Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
Duration: 01.03.2024 – 29.02.2028
Amount awarded: CHF 629,380

Teaching Practices in Physical Education (UPiS-Study)

How Stories Shape Physical Education

This research project investigates teaching practices in physical education (PE) at secondary schools in German-speaking Switzerland from a subject-specific and narrative perspective. Its main aim is to explore how teaching and learning takes place in PE, what is taught and learned, and how these experiences unfold in daily PE lessons.

Drawing on the conceptual and methodological framework of Narrative Inquiry, the project understands teaching not merely as the transmission of knowledge or skills, but as a lived, storied, and co-constructed practice. Teaching is shaped by the dynamic interplay of teachers, students, curricular content, and contextual conditions.

Curriculum Making

The study focuses on the concept of curriculum making—a process-oriented and narrative approach that foregrounds how teachers and students jointly shape the curriculum as it is enacted. Unlike traditional concept conceptions of curriculum as fixed or top-down (e.g., mandated curriculum), Curriculum Making highlights the ways in which content and pedagogical processes take form through negotiation, interpretation, and lived experience.

While this approach has gained considerable traction in Anglo-American scholarship, it remains underutilized in German-speaking Sportdidaktik. This project seeks to fill that gap by empirically grounding Curriculum Making in the context of PE.

Research Questions

1. What Becomes the Curriculum Content in Physical Education?

This question explores which topics, values, and practices are selected, emphasized, or marginalized in PE. It analyzes how content decisions are shaped by mandated curricula, school cultures, institutional infrastructures, scheduling constraints, and broader societal discourses on sport and health.

In line with the Curriculum Making approach, the project assumes that the subject matter in PE is highly contingent, emerging from the interplay of institutional, material, and biographical factors. PE in Switzerland is based on an open curriculum framework, granting teachers significant autonomy—both a resource and a challenge.

2. How Are Teaching Processes Co-Constructed in Practice?

This question investigates how teaching unfolds as an emergent and dialogic process. It examines how teachers structure lessons, design learning tasks, and mobilize space and materials—and how students engage with, adapt to, or resist these arrangements.

Particular attention is paid to the bodily, relational, and practical dimensions of teaching, and how teachers’ subject-specific orientations and sport biographies influence their pedagogical decisions.

Teaching is therefore not a linear transfer of content but a co-constructed and situated practice, shaped by interpersonal interaction, material context, and epistemic engagement.

3. What Kinds of Learning Processes Become Visible in Physical Education?

This question examines learning in PE beyond normative assumptions about fun, fitness, or discipline. It focuses on physical, emotional, social, and cognitive learning, as revealed in real-time interactions in the lessons.

Learning in PE is thus conceptualized as a narrative process of becoming—a form of embodied meaning-making that contributes to identity formation and subject-specific literacy.

Methodology and Research Design

The project employs a qualitative, interpretive approach rooted in Narrative Inquiry. Stories are not just illustrations— they are the analytical medium through which meaning in PE is understood.

• Video-based observations: Capturing teaching and learning as embodied, interactive practices.
• Video-stimulated recall interviews: Enabling teachers and students to reflect and reconstruct reasoning behind key moments.

This dual approach grants access to tacit knowledge, biographical influences, and pedagogical decision-making processes.

Expected Contributions

• Subject-specific understanding of teaching quality in PE, beyond generic instructional models.
• Empirical grounding of Curriculum Making in the German-speaking Sportdidaktik context.
• Insights into embodied, social, and cognitive learning processes.
• Support for PE teacher education through rich, narrative case studies.

The project positions teaching in PE as a complex, dialogic, and storied practice. By capturing the lived experiences of PE lessons, it contributes to both educational theory and practical development.

Project Collaborators

• Prof. Dr. Roland Messmer – Principal Investigator
• Dr. Katja Schönfeld – Co-Principal Investigator
• M.A. Teresa Schkade – PhD-Candidate
• M.Ed. Rebecca Milde – PhD-Candidate
• M.A. Rahel Zimmerli – PhD-Candidate
• M.A. Raphael Mathis – PhD-Candidate
• M.A. Mario Steinberg – Research Assistant