Background/Purpose Secondary physical education ideally exposes students to many diverse physical activities, yet despite an explosion in PA culture, many secondary programs focus narrowly on competitive sports. Little research has examined factors that influence PE teachers' selection of physical activities as an avenue to explain this dilemma. Therefore, using theories of habitus, social fields, and occupational socialization, this study examined how secondary physical educators made decisions about curricular content.
Method Interpretive methodology guided this study that spanned one and one half school years. 28 specific factors thought to impact teachers' content decisions were used to guide; lesson observations (n= 380), informal and formal interviews (n= 100), as well as document analysis (e.g. lesson plans) with 28 secondary physical educators. Data were analyzed using constant comparison and subjected to trustworthiness strategies (e.g. data triangulation, peer debriefer, member checks).
Analysis/Results This study found that a complex interplay of personal (e.g. comfort, values) institutional (e.g. facilities, teaching colleagues), and student factors (e.g. student desires, gender) uniquely coalesced to spotlight three distinct typologies of teachers with markedly different content choices and rationales for those choices. The typologies included all-sport teachers, mostly-sport teachers, and partly/no-sport teachers.
Conclusions Findings support the power of Bourdieu's theories in helping to understand the complexities involved in teachers' content decisions, as well as the powerful role occupational socialization plays in cementing affinities for particular content areas. Specifically, teachers' perceptions of most factors pointed to an ecology and historical dynamic well suited to support sport dominant secondary curricula.
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