Discursive visibility of physical activity in school time reform: an analysis of district education bureaus' official...

The organization of school time has been a focus of recent education reform, yet which school time reform practices appear in the official social media narratives of district education bureaus remains insufficiently understood.

Taking Qingdao, China, as a case study, this study employed directed content analysis. A deductive coding framework of 3 first-level and 9 second-level nodes was first constructed from the literature and policy documents. This framework guided the retrieval of 376 articles from the official WeChat accounts of all 10 district education bureaus. Inductive analysis of these articles was then used to develop a typology of third-level reform narratives, which served as the final coding scheme.

The finalized typology comprised 25 third-level narrative types across instructional time, recess, and after-school services, with 704 occurrences coded in total. Each occurrence corresponds to one article in which a given node was identified, with each node recorded once per article. After-school services accounted for the largest share (60.1%), followed by recess (28.4%) and instructional time (11.5%). Physical activity-related practices were frequently reported across all three dimensions. Within instructional time, "Guaranteed PE instructional time" (30) and "PE instructional time quality assurance" (18) had the highest frequencies; in recess, "Ground space gamification" (38) was among the most frequently reported practices; within after-school services, "Curriculum-based club activities" (121) was the most frequently reported node, with sports clubs mentioned in 57.9% of these articles. The frequency of coded nodes also differed across districts.

A notable theme that emerged from the analysis was the frequent reporting of physical activity-related practices in official communication about school time reform. Within this theme, recess activities and after-school content appeared in more articles than structural changes to instructional time. Reporting was also selective: event-based and narrative-rich practices appeared more frequently, and physical activity was often described in relation to health and participation. The study contributes a transferable typology of reform narratives and demonstrates the value of social media data for examining public communication of school-based health practices.