Taking into account the experience of beginning physical education teachers: Epistemological, heuristic and formative issues
This article sets out to show how beginning physical education teachers’ experience can be taken into account through three approaches, depending on the researcher’s mode of grasping subjective experience, in order to specifically identify teachers’ professionality. The three approaches are experience as conceptualization in action, as persistent lived experience, and as dialectics of self-positioning. These three approaches are examined via an analysis of trainee teachers’ productions. Comparison of these approaches gives rise to three objectives: 1) epistemologically speaking, to pinpoint the approaches’ respective contributions to grasping and problematizing experience; 2) heuristically speaking, to define beginning physical education teachers’ professionality and to specify the (already well known) importance of “control”; and 3) formatively speaking, to investigate beginning teachers’ development projects from an autonomy standpoint.