An ethnographic analysis and survey of specific attitudes of physical education teachers

Master of EducationStage One utilizes an ethnographic approach by researching four teachers of physical education who graduated from Melbourne University in 1960, 1965, 1970 and 1975. Case studies were written on the four subjects. The teachers differed in their attitudes towards students with the more experienced teachers who were married and had children displaying a more caring and concerned disposition towards their pupils. It was evident that throughout his career a physical education teacher will display varying degrees of enthusiasm for his work, with the experienced teachers in this study being more enthusiastic. In addition they did not rely on strong disciplinary methods and had gradually moved away from a basic survival and control tendency which was a characteristic of the less experienced teacher. Generally, the more experienced teacher had greater job satisfaction than his less experienced counterpart. Ideas, principles, and hypotheses were generated from the ethnographic work in stage one and were used to formulate the traditional research attempted in stage two of this study. Thirty-six teachers of physical education from Education Department Secondary Schools within Victoria responded to the survey (85 percent response vote) which sought information concerning teacher attitudes, teacher enthusiasm and teacher reactions to particular issues central to their function as teachers of physical education. Data from the questionnaires was computed by the use of the Statistical Package for Social Science (Nie et al 1975). Analysis of the questionnaires involved the following statistics; mean, standard deviation, percentage, t-test and Pearson r correlation coefficients. The results revealed that the experienced physical education teacher who is married and has children will display a different set of attitudes towards the children whom he teaches than the less experienced, unmarried teacher of physical education. The enthusiasm level of teachers of physical education for their work varied greatly throughout their career. However, all teachers of physical education appear to follow the same pattern of changes in levels of enthusiasm, with subjects showing increased enthusiasm in early and late years of teaching and a drop in the level off enthusiasm in mid-career. This drop in the level of enthusiasm in mid-career seems due mainly to an increased emphasis by the teacher to his personal and family commitments