, including teacher educator reflective diaries, lesson observations, and a focus group interview with pre-service teachers (PSTs).Results: On the surface of integrated movement education, PSTs are positioned as both learners and teachers of movement through integrated engagement in (i) different movement practices, (ii) facilitated movement and guided reflection and (iii) the linking of movement practice with movement theory. The deep structures of the pedagogy are that PSTs develop professional movement knowledge through embodied exploration, through which they become discerning movement connoisseurs with a growing didactical repertoire for movement learning. Implicitly, integrated movement education carries a commitment to norm-criticality and embodied integrity, encouraging PSTs to question and challenge traditional notions of what and how to teach in PE. In our analysis, we relate these structures to key challenges in PETE and the PE profession.Conclusions: Integrated movement education can be considered an emerging signature pedagogy insofar as it relates to key challenges in the PE profession, such as PETE-on-repeat, including PSTs in diverse movement practices, fostering teacher reflexivity, and challenging a dominant PE as sport technique logic. We propose that emerging signature pedagogies should be valued in terms of their potential as solutions to pervasive problems of practice in PE.