Sport within the extracurricular school context: meanings and contradictions related to futsal teaching

Abstract

Abstract The practice and teaching of sport, which are expressed in different environments such as school, leisure and high performance environments, derive from sociocultural components related to the pedagogical context in which these processes take place, as well as the involved social agents’ cultural background. Understanding school as a space for social protection and socialization, the care related to pedagogical actions is important, as possible social inequalities in the offering of learning opportunities can be reflected in other dimensions of students’ lives. At school, futsal teaching happens both in Physical Education classes and extracurricular activities, being the later called in this study as extracurricular sports practices (ESP). The aim of this study was to investigate and analyse the reasons and meanings of teaching futsal as an extracurricular sport practice, for teachers/coaches in a country city in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Through semi-structured interviews with futsal teachers/coaches, and data analysis based on Grounded Theory, the main results are expressed in three thematic axes: 1) goals of teaching sport at school: moral education as a relevant contribution; 2) dispositions of teachers/coaches for the overvaluation of the sport competitions’ results; 3) sport participation as a privilege for the few students with better competitive performance. We concluded that even knowing more appropriate pedagogical actions for ESP, teachers/coaches address their pedagogical acting to the achievement of optimal competitive results, causing social exclusion and unequal offer of learning opportunities to students in ESP.