The aim of this paper is to identify and compare the enactment of teaching traditions in physical education classroom teaching units in France and in the canton of Geneva. 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). Four physical education teaching traditions (PETTs) can be found in the curricula : Teaching PE as sport-techniques, Teaching PE as health education, teaching PE for values and citizenship and Teaching PE as physical culture education. If these four traditions impact the French and Swiss curricula, their influence in the official texts is more or less strong. In France, despite a domination of teaching PE as sport-techniques and as physical culture education, a tangle of the four teaching traditions may be noticed ; whereas in Switzerland, three traditions are explicit in the texts, but teaching PE as health education and as sport-techniques are dominant ( Forest, Lenzen & Öhman, 2017). What impact do these different PETTs identified in the official curriculum have on what is actually taught and learned in class? Moving from authoritative texts to their implementation in classroom practices is a complex process. According to Lenzen (2012), teachers interpret institutional requirements according to the means at their disposal and the requirements they set for themselves. We intended to understand how the identified PETTs are reinterpreted by PE teachers and implemented in their classroom practices, relying on video recording of PE lessons and on interviews conducted with the teachers. From this perspective, we first analysed two gymnastics and two step aerobics lessons in French and Swiss secondary schools, in order to identify transactions representative of various PETTs. Then, we analysed the singular significance of the identified PETTs. For example, we show how teaching PE as health education is considered in different ways, contextualized according to each teacher. Finally, we tried to understand the choices of teachers who value some PETTs to the detriment of others yet present in the curriculum, by taking into account what sense it makes for them, identifiable through the content taught. Differences and similarities are thus identified in the two countries, in the comparison of the curriculum as well as in its enactment in the classroom.

Forest, E., Lenzen, B., & Öhman, M. (2017). Teaching traditions in physical education in France, Switzerland and Sweden : A special focus on official curricula for gymnastics and fitness training. European Educational Research Journal. Lenzen, B. (2012). Les activités curriculaires des enseignants d’EPS, entre prescription et liberté : une revue de littérature. eJRIEPS, 27, 27-65. Lundqvist, E., Almqvist, J. & Östman, L. (2012). Institutional traditions in teachers’ manners of taching. CulturalStudies of Science Education 7(1): 111- 127.