Influenced by Third World Liberation social movements in the United States and abroad, this article applies a serve-the-people concept to service-learning in education. Rooted in pedagogies more traditionally associated with ethnic studies and community organizing, and informed by sociocultural and critical frameworks in education, this article offers insights from school community spaces that serve K–12 youth from different urban working-class neighborhoods. Transformative opportunities for grassroots collaboration, learning, agency, and community reorganizing are explored with implications for students, teachers, teacher educators, and community workers concerned with social justice.
Copyright of Theory Into Practice is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2015.977659

This editorial provides an overview of the articles which are featured in this issue of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice. This issue includes a number of contributions which deal, directly or indirectly, with teacher learning, and particularly with the development and role of teacher professional learning communities. It also addresses the issue of learning from teaching as teachers describe, analyze and reflect upon their teaching experiences in the classroom, including the connection between their behavior and beliefs and student learning. One of the ethnographic studies focuses on the development of a community of practice for sustainable professional development among 18 teachers of English as second language in Hong Kong. Another article discusses the complex role of special education teachers in Israel. All seven papers included in this issue, in a way or another, look at the complexities of teaching and learning. Overall, a number of overarching themes may be identified: the importance of analyzing teachers beliefs and practices; the key role of professional communities in enhancing teacher learning and change; the need for relevant professional development opportunities to support teacher learning and commitment to teaching; the pedagogies of teaching and their role in fostering teacher reflection and growth as well as student learning taking into account the diversity and guidance provided to them; and the link between the complexity of teaching and the dynamic of classrooms and school culture.
Copyright of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2014.928118

At present, it is very difficult to retrieve relevant and comprehensive literature on the historical development of PE teacher education in Hong Kong. One of the problems might be due to the fact that in the past PE teacher education was offered by the college of education which was run by the government. Under civil regulations, PE lecturers were not encouraged to conduct any research or projects. In order to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the PE teacher education history, there is a need to develop enriched, empirical teaching resources to strengthen this area. The purpose of this project is to study the historical development of PE teacher education in Hong Kong since the 1930s, focusing on the areas of physical education teacher education and physical education development at school levels. To collect primary empirical data about programmes, pedagogy, curriculum changes, school-based curriculum development, and professional development of PE teachers, 19 retired and serving PE lecturers and 10 secondary and primary schools PE teachers were invited to participate in interviews. The results of this study will provide a comprehensive reference for teaching and learning purposes to be used in teaching PE history and other contexts.

Language in its broad sense refers to a message system communicated from one to another. It is not uncommon for teachers to teach with a specific kind of language to pupils, which creates unequal relations of power, particularly between teachers and pupils in classroom context. In turn, language itself becomes a discourse including the ways teachers speak during PE lessons. This study investigates the language used by two student teachers in PE lessons during field experience in a primary school in Hong Kong. The PE lessons conducted by the participants were video taped and analysed in the aspects of context, teaching process, and most of all, the language used during the lessons. Results indicate that the participants used language to teach and control pupils learning and discipline consciously and unconsciously. As student teachers, their teaching behaviour and performance were much influenced by the school traditions, such as routine training. However, through languages during the process of teaching, they exercised power and control over their pupils on thinking and ways of problem solving. Hidden curriculum such as sexism also existed unconsciously as another discourse in the lessons.

This paper explores how Learning Study, a Hong Kong version of the Japanese Lesson Study, serves to relate teaching to learning at the classroom level. Learning Study is premised on a conceptual framework that builds on three types of variation in a specific object of learning: variation in students' understanding of the object of learning (V1); variation in teachers' understanding and ways of handling the object (V2); and the use of patterns of variation based on the Theory of Variation (V3). Each Learning Study begins with a careful consideration of what pupils are supposed to learn (i.e. object of learning) and what is/are critical for them to be able to learn it (i.e. critical features). A pre- test is used to help the team to collect pupils' prior understandings of the object of learning which may constitute their learning difficulties. Taking into account students' different understandings of the object of learning, teachers collaborate with researchers from tertiary institutes to develop ways to structure the lesson in terms of pattern of variation aiming to make possible the learning of the critical features identified for the object of learning. Teachers in the team then teach the lesson in cycles. Lesson observation, post-lesson conference, post- test and post-lesson student interview are arranged after each cycle of lesson and the data collected are analyzed and triangulated to optimize the improvement that can be made in the next cycle. This paper draws on the data of two learning studies supported by the government-funded Progressive and Innovative Primary Schools Project of the Hong Kong Institute of Education and discusses how the teachers became aware of what was crucial in teaching the chosen topic – the critical features that students had to attend to, by relating the act of teaching to the corresponding student learning outcomes.

Classroom management is recognized as an essential component of effective teaching. However, there is little information about how physical education student teachers manage their class during their practicum. The purpose of the study was to describe the class management practices of Hong Kong physical education student teachers. Twenty local primary pre-service student teachers were videotaped teaching two ball games lessons in the allocated schools during their final practicum. Each videotaped lesson was coded using the Physical Education Teacher Assessment Instrument (PETAI). Quantitative data generated by the PETAI indicated that the pre-service group spent similiar percentages of time in overall class management to other studies. Three pre-service student teachers were randomly selected to participate in the second phase of the study. Students were observed teaching two ball games lessons and were invited to take part in two pre-lesson interviews and two post-lesson stimulated recall sessions. Qualitative data were collected through lesson observations and interviews. Constant comparison and analytic induction were used to organize and categorize the data. Results showed that there were common managing behaviours and strategies exhibited by the pre-service student teachers during teaching. Pedagogical setting for learning and organization were the identical managing behaviours observed, whilst the preventive management, equipment management, and interactive management were the common class managing strategies identified. Findings of the present study hold implications for the preparation of physical education teachers.