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Parental perceptions of fifth-grade physical education: A case study
Abstract
Throughout the professional literature in physical education there is considerable rhetoric about the need to recruit and maintain the support of parents. Among those who teach a vulnerable and sometimes marginal special subject, there is a widely held belief that parental approval and support matters a great deal, in fact, that parental dispositions are critical to the future of the subject in the public schools. Despite this article of professional faith, there are few studies that describe the attitudes of parents about physical education. None of those employed the strategy of probing the communication of program information and subsequent parental responses to program operation at a single site--that is, rich case analyses simply are not available. The purpose of this study was to describe parents' perceptions of and attitudinal dispositions toward a physical education program at a single public school site. The primary sources of data were (a) a parent background questionnaire; (b) open-ended interviews with participants (27 parents of fifth grade children, the physical education teacher who taught those children, nine classroom teachers at the same school, and the principal); and (c) observations at the site. Results indicated that many parents possessed inaccurate information about the physical program--information that typically was acquired from their children. Few parents attempted to obtain information from other sources. Further, all parents drew on their own, often negative, recollections of gym classes when describing perceptions of and dispositions toward their child's program. Although anxious to obtain parental support, the teacher did not attempt either to communicate more than minimal information about the program, or to solicit more than trivial forms of parental support and cooperation. Her strong sense of the importance of teacher autonomy, and school norms restricting parental participation in educational matters, appeared to limit her efforts to improve relations with parents. This study concludes with a discussion of the communication process between the physical education teacher and the parents, and a comparison of that with what occurred between the classroom teachers and parents. This is followed by implications for both teacher preparation and school practice.
Subject Area
Physical education
Recommended Citation
Sheehy, Deborah A, "Parental perceptions of fifth-grade physical education: A case study" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9408345.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9408345