University of Texas Permian Basin is teaching people how to become physical education teachers.
“Ours is an undergrad (program), so it’s a bachelor’s degree,” said Lara Cate Bedard, lecturer and kinesiology advisor at UTPB, College of Health Sciences and Human Performance.
The program started in the fall 2022.
“We have eight student teachers completing their student teaching currently and then probably 15 up and coming. The teacher certification is early childhood through grade 12, so our curriculum has to prepare our students to be able to teach 3- (and) 4-year-olds all the way up to 17- (and) 18-year-olds,” Bedard said. “A lot of our students have the desire to coach, but we really encourage them to get the teacher certification to open more doors (and) make them more marketable in the school districts.”
The curriculum not only prepares them to get the job, but then to want to stay in the career, she added.
“We talk a lot about how to manage big groups of people, how to give corrective and constructive feedback, developmentally where to meet students, how to adapt to different ability levels from a physical standpoint and then ultimately just prepare young people to keep the desire to be active alive through a lifespan,” Bedard said. “That’s really our goal.”
She added that a unique feature of their field is that they get to teach many life skills through movement. Bedard said the program also teaches leadership, communication, discipline, how to work as a team and how to handle success and failure.
Bedard said she usually tells her aspiring PE teachers that kids have a desire to move.
“One of our biggest challenges is to keep that alive; make it fun while you’re furthering skills and while you’re exposing them to lots of different activities they can do into adulthood. When sports is over, and it will be at some point, how do they stay active beyond that. If they get in the habit every day of being active as a young person, the chances of them continuing that healthy habit are greater,” she added.
Bedard said she also teaches PE majors how to incorporate movement into their classrooms.
“We’re all fighting for more time with our students. We never have enough, so how can they maximize their activity time throughout the day, not just in PE but in the classroom and before school and after school,” she added.
Bedard said students are taught to work with all populations.
“We definitely want to make sure that we’re maximizing our activity time and catering to all ability levels. We even have an inclusive physical education class where our students learn to work with the adaptive population,” Bedard said.
Alanna Dennison, academic chair for the Department of Human Performance and Athletic Training Program director, said they previously had a concentration through their former kinesiology degree.
“We made some changes to the degree plan to make it meet the current need of educational requirements. But that’s something that has been included in the physical education teaching standards for a long time — how to integrate the adaptive population,” Dennison said.
Previously, Bedard said, it was a class students could take, but it wasn’t required.
“Now it’s required,” she said.
