Physical education classes – a double-edged sword: a qualitative study of Norwegian high-school students’ experiences

ABSTRACT

Aim: The aim of this study was to explore students’ experiences of physical education (PE) and to gain insight into what contributes to engaging them in PE.

Methods: A total of 316 second-year high-school students from five schools participated by completing a school assignment. The data were analyzed according to content analysis. Findings: Two main themes were developed. The first was One-sided emphasis on performance, bodily skills, and assessment with the corresponding sub-themes: Skills and performance; and Assessment, tests, and grading. The second was Wish for play, respite, co-determination, and togetherness with the sub-themes: Play and spontaneity; Respite, Togetherness and cooperation; and Co-determination and engagement. Our findings reveal a wide range of student experiences with PE classes, from a welcome respite in an otherwise sedentary and theoretically dominated day at school and enjoying being physically active with classmates, to frustration about extensive use of tests, lack of mastery, and feelings of exclusion.

Conclusion: To be consistent with the values of the Ministry of Education in Norway, we conclude that the content and mode of delivery of PE in schools would benefit from being rethought if the intent is to facilitate children to stay physically active. Norwegian physiotherapists are promoters of health and physical activity across the lifespan. As part of health services in schools, they are in a prime position to optimize the PE experience for students.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum intentions
• engagement
• influential discursive perspectives
• physical education
• students’ experiences

Acknowledgments

We thank the schools that contributed to the study and the students who shared their experiences and thoughts with us.

Disclosure of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Also called the bleep test, multi-stage fitness test, pacer test, Leger-test, or 20-m shuttle run test. The test can be performed with several people at the same time. The person must run between two markings of 20 m with increasing speed within a given audio signal (beep). If they do not reach the mark on the other side within the time limit, the test will be terminated for the individual and the number of beeps/completed lengths will be recorded. In Norway, the test is often used in PE at different educational levels. The duration of the test depends on the performer’s endurance, but usually lasts between 10 and 20 minutes.

2. As mentioned in the analysis, the data corpus includes different aspects of gendered meanings. These aspects were set aside for the purpose of this article.Also, there appear to be sufficient data to compare findings from different types of schools. This was also part of the preconceptions, that there could be differences between schools. Through scrutinizing the data sets from the five schools, there were no clear differences between the schools that stood out as to what the students were saying, making a comparison between schools redundant.

3. We are well aware of the strong tendency of today’s society to reduce the value of PE to a means of better learning (cf. the debate about play being good for learning mathematics) and do not to dismiss the research that has found positive associations between PE and various academic outcomes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council of Norway [259982/H40].