PE teachers as promotors of physically educated citizens: Comparison of their representations in Quebec and Wallonia

If physical education (PE) was sport oriented since the 80’s, an international movement underlined a need of change in order to deal more with the society evolution. Since the turn of the new millennium, PE has been increasingly linked to the promotion of physically active lifestyles. The implementation of such change of core values differed dramatically from one country to another. For example, in two French speaking regions, Quebec and Wallonia, the educational stakeholders reacted in different ways. As soon as 2001, the Quebec Ministry of Education decided to entrust PE and health education to PE teachers while the Wallonian educational authorities seem to discover today the central role that PE teachers could play in promoting a healthy lifestyle in youth. In this study, we compared Quebec and Wallonian PE teachers’ representations of their role as promotors of an active lifestyle.
Six Canadian (3 females) and 11 Wallonian PE teachers (6 females) answered to a semi-structured interview. It was focused on: students’ motivation and self-confidence to engage in regular physical activity; knowledge about the health benefits of an active lifestyle, and self-determination to practice regular physical activity. A content analysis of the verbatim was processed in order to identify the main concepts expressed by the subjects.
At the current state of the data analysis, it appears that cultural differences are clearly identified between Canadian and Wallonian PE teachers. The development of a healthy active lifestyle is more predominant among Canadian educators who can draw their experiences in more than 10 years of the Physical and Health Education curriculum while their colleagues from Wallonia are still trying to test new approaches without a strong institutional support.
Wallonian teachers could take benefit of their colleagues’ experience in order to facilitate the adoption of news teaching strategies.