Session Information
27 SES 06 A, Manners of Teaching in Science Education and Physical Education
Paper Session
Contribution
The main purpose of this paper is to compare the manners of teaching gymnastics in secondary schools in the three countries involved in the Teaching Traditions and Learning project funded by the Swedish research Council (Sweden, France and Switzerland). Didactic transposition theory, teaching traditions and the culture of gymnastics constitute the theoretical framework to be discussed in the first part of this paper. Didactic transposition theory conceptualizes the inevitable phenomena of transformation, elaboration and reconstruction of the knowledge to be taught (Chevallard, 1991). Unlike other school subjects, PE cannot be directly based on a corpus of established scientific knowledge which would be taken as reference in the didactic transposition process. It is rather based on a social field of physical practices. From these social practices taken as reference (Martinand, 2001), PE teachers construct ‘scholastic forms of practice’ which stand ‘at the interface of sport (with its cultural and historical foundations, rules and techniques) and physical education (with its institutional constraints, its timetable, and the heterogeneity of its students)’ (Mascret, 2011, p. 2). This construction can take several forms and we expect to observe different manners of teaching gymnastics across the three countries which might possibly refer to different teaching traditions. Teaching traditions shape the curriculum in the sense that they contain ideas about the goals of school subjects and therefore about the kind of skills expected from students in order to achieve these specific goals (Lundqvist, Almqvist & Östman, 2012). We have already identified differences between the curriculum texts for PE at secondary school in Sweden, France and Switzerland, the main difference lying in the way they take epistemology of physical activities into account. Contrary to Swedish and Swiss texts, the French ones refer to the entire culture of the social practices taken as reference. For example in gymnastics, they do not only refer to movement, but also to code and social roles such as judge (Lenzen, Forest, Cordoba & Öhman, 2015). In so far as a gap may exist between formal and actual curricula, we now intend to study the manners of teaching gymnastics as they are observable in teacher and students’ joint action, as a second step in determining teaching traditions in PE.
Gymnastics is a physical activity which is traditionally taught in physical education (PE) as well as team sports, athletics and swimming (Lenzen, 2012). It has been significantly evolving over time. In the early years of PE, gymnastics was only taught at school to young males for military purposes. It was made of static postures and attitudes and its expected outcomes were strenght, courage, rectitude and abnegation. Nowadays, gymnastics is mainly a female and prepubescent physical activity which is characterized by an equilibrium between risk-taking and mastery. Gymnasts have to realize the most difficult and mastered sequence possible under judgement of a college of gymnastics judges (Robin, 2012).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Chevallard, Y. (1991). La transposition didactique. Du savoir savant au savoir enseigné (3e éd.). Grenoble : La pensée sauvage. Lenzen, B. (2012). Les activités curriculaires des enseignants d’EPS, entre prescription et liberté : une revue de littérature. eJRIEPS, 27, 27-65. Lenzen, B., Forest, E., Cordoba, A, & Öhman, M. (2015). Physical education – teaching traditions in physical education in Sweden, France and Switzerland: A special focus on gymnastics and fitness curricula. Communication at European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) ‘Education and Transition – Contribution from Educational Research’. Budapest, September 7-11, 2015. Lundqvist, E., Almqvist, J., & Östman, L. (2012). Institutional traditions in teachers‘ manners of teaching. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 7(1), 111-127. Martinand, J.-L. (2001). Pratiques de référence et problématique de la référence curriculaire. In A. Terrisse (Ed.), Didactique des disciplines. Les références au savoir (pp. 17-24). Bruxelles : De Boeck. Mascret, N. (2011). ‘Badminton player-coach’ interactions between failing students. Physical Education & Sport Pedagogy, 16(1), 1-13. Robin, J.-F. (2012). La gymnastique : un jeu de règles. eJRIEPS, 25, 27-42.
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