Teachers' Risk and Safety Management in Physical Education: A Professional Practice?

This doctoral thesis concerns teachers’ risk and safety management in school physical education in Norway. The purpose of the thesis is to generate research-based knowledge about teacher management of physical risk and safety in physical education that can potentially contribute to the development of educational policy, theory, and practice. Using a mixed-methods research approach along with a hybrid, partly planned partly emergent, design, data were generated in two main phases and through three substudies, including document analysis, interviews, and survey. The doctoral thesis comprises four published research articles and a synopsis. Article I reports the results of a document analysis that examined how teachers’ risk and safety management in physical education is constructed in five regulative policy documents. The following three articles address primary and lower secondary teachers’ perspectives and reports on risk and safety management in physical education. Article II provides the results from interviews with teachers and explores how teachers develop their risk and safety management knowledge. Articles III and IV have a mixed-methods design in their reports. They integrated those results with the interview and survey results. Article III explores how teachers perceive risk and safety management in their teaching physical education. Article IV explores and strives for an understanding of the aspects that characterize teachers’ risk and safety management practice in physical education, along with how teachers relate their practice to risk and safety management. This study is relevant due to a scarcity of empirical investigations of teachers’ risk and safety management in school physical education, and what seems to be a lacking field of research in Norway. Also, the critical examination of regulative policy that targets physical risk and safety in physical education in Norway seems scarce. Therefore, this thesis seeks to contribute to the field of risk and safety management in physical education with a focus on the Norwegian context. The synopsis incorporates an elaboration of previous research and literature, the guiding theoretical framework, and the research philosophy underpinning the research. The coherence between the philosophical position, research design, methods, and analytical framework are further elaborated and discussed. The study’s findings are presented and summarized before a discussion of the research problem. The thesis is then rounded out with conclusions that address the study’s limitations and opportunities for further research