TENSIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS OF THE PRACTICE OF TEACHERS OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION IN URUGUAY IN THE NARRATIVES OF TEACHERS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF LATE MODERNITY

Abstract

Although sports and healthy physical activities seem to gain an increasing relevance as massive world-wide spectacles or as a daily basis self-construction of the individual body, Physical Education is losing weight in the curricula all around the world. This paradox affects Physical Education teachers who seem to share the devaluation of their own discipline in the benefit of the intellectual ones, such as Mathematics or Sciences, with obvious consequences on the future of modern populations in living a good and long life. The research addresses the question of how this phenomenon happens, through the record and a hermeneutical analysis of interviews with 23 physical education teachers about their own lives and careers, paying attention at the main milestones that marked their labour biographies. The analysis shows personal discomfort and anguish, not only as a result of functional overload and instrumental abuse (Weis) but due to the tensions that result of the anchoring of the professional field to three contradictory logics: the rational that governs work, the expressivity of ludic activities, and the value-oriented teaching profession (Weber, Habermas). At the long run, teachers resolve those tensions through a valuative hierarchy that orientate their professional elections, situating corporal activities in the very bottom of relevance, to the point of not teaching them, reproducing the structural devaluation of the discipline (Giddens, Archer). Theoretically, the research is framed into sociological theory of late modernity (Habermas, Giddens, Archer), and some classic theories of Sociology of Sports and Physical Education (Huizinga, Callois, Weis, Turner, Brinkhoff)