Meaningful physical education: Towards an embodied pedagogy

Abstract

International research on students’ meaningful experiences in physical education (PE) has led to the proposal of the Meaningful PE approach, aiming to guide pedagogical principles to support students’ meaningful experiences in PE. The approach currently includes democratic and reflective pedagogical principles. With this paper, we aim to contribute to the Meaningful PE approach by emphasizing the need to address a third pedagogical principle that attends to pre-reflective bodily dimensions of students’ meaningful experiences in PE. The democratic and reflective pedagogical principles are based on a reflective interpretation of the significance an experience holds. While this approach is highly valuable, the retrospective nature of these principles may unintentionally overlook significant pre-reflective bodily dimensions of experience. Drawing on a phenomenological concept of embodiment, we use key structures of our pre-reflective bodily engagement with the world to analyse features that young people describe as significantly contributing to their meaningful experiences in PE and youth sport: social interaction, challenge, motor competence, fun, and personally relevant learning. Our analysis reveals that pre-reflective bodily meaningful experiences emerge as something in-between the subject and the world. These experiences can be affected by others in body-to-body encounters and contain a dimension of negativity related to the pre-reflective, relational, and active–passive structure of our lived experience. Based on our analysis, we propose that teaching to support meaningful experiences in PE must address the dialectical interplay between reflective and pre-reflective dimensions. Therefore, we advocate for adding an embodied pedagogical principle to the Meaningful PE approach alongside the reflective and democratic principles.