The role of physical education (PE) in teaching for Health-Related Fitness (HRF) has evolved over the years. Scholars have examined HRF in PE from a wide range of theoretical and practical perspectives, including but not limited to: obesity; tracking youth and adult physical activity and fitness; teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward fitness testing, and school based physical activity and HRF knowledge interventions (Keating, Silverman, & Kulinna, 2002; Mercier & Silverman, 2014; Welk, Eisenmann, & Dollman, 2006). While scholars have also critically examined some of the assumptions and ideologies characteristic of students’ perceptions of HRF discourse as it relates to school PE (Burrows, Wright, & Jungersen-Smith, 2002; Hopple & Graham, 1995), no contemporary study has yet to examine simultaneously teachers’ perceptions, and the perceptions of the adolescent students they teach, with respect to the role that HRF should play in PE.
Method:
Interpretive and focus group methodology guided study design and data collection that spanned one school year. Questions focused on participants’ perceptions of what HRF was and was not, the present emphasis and forms of HRF in PE, and potential role and place of HRF in PE. These questions were posed to 31 teachers in individual interviews and 97 of the students they taught in focus groups. Data were inductively analyzed using constant comparison.
Analysis/Results:
The main finding of this study revealed a range of congruencies and disjunctures with respect to the role teachers and students perceived HRF currently played and should play in school PE. Specifically, both teachers and students held a number of inaccurate assumptions regarding the desires, ideals, and motives of each other with respect to the present and potential role of HRF in PE. The most prominent themes documenting these miss/non-communications include the framing and importance of HRF, content selection, and instructional quality and depth of HRF knowledge.
Conclusions:
The role of HRF in school PE will continue to be of importance as long as federal, state, and local entities remain concerned with youth physical activity levels and related Public Health concerns. The significance of this study lies in disclosing a set of disjunctures that lie between teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the role HRF curriculum should play in PE, and hence prevents its development in an effective manner. It also points to some ‘unknown’ common ground, that if explicitly stated, could allow teachers and students to craft more beneficial and meaningful HRF curriculum.
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