The education of Tunisian PE teachers takes place in 4 separate Institutes (ISSEP, official acronym for Institut Supérieur du Sport et de l’Education Physique). The curriculum takes place within 6 semesters (more than 2000 hours of teaching) and after successful graduation, the students may become PE school teachers. However possible jobs are difficult to obtain because of the excessive number of students. A reform of the educational program aims at developing a “Bachelor-Master- Doctorate” (BMD) structure whose achievement is yet limited by the economic situation of the country (Bouzaiene, 2006). A problem of suitability of the educational program of the ISSEPs for the factual preparation to exert as PE teachers has also been pointed up (Bali, 2005). Altogether, this suggests that the initial training of Tunisian PE teachers is weak and may generate vulnerabilities in graduate students (for the concept of vulnerability, see: Brodiez-Dolino, 2016; Kaspersons et al., 1995; Pizzaro, 2001; Turner et al., 2003).
The aim of the present study was to examine these possible vulnerabilities through the interviews of the 4 directors (D) of ISSEP, of 4 trainers (T) of these institutes, and of 4 graduate students (G) not yet recruited as teachers. Semi direct interviews led to the identification of: (1) the aims and objectives of the training and its efficiency for a professional integration; (2) the design and contents of the training. A lexical and categorical analysis of the interviews was realized with a textual data analysis software (Alceste: Reinert, 1983; Kalampalikis, 2003) to identify categories of forms (from a descending hierarchical classification), the respective representative text fragments, and the associated type(s) of subjects (by Khi square). The textual analysis identified 33.139 forms distributed in 5 categories (C1a- e), and 25.298 forms distributed in 6 categories (C2f-k). The results showed that each category is specifically associated to each one of the three groups of subjects, even if the answers to (1) and (2) were separately analyzed. In particular:
- The D subjects identified: (C1a) the difficulties of professional integration and the consequent social insecurity, (C1b) the absence of a clear goal of competencies to organize the initial training, the lack of continuous training to support the graduates and that of continuous training for trainers. D subjects also noticed: (C2a) the excessively theoretical background of the training and (C2b) the difficulty to create a transition between training in ISSEP and actual PE teaching.
- The T subjects emphasized: (C1c) their hope in the development of a BMD structure exclusively centered on the field of the high-level sport training; (C2c) the importance of high- level sport in PE curricula and (C2d) the accent that must be given, in their opinion to the scientific content of these curricula.
- The G subjects regretted: (C1d) a lack of pertinence of their initial training, (C1e) the lack of a follow-up in their career. They formulated: (C2e) the idea that PE teachers might act as sport technical trainers; while criticizing (C2f) the suitability of their initial training to teach PE.
These results will be discussed as indicators of vulnerability. Possible suggestions concerning the development of the BMD structure will also be discussed.