Phenomenology and Pedagogy in Physical Education

Oyvind Standal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317689102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación física

Phenomenology is a philosophical approach to the study of consciousness and subjective experience. In recent years it has become a more prominent element of the social scientific study of sport and a core component of the important emergent concept of physical literacy. This book is the first to offer a philosophically-sound investigation of phenomenological perspectives on pedagogy in physical education.

The book argues that phenomenology offers a particularly interesting theoretical approach to physical education because of the closely embodied relationship between the knowledge object (the actions, activities and practices of movement) and the knowing subject (the pupil). Drawing on the work of key phenomenological thinkers but also exploring the implications of this work for teaching practice, the book helps to illuminate our understanding of important concepts in physical education such as practical knowledge, skill acquisition, experience and ethics.

This is fascinating reading for any serious student or researcher working in physical education or the philosophy or sociology of sport.

1 Introduction

This book is about phenomenology and pedagogy applied to the context of school physical education. As such, it aims to fulfil a dual purpose, namely to contribute both to the philosophy of physical education as well as to the pedagogy of physical education. As an introduction to the topic, there is a need to do some conceptual groundwork by first providing an outline of the key concepts I will be working with: school physical education, pedagogy in relation to physical education, philosophy of physical education, and phenomenology. On the basis of this, I intend to argue for why this study into phenomenology and pedagogy in physical education is worthwhile and important. In outlining what ‘physical education’, ‘philosophy of physical education’ and ‘pedagogy in physical education’ might entail, I run the risk of derailing the whole project of studying phenomenology and pedagogy in physical education, because all these areas can be objects of a study in their own right. I will therefore be brief, thus inducing the risk of superficiality. However, I hope that in the course of developing my ideas and arguments throughout the book, I will be able to fill out the picture.

Physical education

There is a sense in which physical education can be understood as a broad process of induction, socialization, and learning to take part in the valued physical activities¹ of one’s culture. The broad sense of ‘physical education’ includes – but is not limited to – school physical education. Physical education in a wide sense can be understood as the process of developing ‘the body’s intelligent capacities for movement and expression in physical culture, in all its varied forms’ (Evans, 2004, p. 96). This book, however, is aimed at the school subject of physical education. Thus, my use of the term ‘physical education’ is restricted to the school subject. In the British context, Stidder and Hayes (2013) note that physical education ‘relates specifically to the 76 hours (or 5%) of formal curriculum time devoted to the teaching and learning of physical education to all pupils in an academic year’ (p. 2). In other words, the use of the term ‘physical education’ is restricted and distinguished from other school physical activities, for instance school sport programmes in the UK (ibid.), and ‘physical activity and health’ in the Norwegian school context. The latter is an effort explicitly aimed at public health issues, where there is no curriculum and no requirement as to the competence of the person in charge of the activity. Although school sport and ‘physical activity and health’ fall within physical education in the broad sense, they are not part of physical education in the narrower sense in which I am interested.

Schools are diverse and situated in specific historical and cultural contexts. How physical education is practiced in schools in Norway today is surely different from the manner in which it was practiced in the 1950s. Also, the practice of physical education in Norway differs from how it is practiced in Japan, Nigeria, Afghanistan or in the USA. Indeed, it even differs between comparatively similar countries such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark (Annerstedt, 2008). Consequently, it is important to recognize that physical education means different things to different readers of this book. However, there may be some issues that, due to globalization and academization of the subject for instance, are quite similar across cultures and countries.

In Physical Education Futures, David Kirk (2010) develops what he calls the idea of the idea of physical education (abbreviated as ‘id²’). In order to capture what physical education means, Kirk relies on a social epistemological analysis rather than an analysis of various definitions of physical education. A social epistemological analysis implies that knowledge is socially constructed, but concedes at the same time that there must be some features that allow us to recognize ‘when a practice is physical education and when it is something else’ (p. 16). His perspective is that there are no essences of physical education that transcend time and place. But neither does he allow for a relativistic understanding where anything can pass as school physical education. For Kirk, the idea of the idea of physical education is expressed in terms of physical education-as-sport-techniques. This implies that it is the teaching and learning of various sport techniques which are central to the way physical education is currently practiced. This should not be taken as a simplistic conclusion about what physical education is. For one thing, Kirk points out that there are teachers who resist this idea, and teach the subject differently. In addition, he also points out that ‘surrounding these techniques is a complex of other forces that gives the id² its considerable reach and durability’ (p. 42).

There are four features of Kirk’s analysis of physical education that I will highlight here. First, physical education is predominantly characterized by a multi-activity model where pupils are presented with a wide range of activities in which they should be active participants. This is a characterization of the curriculum which finds broad support in the research literature. For instance, Annerstedt (2008) made a comparative study of physical education in the Scandinavian countries and found that:

The syllabi seem to have three dominating elements: physical activity, social learning and health. Through multi-activity programs of different physical and sporting activities, the pupils in Scandinavia are to learn about their bodies through the use of their bodies (Quennerstedt, 2006). Above all, pupils should develop a desire to perform life-long physical activity through experiencing the joy of movement during PE classes.

(Annerstedt, 2008, p. 310)

It should be noted here that active in this context implies being physically active. Indeed, Annerstedt (2008) indicates that the focus in school physical education is ‘more on activity than on learning’ (p. 316), and questions the relationship between the idea of creating a life-long interest in physical activity and the actual learning outcomes of physical education lessons.

Second, in relation to physical education-as-sport-technique, Kirk (2010) highlights the distinction between technique and skill. Whereas techniques are decontextualized aspects of a sport or an activity, such as the dig in volleyball or the lay-up in basketball, skills are basically the same movements, but performed in context. That is, whereas the lay-up in basketball as a technique can be practised in isolation without reference to or interference from opponents, the lay-up skill takes place within the context of a game.

The third point I want to make about Kirk’s ‘id²’ of physical education is that the dominant form of teaching is an instructional style, which is directive and command oriented. Tinning (2010) similarly claims that the dominant pedagogical form of physical education is the so-called DEP-model, i.e. ‘the sequence of demonstration, explanation and practice’ (p. 43). One can therefore say that even though the pedagogical role of the physical education teacher has developed from the highly authoritarian command style of Swedish gymnastics, it is still very much modelled on a traditional instruction-based teacher role. The instructional style of teaching can be partly explained on the basis of the understanding of physical education-as-sport-technique, but also due to restrictions imposed on teachers by factors such as class size and timetabling.

The fourth point brought up by Kirk (2010) are four relational issues that the institutionalized practice of physical education must consider. These are physical culture, transfer of learning, standards of excellence, and social and cultural transmission. When it comes to physical culture – understood as the bodily practices of play, games, sports and ‘other leisure physical activities that help define the social fabric of local and national communities’ (Evans, 2004, p. 106) – one can analyse the relationship between the practice of physical education and the wider physical culture in which pupils (may) take part: To what extent does physical education engage young people’s physical culture in contemporary society? Associated with this is the question of transfer of learning. Given that learning of sport techniques has a central place in the subject, to what extent is this learning transferable to pupils’ lives here and now, and in a life-span perspective? According to Kirk (2010), the question of standard of excellence concerns how ability is understood and valued in the subject. As implied by Annerstedt (2008) and other researchers (e.g. Evans, 2004; Fitzgerald, 2005; Hay and Macdonald, 2009), it is skills in traditional masculine activities such as ball games that are valued. Therefore, it appears that excellence in these skills constitutes ability in physical education. This, then, leads to the fourth relational issue in Kirk’s analysis, namely the social and cultural transmission of knowledge and values. As I will expand on later, this issue is about how hegemonies and inequalities are transmitted and reproduced through physical education with the effect of yielding benefits to some pupils but disadvantages to others.

In closing this section on what I talk about when I talk about physical education in this book, I want to make two points. First, one debate that physical education teacher educators, like myself, need to engage with is what physical education should be. This, however, will not be the main topic in this book. I nevertheless hope that my investigations into phenomenology and pedagogy in physical education give some guidance in future discussions about the normative question of what physical education should be like. Second, the analyses of Kirk (2010), Evans (2004) and Annerstedt (2008) point to the centrality of the body in physical education: the moving body is the knowledge object of physical education. That is, through developing skills, techniques or knowledge about physical activities, the moving body becomes a knowledge object. In addition, and of no less importance, the body is also the knowing subject of PE. The implication of the claim that the body is both the knowing subject and knowledge object of PE will be substantiated throughout the book.

Philosophy of physical education

Whereas philosophy of education is a burgeoning sub-discipline of philosophy with its own journals, conferences and international research associations, it appears that the philosophy of physical education is an unfashionable term. If this claim is true, then there is a history to this state of affairs, and some comments should be made about this history.

Morgan (2006) sees philosophy of physical education as a predecessor to philosophy of sport. He claims that up until ‘the late 1960s or so’ (p. 97), a pedagogical perspective informed philosophical approaches to various physical activities such as games, sport and physical education. This connection between physical education and philosophy of education was, however, severed with the invention of philosophy of sport. Indeed, he claims that ‘[philosophical work dealing with physical education] has been clearly dwarfed by the work devoted to sports’ (ibid.). According to Morgan’s analysis, this has meant that philosophically oriented research into physical education has been – and he also suggests that it will continue to be² – informed by philosophy of sport, rather than philosophy of education. In particular, he claims that ‘much of this research will be centered on ethical inquiry into sports as opposed to the older epistemological research paradigm favored in philosophy of education circles’ (p. 106).

Assessing the accuracy of Morgan’s historical analysis is beyond the scope of this book, but two points can be made. First, the concept of fair play, which must be said to be a key concept in philosophy of sport (Loland, 2002), has found its way into the physical education curriculum in Norway (Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2006) and elsewhere (Kirk, 2010). The focus on fair play in physical education may indicate that Morgan to some degree is right in suggesting that ethical inquiry into sport informs physical education. Second, a literature search on the precise term ‘philosophy of physical education’ in the database SportDiscus gave seventy-five hits.³ Of these, about two thirds were published before 1985. Thus, if this rather unstructured literature search is anything to go by, it seems that the heyday of philosophy of physical education was in the 1970s and 1980s, which is not so far from Morgan’s claim.

One might wonder why philosophy of physical education seems to be a declining research area. Based on his perception of a ‘yawning gap between the philosophy of PE, as articulated by academic philosophers, and PE as taught in a practical way by PE teachers’, Green (1998, pp. 128–129) has researched the ‘philosophies’ of physical education teachers. By ‘philosophies’ Green does not mean the systematic thinking about concepts and practices, which is characteristic of philosophy as an academic study, but rather the ideologies that teachers of physical education hold about the nature and purpose of their subject. This gap between philosophy and the practicalities of PE identified by Green (1998) is also pointed out by McNamee (2005, p. 1):

There has always been an air of suspicion about those who think philosophically about the nature and values of physical education. On the one hand, physical education teachers are apt to claim that theirs is essentially a practical vocation; a calling to the teaching of physical activities that can help students to live better lives. What need have they of a philosophy? On the other hand, philosophers of education, notably in the liberal-analytical tradition, have often sought to cast a dim light on physical education, thinking it valuable (on good days at least) – but not educationally so.

The gesture that McNamee makes towards liberal-analytical philosophy of education is important because this tradition has been highly influential on the philosophical debates that have taken place in the context of physical education. These debates centred on the justification of the subject in the school curriculum were set against the backdrop of the liberal-analytical philosophy of education advanced by Richard Peters and Paul Hirst. Their position was – stated very briefly – that education ‘referred to the initiation of the unlearned into those intrinsically worthwhile forms of knowledge that were constitutive of rational mind’ (McNamee, 2005, p. 2). By this account, physical education did not have educational value because it did not possess the cognitive qualities that were considered as the marks of education.

In a later chapter I return to some of the literature that aimed to argue for the inclusion of physical education into the curriculum. For now, suffice it to say that arguments were made against the restrictive view of education proposed by Hirst and Peters. The strategy was to argue for a broader understanding of knowledge in the sense that practical knowledge, which characterizes physical education, also has educational value. That is, in order to justify physical education as educationally worthwhile, a broadening of the concepts of education and knowledge was advanced. This work was, as McNamee (2005) notes, also situated within the analytical tradition, but it appears that the analytical philosophy of education and its relation to physical education has become unfashionable. I have already mentioned Green’s (1998) work on teacher’s philosophies, and quote him at length here in order to show what this dissatisfaction amounts to. Commencing with an interest in educational philosophy and physical education, Green traces his autobiographical development:

I became increasingly concerned with academic PE philosophy itself; I focused entirely on the philosophical ideas themselves, abstracted from their social context, with the result that people (i.e. PE teachers themselves) ‘disappeared’. […] I had in effect been seeking to understand philosophies as though they were disembodied sets of ideas which could be understood without reference to the social lives of the people who generated a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgement
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Phenomenology and physical education
• 3. Phenomenology and practical knowledge
• 4. The knowledge objects embodied
• 5. Teaching embodied knowledge
• 6. Phenomenological pedagogy and embodied experiences
• 7. Experiencing the body as object
• 8. Inclusion and difference: a phenomenological perspective
• 9. Abilities and capabilities: normative questions
• 10. Concluding comments
• Index