Moral Development in Sport Education: A Case Study of a Teaching-Oriented Preservice Teacher

Moral development and sporting behavior in sport education: A case study of a preservice teacher with a coaching orientation

“…Finally, there were some instances of students defining moral and sporting behavior in terms of engaging in positive behaviors. These students appeared to be operating at Kohlberg’s (1976) postconventional level of moral development and, similar to some of the students studied previously within SE seasons (Brock and Hastie, 2007; Schwamberger and Curtner-Smith, 2017, in press; Sinelnikov and Hastie, 2008; Vidoni and Ward, 2009), tended to focus almost exclusively on ‘respecting’ officials, opponents, and teammates and being supportive of ‘equality’ in terms of ensuring all students got ‘playing time’ within the unit:There’s some people, like myself, who aren’t as skilled as others and if they like made a basket or made a really good pass, everyone would cheer them on. Like even if they weren’t on my team I’d still like cheer them on cos I know that it would like just make their confidence go up.…”

“…I know the games were tight during the lesson, so the aspect of wanting to win could have played a role in letting it go. (Lindsey, stimulated recall interview)In line with the findings of Schwamberger and Curtner-Smith (2017, in press), within both classes girls who identified as being ‘athletes’ appeared more likely to engage in poor sporting behavior, their motivation being to ‘win at all costs.’ In congruence with social learning theory, we speculate that this behavior was the result of the socialization these students had received during extracurricular school sport, competitive sport outside the school setting, and through the media; the key socializing agents being coaches, parents, other players, and coverage of sporting events on television. Specifically, this group often acted counter to the stated ‘equality’ objective by dominating game playing time on court, taking all the prime roles, ignoring their less-skilled teammates, and only passing to players of similar ability:I’ve witnessed, like on other teams, there’s these two specific people who will only pass the ball to each other and shoot, but they won’t pass it to other teammates.…I think it’s because they’re really good friends and they’re really athletic, but they don’t give the other people a chance.…”

“…(Kelsie, eighth grade focus group interview)The main reason for not engaging in such behaviors, the students explained, was to avoid ‘losing the fair play points’ that could be awarded by the officials to each team after a competitive game or being asked ‘to sit out’ of game play altogether by Lindsey. In short, and in contrast to students studied by Schwamberger and Curtner-Smith (in press), there was apparently little internal drive to avoid these unsporting behaviors. Rather, students were acting out of fear of being ‘punished.’…”

“…As the season progressed, however, and the competition became increasingly fierce, students’ views about equal playing time changed, especially when it could make the difference between winning or losing. Similarly, Schwamberger and Curtner-Smith (in press) found that students taught the full version of SE gained an improved understanding of fair play and were observed using sporting behaviors on numerous occasions during early season lessons. As in the earlier studies, however, students’ levels of sporting behavior deteriorated when competitive game play commenced.…”

“…Within the preconventional level, the cognitive structure is relatively unsophisticated and characterized by following rules set by others without thought or understanding about the morality of these rules (Shields and Bredemeier, 1995). In a sporting context, individuals at this stage might follow rules and regulations of games merely to avoid being penalized by officials (Schwamberger and Curtner-Smith, in press). Individuals at the conventional level of moral development act and reason in accordance with standards and thinking set by social groups to which they belong without examining the morality of these standards and this thinking (Shields and Bredemeier, 1995).…”