Physical educator and/or health promoter? Constructing ‘healthiness’ and embodying a ‘healthy role model’ in secondary school physical education

Abstract

The following sociologically orientated study explores how two physical education (PE) teachers at two secondary schools in North West England construct the notion of ‘healthiness’, and how this informs their health-based PE practice. The research process was influenced by figurational sociology [Elias, N. (1978). What is sociology? New York, NY: Columbia University Press], and the use of in-depth, reflexive interviews allowed emergent beliefs of the teachers in relation to ‘healthiness’ to be made evident, as contextual elements of their lived-in world surfaced. Within health-based PE, the teachers embodied a ‘healthy role model’ to match dominant PE discourses, whereby teachers must work on their capacity to help pupils learn, and work on their own ‘healthy bodies’ simultaneously. It is suggested that notions of ‘healthiness’ constructed by PE teachers develop within the social contexts of their personal and professional lives as complex spaces that provide dilemmas, opportunities and possibilities within which the teacher constructs, adapts and embodies a ‘healthy role model’ to enhance both long and short term (self) interests.