**1. Introduction**

#### *1.1. Students' Cooperative Learning and Sustainable Development*

Providing future generations of professionals with the skills for sustainable development relies mainly on integrating approaches and strategies into Higher Education Institutions and their systems [1–6]. Education for sustainable development, when developed in Higher Education, should enhance students to understand how their professional activity interacts with society and the environment in order to identify possible challenges, risks, and impacts [2]. Therefore, Higher Education Institutions should transfer sustainability competences to the teaching profession by developing curricula competences in education for sustainability, linking sustainability to both student learning and in-practice teaching [2,5]. It entails promoting student interaction and fostering relationships in socialization and learning [7–9]. Education for Sustainable Development is directed towards promoting the development of critical thinking, strategic action, and interpersonal relationships as well as collaboration, personal involvement, and tolerance for ambiguity [1,3], in which students

accept uncertainty and acknowledge dilemmas [10]. It empowers students to change their way of thinking and to work towards a sustainable future [2,3]. How students understand what they know and how they are progressing as they develop their knowledge through reconsidering what they learn in practice [11] is a fundamental element of sustainable education.

Education for Sustainable Development concerns sustainable actions at all educational levels, favoring the development of competences that allow people to think about their actions [2,3]. Competences integrate knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes [10,12–14], and a competence-based education is a type of education that focuses on the implementation, development, and assessment of competences [13,15–17]. Both cooperative and reflective learning are instructional practices that can activate and promote sustainable-oriented competences. For example, reflecting on beliefs, actions, and goals are the foundations of critical thinking and analysis. Sustainable-oriented competences also promote developing ideas and applying strategies, planning and executing projects, reflecting on risks, taking responsibility for motivating others; all of which form the basic principles of strategic action [13,18].

Cooperative learning is an educational methodology based on small (usually heterogeneous) groups of students working together. In cooperative learning, students join forces and share ideas and resources to learn something themselves and encourage other team members to learn as well. Cooperative learning activates peer-to-peer learning, which is defined as building both sustainable knowledge and skills through interaction. The five variables that mediate the e ffectiveness of cooperative learning are positive interdependence, individual accountability, promotive interaction, the appropriate use of social skills, and group processing [8]. Cooperative learning relies mainly on the interdependence of the students among each other, with the roles of the team members being clearly mapped out, although they can be negotiated. The students submit the complete group task at the end of the lesson and during the final group processing. In contrast, in collaborative learning, if this method is properly directed by the teacher, the students themselves can learn to manage the task with no further instruction. Most important, in collaborative learning, each student is responsible for their own individual work, separately. In general, authors see collaborative learning as a broader, more general concept covering multiple approaches on peer collaboration, among which, for example, is cooperative learning [14,16,18,19].

Cooperative physical challenges are cooperative learning activities that have a clearly defined objective and are posed as a collective (team) challenge in which the group, in the first stage, must resolve a specific problem by using multiple solutions and, in the second stage, reflect on the whole process. To do so, each team needs not only to agree on their actions as a group but, more importantly, to consider and value the individual characteristics of each and every one of its members to resolve the problem posed. While a specific response to completing the challenge may be valid for one team, it may not be for another. Cooperative physical challenges maximize the acquisition of competences through individual cooperation in teamwork, the intrapersonal construction of professional identity, and the definition of strategic decision actions [8,19].

Cooperation is the reciprocal relationship between people or groups, which are characterized by being heterogeneous, aimed at achieving a goal through a common e ffort [19]. Cooperation is also a principle that can guarantee a more creative and sound teaching process, provided the teacher and the student are involved in the construction of knowledge. Cooperative learning is an educational strategy in which students work together in groups to achieve a common goal that is characterized by a structure that promotes positive interdependence between the group members [8]. Students gain both academically and socially when they have opportunities to interact with others to accomplish shared goals [8,20–22]. In the process, students learn to communicate e ffectively by explaining the experiences in which they have been involved, and the language they learn to use to explain the experiences, in turn, helps them to construct new ways of thinking [23]. In addition, if students are encouraged to participate in group discussions, they demonstrate a more sophisticated level of discourse and intellectually valuable contributions [23,24].

The basic characteristics and conditions for cooperative learning were defined by Johnson and Johnson [8]. First is positive interdependence. This occurs when the learning of the di fferent members of the group depends on the actions carried out by all the members of the group. There is positive interdependence when the team members can achieve a goal, but only when the other team members also reach it [19]. Second is individual accountability. This refers to the members of a group having to work together (face to face) at some point during the process. In doing so, not only are students encouraged to strive for more committed relationships within the group, but they also improve their adaptation and social competences. To do this, all the team members' contributions must be made possible and necessary and, thus, render learning visible [25]. Third, is promotive interaction. The members of the group cannot be successful based solely on the success of others. Therefore, each student is responsible for a part of the work, and the success of the other members depends on the participation of all the members. Fourth is the appropriate use of social skills in a small group. Students have to learn some abilities in order to achieve common goals, such as getting to know the other members in the group, communicating e ffectively, supporting each other, and constructively resolving conflicts. Fifth is group processing. For a cooperative group to function properly, the students need to reflect on how it works. Thus, in group processing, the members of the group discuss the achievement of the objectives, the e ffectiveness of their work methodology, and the relationships between themselves. This allows them to analyze what went well and what did not, strengthen their bonds, and improve their work.

#### *1.2. Students' Identity Construction and Sustainable Education*

Shaping pre-service teachers' professional identities is at the base of sustainable education. Professional identity is promoted in higher education through the delivery of pedagogical approaches and strategies by teachers [3] and through the understanding that the approaches must guide students to examine and mediate themselves in relation to context, for effective decision-making and action [3,26] and for acquisition of sustainability competences for sustainable development to perform personal actions as well as to bring about changes in society [2]. For pre-service teachers, reflection calls for critical evaluation of their teaching practice in schools, which may refine their self-understanding as future teachers [20]. Reflection encompasses pre-existing beliefs and examines students' practices for further actions and improvement [27]. Pre-service teachers can construct their identities in practice (in-action), discourse, and activity in the schools when developing instructional practices, actively. But, their emerging identities as reflective practitioners and adaptive experts should further be enriched and extended through reflective thinking and engagements [20]. Therefore, reflection after the action (on-action) is needed to gradually broaden and deepen a primarily descriptive reflective narrative [9–12].

Frameworks for reflective learning and reflective practice, guide personal and professional mediation. For instance, there are reflective approaches and methodologies in which individuals manage competing influences and deliberate about action [7,28]. Individual professionalism or scholarship of teaching is characterized by commitment and vulnerability, which may determine the degree to which pre-service teachers reflect and self-understand as future teachers [29]. The components of professional self-understanding that fuel teachers' identity construction are self-image, self-esteem, commitment, task perception, job motivation, and future perspectives. For pre-service teachers, however, the dimensions are reduced to self-esteem, task perception, job motivation, and future perspectives [29]. Self-esteem or the evaluative component of self-understanding may refer to students' appreciation of their job performance. Task perception encompasses students' ideas on what tasks and duties are required to do a good job. It deals with students' responsibilities in order to induce justice in learning outcomes. Job motivation refers to motives that turn students into professionals, and future perspectives reveal the students' expectations about their future in teaching.

This study proposes then, applying the rationality of cooperation and identity construction through structured, semi-structured, and non-structured instructional cooperative physical challenges that progressively and e ffectively favor the essential components of cooperative learning and the

intrapersonal construction of professional identity for pre-service physical education teachers. The study also proposes applying the logic of reflection-on-practice through the process of constructing reflective narratives on the results of implementing instructional approaches in the schools where the pre-service teachers had their teaching practice [29,30]. We formulate the characteristics that define the structured, semi-structured, and non-structured cooperative physical challenge approaches and the dimensions for students' reflections concerning both cooperative approaches and identity construction. Based on this multi-approach formulation, we construct three hypotheses:

**H1:** *Activating cooperative learning based on no-to-structured instructional approaches produces professional identity.*

**H2:** *Pre-service teachers can construct and transform their professional identities through reflective practice.*

**H3:** *Pre-service teachers, when engaged in individual and community reflection, may activate interpretation and critical competence evaluation of their teaching practice at schools.*

We consider community reflection to be the reflection resulting from dialogues between pre-service teachers or dialogues between pre-service teachers and students at the schools [20].

Although some e ffort has been made to understand the potential of designing curricula based on the delivery of sustainable-oriented competences, little is known about pre-service teachers' perceptions of the joint delivery of pedagogical approaches and sustainable competences, and the impact that such delivery has on their own construction of professional identity. Therefore, this manuscript aims to provide knowledge on the strategy of connecting cooperative and reflective learning through di fferent pedagogical approaches and the pre-service teachers' resulting transformation in terms of construction of professional identity. The goals of the present study are (1) identify the ways in which pre-service teachers represented their professional learning through reflection on instructional teaching approaches, (2) ascertain whether and how pre-service teachers were reflective in their written narratives of on-school practices experiences, and (3) identify in which ways reflection by pre-service teachers fostered personal critical professional competence.
