Parallel Stories of Publicly Imagined and Personally Lived PE Teacher Identity Reconstruction in the Time of COVID-19

Abstract

As the novel virus was declared a pandemic, Korean schools quickly transitioned to remote schooling based on its advanced IT system, government-operated digital learning platforms, and an abundance of pre-existing online teaching materials (Byun & Slavin, 2020). Unfortunately, this story of “successful” educational responses to the pandemic was of little relationship to physical education (PE) partly because of the sparsity of supportive resources for online teaching of the hands-on subject area but mainly because of the incompatibility between the nature of the online classroom and the essence of PE (Baek & Yoon, 2020; Oh, 2021). As its name implies, physical education is inseparable from physical movements, bodily dialogue, close physical contact, and active, direct interactions between engaged individuals. Accordingly, PE teachers, dwelling in either online or blended classrooms where bodies are absent, and touch is unthinkable, are experiencing diminished room to implement their pedagogical repertoires and, in turn, affecting their deconstruction and reconstruction of their teacher identities (Kamoga & Varea, 2022). In a nutshell, PE subject matter and PE teachers' identities are being challenged and experiencing unexpected metamorphoses amid this global crisis.

Citation

Lee, H. (2023), "Parallel Stories of Publicly Imagined and Personally Lived PE Teacher Identity Reconstruction in the Time of COVID-19", Singer, E.A., Etchells, M.J. and Craig, C.J. (Ed.) Drawn to the Flame (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 45), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 117-136. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720230000045008