Physical education textbooks: an overview of the academic output

Abstract

This article aims to present an overview of the academic output (articles, end-of-course projects, dissertations and theses) about Physical Education Textbooks (PETB) based on an inquiry about the use of textbooks throughout the history of this school subject in Brazil. Our theoretical-methodological framework consisted of the studies of Bardin (1977) and Choppin (1992, 2004), among others, which allowed outlining a panorama of the national research on PETB, the geographical and institutional distribution of studies, the chronological order of publications, as well as the main topics that characterize them, while taking into account the goals and approaches of each of them. The search, selection and access procedures resulted in 55 scholarly works produced from 1993 to 2019. The analysis of surveyed data allowed building a quantitative-qualitative overview, as well as a survey of 19 Physical Education textbooks used in Brazil which were analyzed or cited in the 55 studies. We conclude that there is an increasing scholarly output about PETB, particularly over the last two decades, which is mostly aimed at analyzing the contents of PETB that have been or still are in use. In addition, such works aim at proposing new textbooks to meet the demands of a Physical Education perspective understood as a body culture of movement, i.e., an approach in which their contents produce and reproduce cultural elements.

Textbook; Physical education; Research