Tapping into the educational potential of sportspersonship for the moral development of students: The case of a badminton tournament

Sportspersonship has the potential to contribute to the moral development of young students and athletes. However, few studies provide information on the training strategies needed to encourage physical education and sport (PES) practitioners to harness this concept for moral education purposes. This article looks at an action research study designed to support physical education teachers in planning and implementing activities targeting the moral development of students through the learning of better sportspersonship (Tremblay, 2020). This article presents the detailed case of a teacher who, as one of four teachers accompanied by a trainer-researcher during the project, set up a badminton tournament dedicated to moral development. In this regard, we explain the (1) characteristics of the badminton tournament; (2) perceptions of the students who took part; and (3) findings related to the training process. Based on qualitative analyses, the results of this research reveal a mechanism for transposing popular knowledge—in this case sportspersonship as initially conceived by the teacher—into didactic knowledge that can be used to establish moral education in PES. These results ultimately contribute to the emergence of the “Sportspersonship Approach,” a new approach to moral education in PES.