"The purpose of this study was to understand the process of building sports instructors' career identity posted in elementary schools. The participants were sports instructors(3 participants in K-Do and 1 participant in C-Do). Data were collected by the participant observation, in-depth interview, class schedule and documents from March 2009 to December 2010. The collected data were analysed by Spradley's developmental research sequence(D.R.S.), the methods of domain analysis - classifying analysis - contents analysis. The result shows that the life of sports instructors is quite similar to Lortie(1975)’s metaphor of ‘sinking down or swimming’, in large. More specifically, participants build their career identity in a similar way to the following cultural subjects such as ‘adaptation’, ‘confusion of identity’, ‘attempt and change for better class’ and ‘losing goal and existence’ in their work. This result will give us very useful information to make them adapt to school life and re-education, and the information will be used as the important foundation to make policy to manage and support sports instructors systematically.
※ Key words : elementary school, sports instructor, career identity."