Abstract
The article aims to invest the constitutive elements of a collective identity among the professional group of physical education teachers. An investigation carried out through questionnaires permits to apprehend the profession from the shared professional values and representations. The complementary use of semi-directive interviews qualifies this approach and gives an account of the distortions between a quasi-consensual collective discourse and singular interpretations. A certain amount of tensions appears, hence, between the specificity of the discipline and its integration amidst the academic system, between the sports’logic and the pupil’s learning logic, between the practice and the theory. In order to overcome the cleavages and get unity back, the sports’teachers refer to the finalities of the discipline and to educational values. They claim a privileged relationship with the pupils as they set themselves as essential and special actors within schools.