The gendered construction of physical education content as the result of the differentiated didactic contract

Abstract

Background: Research on gender in physical education has pointed out the social construction of gendered bodies and minds through the curriculum. It has been shown that girls do not benefit from equal opportunities to participate in physical activities. Developed within the theoretical framework of the didactique tradition, this paper tries to understand how teacher and students (girls and boys) jointly construct gendered content knowledge during formal episodes of teaching and learning in physical education.

Purpose: To focus on student learning with special attention to the gendered content taught and learned with the aim of understanding the differentiated process which is as the root of gender issues in physical education.

Setting and participants: Sixteen students (six girls and ten boys) and two teachers during coeducational volleyball units in two high schools (Lycée) in France.

Research design and data collection: The study investigates how the attack is learned in volleyball according to gender through a design experiment within a didactique research methodology. The protocol included collecting data regarding student intentions, actions and interpretations of content through the use of lesson observation and pre- and post-lesson participant interviews. Data analysis consisted of the identification and evolution of the differentiated didactic contract (DDC) across the pedagogical interactions which occurred during two learning tasks concerning ‘how to perform an efficient attack’.

Findings: Students do not develop the same nature and degree of understanding and performance of the attack in volleyball due to the differentiated ways in which the didactical interactions evolve during formal lessons in physical education. Five factors influence the process: (1) the gendered nature of knowledge; (2) the ways in which the knowledge is developed by the teacher; (3) the gendered perspectives individuals bring into and invoke during the didactical interactions; (4) the evolution of the enacted content knowledge as a consequence of the ongoing process through (5) the tacit and implicit negotiations which originate the differentiated didactic contract.

Conclusions: The study supports a research agenda which gives attention to the domain-specific content taught and learned during classrooms interactions. It supports the theoretical idea that curriculum is enacted through micro-social interactions around particular content and within specific contexts.

Keywords:

• Gender
• Differentiated didactic contract
• Gendered content
• Co-construction

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank David Kirk and Mary O'Sullivan for their helpful and insightful contributions to the first manuscript and the reviewers for their comments and editing suggestions.

Notes

1. The French word ‘didactique’ does not have the same pejorative meaning that it can have in English. Here it refers to a research approach which is rooted in anthropological analysis of pedagogical interactions in relation to the content taught and learned within the situated triadic relationships that link the teacher, her/his students and the body of knowledge at stake [for an overview see the chapter in the Handbook of physical education by Amade-Escot (2006)].

2. The term ‘relation to knowledge’ in didactics refers to a mix of beliefs, values, views and prior knowledge (borrowed from Chevallard, 1989).