The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020 upended various sectors of society across the globe. The educational sector was included in this. Schools and universities scrambled to adopt methods for teaching students remotely. Many with the necessary means and infrastructure turned to online teaching. This transition was particularly challenging in the physical education and physical education teacher education (PETE) fields, subjects that rely on experiential education and interpersonal socialization (Graham et al., 2020).
Surprising to some, the concept of teaching physical education online was not created in reaction to the pandemic’s arrival; it is a practice that has existed for more than 20 years (Daum & Buschner, 2018). As of 2016, 31 states allowed students to earn physical education credit through online courses (SHAPE America, 2016). Correspondingly, online physical education teacher preparation has witnessed similar growth over that time period (Mahar et al., 2014). While these practices have seen steady expansion over the past two decades, empirical research has lagged behind. This dissertation is founded on the idea that the experiences of physical educators and physical education teacher preparation programs during the COVID-19 pandemic can help inform these two fields in the future.
This dissertation adopts the three-article dissertation format. Chapters 1–2 provide background information on the COVID-19 pandemic, online physical education and their intersection. Chapter 3 discusses the overall approach taken in this dissertation. Chapter 4 is the first empirical study. This study examines one university’s PETE program’s transition to online instruction at the onset of the pandemic. The perceptions of university faculty, university students and cooperating teachers are investigated.
Chapter 5 is a second empirical study. It builds off the findings of Foye and Grenier (2021), which examined the experiences of fifteen K–12 physical educators teaching online in the spring of 2020. This follow-up study provides a longitudinal glimpse at these participants’ experiences teaching online during the 2020–2021 school year, and compares and contrasts their perceptions of the two years. Chapter 6 is a manuscript that has been authored for a practitioner’s journal. For this article, a wide range of articles related to online physical education during the COVID-19 pandemic were examined. The manuscript reveals trends related to the experiences of the participants in these studies and offers suggestions for online physical educators to implement in the future. The dissertation concludes with Chapter 7 which offers a reflection on this work.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/44406 |
| Date | 09 May 2022 |
| Creators | Foye, Brandon B. |
| Contributors | McCarthy, John |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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