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Background: Student-Centered InquiryasCurriculum (SCIC) is an activist approach [Oliver, K. L., and H. A. Oesterreich. 2013. Student-Centered Inquiry as Curriculum as a Model for Field-Based Teacher Education.Journal of Curriculum Studies45 (3): 394–417. doi:10.1080/00220272.2012.719550] inspired by years of research with youth. It was designed as a means of listening and responding to youth in order to better facilitate students’ interest, motivation, and learning in physical education settings. While we have a strong and growing body of activist research with youth in physical education, SCIC as a specific approach to working with youth is in its infancy; thus, there is a need to further explore the challenges teachers/researchers face learning to use this approach to teaching. Purpose: This study explores how educators, in different contexts, learn to use an activist approach called SCIC, in order to better facilitate students’ interest, motivation, and learning in physical education and physical activity settings. Research setting and participants: Participants included a university professor, a college instructor, a postdoctoral student, a doctoral student, and a pre-service teacher. Data were collected between January and May 2016. Data collection and analysis: Data collection included weekly field notes and debriefings following observations, teacher artifacts, weekly collaborative group meetings, and two individual interviews per teaching participant. Discussion and conclusions: The main challenge that emerged was learning how to move from a theoretical understanding of student-centered pedagogy to the practice of student-centered pedagogy. Specifically, the amount of time that was necessary to build a foundation that allowed for student and teacher understanding, respect, and comfort, negotiating teacher and student assumptions that were embedded in the status quo of physical education (PE), and the struggle to gather and use meaningful data to guide pedagogical decisions. We negotiated these challenges through our professional learning community whereby we worked to all be able to see and name what was happening in our individual classes and collectively planned what was needed to move forward through these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the tensions that surfaced as a teacher of physical education (PE) shifted his ‘stories to live by’ [Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1999). Storying and restorying ourselves: Narrative and reflection. In A. Y. Chen & J. Van Maanen (Eds.),The reflective spin: Case studies of teachers in higher education transforming action(pp. 15–23). Singapore: World Scientific] around PE. The tensions became explicit when his shifting ‘stories to live by’ bumped against dominant narratives of PE that shaped his professional knowledge landscape. Our inquiry is framed by Dewey's pragmatic ontology [(1938).Experience and education. New York, NY: Collier Books] and Clandinin and Connelly's [(1995).Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes. New York, NY: Teachers College Press] narrative conception of experience as the living and telling, re-telling and re-living, of stories of experience. We also draw on Connelly and Clandinin's [(1999). Storied identities: Storied landscapes. New York, NY: Teachers College Press] narrative conception of identity as ‘stories to live by’ which is an embodied, fluid and context-dependent view of identity as situated at the interface between personal practical knowledge and professional knowledge landscapes. We begin with situating this work within the broader spectrum of narrative research. We then describe the relational processes of re-telling the stories through narrative inquiry and finally explore the re-living of these stories in order to show the tensions that surfaced as Ashley's ‘stories to live by’ shifted. We engage in the narrative inquiry process of re-telling using the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space (with dimensions of place, sociality, temporality), to show tensions and shifting identities. We conceptualize these tensions as moments of autobiographical revisions [Carr, D. (1986).Time narrative and history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press]. These revisions are seen as a part of a person's struggle for narrative coherence; a struggle to compose a life in the professional knowledge landscape that is meaningful to each individual. In these moments of autobiographical revision we show the reflexive relationship between living, telling, re-telling and re-living of stories. We end by considering what we have learned about our own stories to live by through this process and theoretically and practically suggest ways other teacher educators and physical educators might benefit from engaging in narrative inquiry work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]