The European Commission places a strong focus on the lifeloná learning of teacher educators as they áare a key factor in determining the quality of teachers and the calibre of teaching in the classroom. We are a collective of four teacher educators at Dublin City University who came together at a time of national curriculum change to decipher what constitutes quality teaching of Arts and Physical Education. We wanted to explore and make accessible to others including our students, colleagues and contemporaries the knowledge gained through our participation in APEX - a self-initiated project exploring quality teaching in the aforementioned curriculum areas. Framed by theory relating to teacher educator professional development and our new primary curriculum framework, we adopted a self-study approach utilising memory and dialogic inquiry methods. We investigated our motivations to participate in the project, our professional development gains, and to what project affordances we ascribe these benefits. Data analysis is currently underway using a thematic analytical approach. Data primarily comprised our four individual written memory tasks. Four themes emerged in relation to our motivation to participate in APEX. These include professional frustrations and disappointments, a motivation for greater awareness and understanding, an appetite to learn, clarify and resolve issues, and a longing to connect, belong and exchange. We hypothesise findings regarding our professional takeaways from APEX will resolve some frustrations, reconcile some curriculum tensions and benefit integration opportunities between Arts and PE in our programme. We speculate the project affordances to which we attribute our professional learning will relate the setting, the format, the direction, the atmosphere, the exchange, the aesthetics and the outcome. This paper will be of interest to primary school teachers, teaching Arts and PE specialists or teacher educators from any discipline who supervise and support preservice teachers on their school placements.

The need to address social justice issues in education has gained global interest, putting us teachers and teacher educators at the centre. As a result, research on socially just education has gained traction. This growing interest in and increasing conversations on social justice specifically diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), have recently started to make me uncomfortable as until then, I had not consciously and explicitly engaged with this subject as part of my teaching practices. The literature reports silence in research regarding how us science teacher educators teach for social justice, and how we can prepare pre-service teachers in matters of social justice teaching. However, considering that social justice issues vary contextually, the aim of this study is to investigate the presence of (and/or missed opportunities for) social justice teaching in my teaching practices at a South African university. My teaching is guided by the Topic Specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TSPCK) framework which is known to promote quality teaching and meaningful learning. It is in this TSPCK –guided teaching that I, with two critical friends, who are co-authors in this paper, use the self-study methodology and the critical incident technique (CIT) to explore the manifestation and/or recognition of social justice (if at all), in my teaching. Data is in the form of the teacher educator’s journal entries, lecture videos and audio transcripts of our discussions and reflections. We wish to bring to light, social justice issues in our contexts and the opportunities that leveraging TSPCK, a framework that explains teacher professional knowledge, can provide for science teacher educators to teach for and equip preservice teachers for socially just and inclusive teaching. Implications of these findings to the role of science teacher education in preparing teachers for socially just teaching, especially in diverse contexts like South Africa will be discussed.

Leaving Certificate Physical Education (LCPE), a certificate examination subject in a high-stakes environment in the final two-years of Irish post-primary schooling, has two explicit bodies of knowledge: theoretical and practical knowledge. The curriculum promotes the notion of ‘integrated learning experiences’ which blends both forms of knowledge. Through a community of learners, two teacher educators and two teachers worked together as a research team to construct and enact teaching resources for ‘integrated learning experiences’. We aimed to explore how teachers teach integrated learning experiences for LCPE and the possibilities of such experiences. A secondary aim of this project was to sustain a community of learners between the research team which spans across the teacher education continuum to establish the characteristics of quality teaching from different perspectives.

This research adopted a collaborative self-study approach and took place over one year as (i) the teachers examined their own practices, (ii) the research team constructed the teaching resources, (iii) the teachers enacted and reflected on such teaching resources/practices with the teacher educators, and (iv) the research team evaluated and modified the teaching resources. This was underpinned by an exploration of ‘self’ on behalf of all community members, each acting as each other’s critical friend in this exploration.

The findings highlighted the challenges in teaching integrated learning experiences given the school context, e.g., timetabling issues, and teacher pre-dispositions, e.g., assumptions of practice. The teachers reflected positively on the possibilities of integrated learning experiences and the potential of increased student learning through such experiences. The collaborative self-study approach allowed for collaborative interrogation of ‘self’ in ‘practice’, encouraged the sharing of differing perspectives on quality teaching (and the effect on the richness of student learning), and the challenging of assumptions in the processes of changing practice. This presentation advocates for collaborative self-study across the teacher education continuum.