The aim of this study was to explore physical education teacher education students’ meaning-making of participating in lessons – in this case gymnastics and basketball – based on their aesthetic judgements, expressed in written stories. A transactional approach, drawing on the work of John Dewey, was used in the study and the empirical data was generated through observations and collection of students’ written stories. A practical epistemology analysis was used in order to explore the students’ meaning-making in-depth. The purposes that the students ascribed to participating in the lessons were to develop both as athletes and as teachers. When analysing the stories, the importance of being a competent athlete emerged as the main purpose of participating in the lessons, and the majority of the students never included the purpose of developing as a teacher in their stories at all. By making the competent athlete the centre of their participation, other positions of participation were excluded or marginalized. However, even if all the students’ stories contribute to the collective appropriation of the type, the majority did not include the projected, ideal type in all respects. In their stories, it was clear that many of the students expressed a tension between doing gymnastics or basketball within the context of competitive sport and doing the same activities within the context of physical education teacher education. Even if the students did not fulfil this awareness of contrasting ideals by undoing ‘the competent athlete’ completely, many of them did highlight the conflict.