Competitive Situations in Physical Education: Is It Useful in Students’ Everyday Lives?

Dealing with competitive situations is part of our everyday lives. Learning to participate constructively in competitive situations may, therefore, be important for citizens in a society. Although physical education may help in such an endeavor, competitive activities inspired by sports competition may not be the best solution. This article seeks to contribute to the discussion of competitive activities in PE. The aim of this study was to investigate how and why competitive activities in PE are presented and to explore students’ experiences and actions in competitive situations within these competitive activities. The aim was to answer the following questions: How are competitive activities facilitated in PE? What are the teacher’s intentions of facilitating competitive activities in certain ways? What are the students’ experiences and actions in competitive situations within competitive activities? The creation of such knowledge through different cases creates the opportunity to discuss whether the competitive activities presented in this study were useful in students’ everyday lives. The participants comprised 25 students (13-15 years old) and their teacher from one secondary school in Norway. The methods included a triangulation of 1. Students’ written narratives were conducted after each of the eight PE lessons. 2. Observations and video recordings of eight PE lessons (600 minutes). 3. Interviews of 13 students and their PE teacher. The data was inductively analyzed using thematic analysis. The results showed that PE activities adapted elements from sports competitions in different ways. For instance, the aim of winning was adapted into PE but not the opportunity to practice over time towards the competition. The aim of winning triumphed an educational outcome. The teacher intended to use the competitive aspect of winning to produce engagement and high physical exertion and to create positive experiences for the students. Due to students’ different physical skills and, therefore, different opportunities to win, the teacher adapted competitive activities to make physical skills less relevant or the students’ performance less visible. The students’ experiences and actions showed that they were still aware of their performance in relation to other students and that replacing the importance of physical skills on performance with chance concerning success in the activity caused frustration, leading students to act out the frustration in the activity. The frustration resulted from a lack of possibility to improve one’s performance. In addition, the findings indicated the difficulty of seeing whether students had positive experiences of an activity only by observation. The article discussed the opportunity to disconnect competition from sports from competitive situations in PE. Instead, competitive situations in PE could be connected to the relevance of students’ everyday lives. As such, it was discussed the opportunity to start with an educational outcome such as helping students to handle competitive situations in their lives or learning about trustworthy actions relevant to the students’ general growth in their lives. The article also discussed the difficulty and importance of evaluating whether the learning outcome and the competitive situations are moving students in an educative direction.