Negotiating professional identity in examination-driven schooling: a Q-method study of physical education teachers

Physical education (PE) is widely framed as a holistic educational domain, yet its institutional legitimacy remains vulnerable within examination-driven schooling systems. Although research on PE teachers’ beliefs and professional identity has expanded, much of this work remains variable-centred or thematically descriptive, offering limited insight into how teachers organise pedagogical, moral, and institutional commitments as coherent configurations. This study examines how physical education teachers negotiate their professional identity within examination-driven schooling contexts by modelling their subjectivities as configurational structures. The term configurational structure is employed here as an analytical construct to denote the holistic, internally organised patterns through which teachers prioritise competing pedagogical, moral, and institutional commitments, a conceptualisation grounded in Q methodology's epistemological commitment to modelling subjectivity as an integrated whole rather than as a set of discrete variables (Brown, S. R. (1996). Q methodology and qualitative research. Qualitative Health Research, 6(4), 561–567. https://doi.org/10.1177/104973239600600408; Danielson, S. (2009). Q method and surveys: Three ways to combine Q and R. Field Methods, 21(3), 219–237. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X09332082). Twenty PE teachers working in public and private schools in southern Türkiye completed a Q-sort of 35 statements, analysed through by-person factor analysis. A three-factor solution revealed distinct yet overlapping configurations: (1) Pedagogical Agency, characterised by instructional flexibility and value-oriented teaching; (2) Institutionally Constrained Professionalism, reflecting tensions between curricular responsibility and limited institutional recognition; and (3) Developmental–Ethical Framing, emphasising holistic student development over performance-reductionist orientations. Across configurations, teachers collectively resisted narrowing PE to performance-driven logics and positioned the subject as a relational and developmental domain. The findings conceptualise PE teachers’ professional worlds as configurational subjectivities structured through the interaction of pedagogical agency, institutional positioning, and developmental purpose, offering an analytically transferable framework for understanding teacher identity negotiation in examination-dominated education systems.