This study aims to analyze a challenging activity, a balance beam exercise, in the physical education
textbooks of the 2007 revised curriculum. The textbooks for this study are the five textbooks for the sixth
graders passed the official approval.
This study used the contrastive analysis of Bereday(1964) and the modified contrastive analysis of
Lee(2012). The criteria for the analysis for this study are propositional contents, narrative, skills, virtue,
interest, and style proposed by Seo, Han, Lee(2008) in the cultural viwpoint of physical education.
The contents of beam balance exercises are contrastively analyzed based on the judgement, regulations,
and rules.
The results of the study are like following. First, the beam balance exercises in the primay school are
composed with propositional contents, skills and virtue.
Second, some textbooks are lack of, or even do not cover, cultural contents such as narrative, interests,
style, judgement, regulation, and rule of the beam balance exercises
Third, the textbooks are lack of systematic approach toward the contents of the beam balance exercises
as indirect experience activity in realizing the value of physical activity. Therefore the physical education
textbooks in the future need to provide educational contents realizing the true value of physical activities