Issn 1983-8034 Ethics, bioethics and physical education

Final considerations

With the intention of contributing to the reflection on ethics and bioethics in the field of PE, this study identified ethical issues inherent in the professional practice of PE professionals with regard to intervention in the school environment, the sport scenario as a space for value experiences, the need for a continually stimulated moral and ethical sensitivity to adequate training and, finally, to the importance of PE professionals capable of reflecting and critically understanding everyday situations.

It is worth noting that, in the first category, the focus of the PE professional’s intervention is related to the school environment. This space is understood as an environment conducive to unique teaching situations that encourage learning, observation, and cooperation experiences and the assessment of attitudes and behaviors. Thus, we must bear in mind that PE professionals must understand values and develop a practice consistent with reflective, critical, and ethical teaching.
At the same time, in the second category, a broader perspective of sport as a potential for moral education is addressed. It is understood that the practice of sports is capable of providing the experience of values; nevertheless, for this objective to be fulfilled, PE professionals working
in this area must invest in ethical training, so that they become able to reflect on possible conflicts and the means to solve them.
In the third category, we found that it is necessary to pay attention to the role of the university in the engagement by teaching and/or continuing education in ethics, which reverberates in the development of ethical skills and sensitivity of PE professionals. In addition, it reinforces the idea of qualifying the understanding of ethical approaches, seeking to avoid any erroneous understandings. Long-term ethical training is necessary, adopting everyday reflections in the context of PE.
Issues related to ethical training, reflective professional practice, and values education, deepened in the fourth category, indicate the understanding that technical-instrumental knowledge in PE is insufficient, considering that broadening the understanding of diversity and humanistic knowledge is essential to the education of PE professionals. In this process, it is paramount to include the contextualization of the professionals’ daily lives, with the purpose of encouraging fair decision-making and changes in practices in conflicting situations.
As limitations of the study, it should be noted that it only addressed articles available for free in the CAPES databases, and no theses and dissertations were included. Nonetheless, the scarcity of scientific production on the topic of ethics and/or bioethics in PE is noteworthy. Therefore, it is important to encourage the development of studies with an ethical/bioethical perspective of the practices experienced by PE professionals.
In this article, we sought to discuss issues related to interventions by PE professionals from a critical and reflective perspective. It is important to sensitize scholars to carry out research on this topic, still on the margins of scientific production in the field of PE, mainly considering the following verified gaps: studies on doping, cooperative values, and defeat in sports.
All in all, we can consider that professionals should know the social and cultural context in which they develop their daily practices and face the potential of the PE area for moral and ethical development — although with responsibility, committed, above all, to the understanding of how, why, and when to use ethical competence (knowledge, skill, and attitude) and bioethics in their practices.

Research