Value Orientations of Secondary Physical Education Teachers in France

Purpose

The aim of this study is to described French secondary school physical education teachers value orientations. Value orientations represent teachers educationals' belief systems. They were described in physical education by Jewett and Bain (1985) in five structured sets : disciplinary mastery (DM), learning process (LP), self-actualization (SA), social responsibility (SR) and ecological integration (IE). Each of these value orientation constitute a coherent set of choices about what should be taught and what should be learned.

Methods

French PE teachers (N=157) completed the French version of the Value Orientation Inventory (Chen et Ennis, 1993) adapted and validated by Pasco, Guinard and Kermarrec (2008). The Chi-square tests were used to examine the relations between value orientations, gender and teaching experience.

Analysis/Results

A descriptive analysis of the data reveals that 83% (N=130) of participants classify one or more of the five values as a high or low priority (Ennis & Zhu, 1991). Of these 130 participants, 53% choose the learning process as a priority (high or low), 33% the social responsability (SR), 31% the ecological integration (EI), 30% the disciplinary mastery (DM) and 27 % the self-actualization (SA). Results also indicated significant correlations between the differents value orientations. Chi-square analysis reveal a significant difference between two categories of experience (6-15 years and 16-25) for the learning process value orientation.

Conclusions

This research shows that the different value orientations described by Jewett & Bain (1985) are present in French PE teaching. We observed different views about the role of physical education. The first is that the primary role of PE is to teach students the knowledge that is specific to the discipline as defined by disciplinary mastery and learning process. The second view is that the ultimate aim of PE teaching is the development of the individual as defined by SA and IE. The significant difference on the LP of the two categories of experience reveals that the importance of this value orientation seems to change between 6 and 25 years of experience. At the beginning and end of their career (1-5 years and +25) the LP has the same priority.