Physical Education Teachers in Tunisia It's Time for Change

Abstract

Tunisia, as an independent State, has had to ensure the education of the young Tunisians. As a consequence, this led to attempts to ensure an efficient training of the future teachers. However, until nowadays, this project did not lead to outputs that would be considered as satisfying. In this framework, physical education (PE) has been initially considered as one of the major ways to educate the young Tunisians. PE has received strong support from the Tunisian State (infrastructures…). Teacher training also benefited of such support and specific Institutes (ISSEPs, French acronym for Superior Institutes of Sport and PE) have been created, since the 1990s, to allow the future teachers to graduate at a master’s level. However, PE is nowadays less supported by the Tunisian State and considered as a school subject of poor interest. The training in the ISSEPs also seems to be weakened as the graduated (at a bachelor’s level since the adoption, in 2005, of a Bachelor-Master-Doctorate structure) have nowadays to wait more than five years before to become PE teachers. As a consequence, the present study aimed to examine possible vulnerability of the training of PE teachers in ISSEPs. This was done by taking into consideration the point of views of major players in the training, i.e.: the directors of the ISSEPs, trainers and students. It has been hypothesized that these subjects (1) are aware of difficulties encountered by the training and (2) criticize this training but (3) their affectations and by their (social) representations hamper possible attempt to regulate the training. Twelve semi-directed interviews has been done to obtain the interviewees’ reactions regarding the training of PE teachers in ISSEPs (aim of the training, training contents, strategy and methods of training). A lexical analysis of the verbatim was computed and this led to a categorical analysis of the corresponding outputs. These analyses led to determine a categories of ideas that put the emphasis on a series of problems. Beyond (1) the difficulties of profesional integretion (2) the absence of a clear goal of competencies to organize the initial training (3) a lack of following during the years after graduation and before becoming a PE teacher and a moderate relevance of the training [(4) academic contents, (5) sport and physical activities, (6) internship] that is considered to fail to prepare the trainees to the requirements of an effective teaching of PE, (7) the difficulty to create a transition between training in ISSEP and actual PE teaching and (8) hope in the development of a BMD structure exclusively centered on the field of the hight -level sport training. These results will be discussed as indicators of vulnerability. Possible suggestions concerning the development of the BMD structure will also be discussed.