Impact of occupational socialization on how physical education teachers employ character education in schools

Arguments relating moral and character education to the field of physical education are not novel. Despite this, there are few studies dedicated to studying how and why physical education teachers use character education in schools. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to address this literature gap by studying how seven teachers employed character education and the extent to which their upbringing, experiences in teacher education, and formal teaching career impacted their enthusiasm for, and use of, character and virtue pedagogies in physical education. Data were collected with three techniques (formal interviews, documents, and artifacts) and were analyzed through thematic methods. Guided by either a multi-sport or health/ physical literacy curriculum, data revealed that the teachers employed a range of character concepts and strategies to promote character development. Moreover, the acculturation phase, especially the impact of one's family and religious upbringing, appeared to have the most influence on teachers' motivation for becoming a moral and character educationalist, while the organizational phase had the most impact on how they embodied this role and practice. In addition, while the professional socialization phase, or lack thereof, appeared to impact the type of curricula being promoted in schools, this phase had relatively little impact on how the participants employed character education with young people. In conclusion, the search for a physical education program and a group of physical educators espousing a well-informed and theoretically robust curriculum for teaching character education in schools, remains. Finally, future research concerned with providing and studying the impact of school and university-based professional development programs on department-wide initiatives and (moral) curriculum development would be helpful.