Recruiting, Funding, and Hiring of Doctoral Students in Physical Education Teacher Education

This article examines trends and issues surrounding recruiting, funding, and hiring of doctoral physical education teacher education (D-PETE) students and graduates. Sources for this examination were background data collected by Boyce and her colleagues, the existing literature on these topics, and qualitative data gathered from 30 sport pedagogists during one round-table session at the National Association for Kinesiology in Higher Education (NAKHE) conference in January 2015. All three sources indicated the importance of recruiting and funding of students and hiring of graduates to the future of D-PETE programs. A number of paths were identified which sport pedagogists could follow in order to keep D-PETE programs safe and help them flourish. Unfortunately, agreement as to which of these paths the field should take was often in short supply. In the conclusions section, suggestions for future research of recruiting, funding, and hiring are made with the goal of providing data which could lead to sport pedagogists making more informed decisions regarding the future direction of D-PETE.