What do children talk about when they talk about Physical Education?

Abstract

Aim: To look at Primary school children understanding of PE. Context: Two mixed class-groups (25 boys, 23 girls), fifth and sixth school year (age, 10-12) of an urban middle-class state-public Primary School; PE was taught by two experienced female teachers. Methodology: Four months of participant observation; besides the observation of the PE lessons, we sharpened our listening of children’ informal conversations and activated strategies to stimulate the spontaneous production of verbal and written texts; triangulation was carried out by one of the authors who played the role of an external critical friend analyzing the process, assessing the increasing systematization of the observations and partial drafts. Conclusions: Pupils’ views depends on their subject experiences; having said that, their discourse reproduces the results of other studies carried out through questionnaires and, mostly, in Secondary Education; children emphasize that they have a very good relation with their PE teaches, who are very nice and design cool lessons; PE lessons consist mainly on games and sports, it’s their favorite subject, there are not books, nobody fails and there are not worth mentioning conflicts.