The changing discursive underpinnings of NSW PDHPE and the impact on teacher professional identity

In 2003 the New South Wales Board of Studies released a revised Years 7-10 Personal Development, Health and Physical Education (PDHPE) syllabus. The 2003 PDHPE syllabus was unique to its predecessors as it signalled and consolidated a discursive shift to a socio-cultural perspective of Health and Physical Education (HPE). A shift that Cliff (2009) indicates arose from key HPE academicsŸ discontent with the dominance of the prevailing scientific, biomedical approach.This thesis is presented as a sequence of three interrelated studies that have utilised the NSW 2003 PDHPE Years 7-10 syllabus as a case study.Study One is presented in two sections and explores how socio-political and historical discourses have informed Australian HPE, as well as demonstrating how these discourses are evidenced in the NSW 2003 Years 7-10 PDHPE syllabus.Study Two explores how the evidence of particular HPE discourses in the NSW 2003 Years 7-10 PDHPE syllabus has given power to particular practices and social groups.Study Three explores how the dominance of the socio-cultural discourse discourses has impacted on PDHPE teacher professional identity.Therefore the aims of this study were to firstly identify and investigate how selected HPE discourses are evidenced in a syllabus. Secondly, how those discourses give power to particular groups, and thirdly how those identified discourses impact on PDHPE teacher professional identity.The participants in the data sample data were in-service secondary PDHPE teachers employed by the NSW Association of Independent Schools.This research is framed within the qualitative paradigm, allowing for the utilisation of methodological traditions of inquiry that explore a social or human problem.