Doctor Offers School Sport Tonic

Newcastle Herald

Friday July 14, 2006

By MATTHEW KELLY Education Reporter

A NEWCASTLE University academic's approach to training physical education teachers has been rewarded with a national excellence in teaching citation.

The citation, from the Carrick Institute, recognised Dr Philip Morgan's "unique, scholarly and inspiring approach to teaching physical education."

Dr Morgan, 32, from the education and arts faculty, put his success down to a passion for his work.

"I try and transfer that to students who in turn put in a lot of effort in their lectures and tutorials," he said.

He said one of the best aspects was helping students overcome a reluctance to teach physical education.

"It's great when you see students who start off with a negative attitude become more positive about physical education and pass that on to their students," he said.

Training teachers to be competent physical education instructors would allow schools to become less reliant on external providers.

He estimated about 80 per cent of schools used external providers in some capacity during the year.

"Childhood obesity has become a major issue for schools in the past decade," he said.

"At the same time there have been people saying we can offer this service and make some money out of it."

As well as the Carrick Institute citation, Dr Morgan last week received the Australian Teacher Education Association's national teacher educator of the year.

He also received the university's 2005 teacher of the year award.

Associate professor Behdad Moghtaderi from the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment also received a citation for his outstanding contribution to student learning. He was recognised for work in the area of design in engineering.