Culture, embodied experience and teachers’ development of TGfU in Australia and Singapore

Abstract

Despite the diversity of cultural settings within which it is now being implemented, research on Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) is yet to address the impact of culture on teaching and learning. With its growth in Asia, in places such as Singa pore and Hong Kong that are culturally distinct from western settings, this seems to be an area of research in need of attention in the TGfU literature. In setting out to redress this oversight in the literature this article draws on a study of TGfU teacher development conducted in Australia and Singapore to examine teachers’ development of TGfU/Games Concept Approach (GCA) teaching in a sequence covering the last two years of teacher education and the first two years of full-time teaching. This article highlights the extent to which teacher development of TGfU is situated within immedi ate cultural and institutional contexts. It identifies how the different cultural meanings attached to sport and its place in both countries shape the participants’ interpretation and understanding of TGfU/GCA.