Health Education and Health Promotion

Preparing Physical Education Teachers as School Health Promoters: Professional Competence, Psychological Resilience and Social-Spiritual Values in Chinese and Kyrgyz Sports Universities

Document Type : Qualitative Research

Authors

Y. Yao
C. Wang
B. Sun
Z. Liu
G. Karabalaeva
Abstract
Aim: Physical education teachers deliver much of the health promotion that schools achieve, yet their preparation is usually assessed on technical knowledge alone. This study examined how professional competence, psychological resilience and social-spiritual values are conceptualised and cultivated in the sports higher education systems of China and the Kyrgyz Republic.
Method: A qualitative comparative document analysis was conducted following the four steps of description, interpretation, juxtaposition and comparison. The corpus comprised national policy instruments, state educational standards, institutional programme documents and peer-reviewed studies published between 2010 and 2025, coded against an a priori three-domain framework.
Findings: The two systems converged on declared aims, each positioning the graduate as a moral exemplar rather than a technician, and diverged on almost every mechanism. China pursued value formation through mandated curriculum instruments and a standardised practicum; Kyrgyzstan relied on heritage-based moral pedagogy under severe resource constraint. Neither made systematic, assessed provision for psychological resilience.
Conclusion: Resilience is a shared blind spot in both systems, and the health promotion capacity of each school system is limited accordingly. A triadic cultivation model is proposed in which four pedagogical levers act across all three domains, requiring redesign of existing experiences rather than new expenditure.

Keywords

Health Promotion
Physical Education and Training
Resilience Psychological
Spirituality
Professional Competence
Schools
Subjects