Motives for Choosing the Profession and Educational Perceptions of Physical Education Teachers in Midlife as Emerging from Their Life Stories

Background: The professional identity of a human being in general is a complex phenomenon. Teachers’ professional identity expresses their values, beliefs and ideologies. The explicit and implicit ideologies construct their educational perceptions (Zach et al., 2005).

Aim: The presented research aims to look into the motives of physical education teachers in choosing their teaching profession and relating to their educational perceptions reflected in their life stories, concentrating on interviews with 10 teachers in midlife. It is based on narratives in which the interviewees describe their life stories. The best way to answer the research questions is through personal stories, because identification is a combination of a person’s past and present, or as McAdams says, `my story tells who I am` (McAdams, 1993).

Results and Discussion: From the initial findings it emerges that the participants chose their profession because of their will to integrate their hobby with their work. For most of them, childhood experiences, specifically in sports, influenced their choice of teaching physical education. They expressed their love for sports and for children, which are considered inner motives (Schor & Levi, 2003). The profession enables them to feel that they are contributing to society and fulfilling a meaningful profession. It enables them to educate the new generation to love sports and through it acquire meaningful values for their lives. They describe what McAdams, following Erikson, defines as generativity which means the passion in midlife to pass on one’s legacies and values (McAdams, 1993).