(Re)Telling lived experiences in different tales: a potential pathway in working towards an inclusive PE

Abstract

Existing research reveals that there are large discrepancies between the rhetoric of inclusive practice and what actually takes place in physical education (PE) lessons. PE appears to be a conservative subject, where little has changed over the years, despite increased diversity in schools and new modes of movement in society at large.  In this article, I will argue that there is a need for ‘different’ ways of knowing, to gain knowledge about the complexity of creating an inclusive PE. My critical interpretive PhD project will serve as a starting point for arguing how narratives can be well suited to help illuminate individual experiences located within broader social and cultural structures. By engaging in self-biographical story sharing from my position as a neophyte researcher, I will highlight some of the theoretical and methodological tensions that I have encountered in my narrative inquiry of embodied experience. Narratives provide insight into the multiple realities of inclusion and/or exclusion, disability and PE. Emancipatory educational storysharing may have the potential to revisit and challenge well-worn, taken for granted realities about these phenomena and facilitate professional self-reflection. For illustrative purposes, I will share some narratives from young disabled people’s experiences in PE lessons, in different narrative forms: an ethnographic fiction and a poetic transcription. In addition to contributing cognitive ways of knowing, narratives recognize the role emotions play in how we come to understand our world. Different ways of retelling stories, if well done, may evoke feelings and create new understandings of inclusion, disability and PE. Narrative ways of knowing could therefore contribute to bringing us further in working towards more inclusive education and create, at least, modest change.

Keywords:

• Narrative
• Critical-interpretive research
• Physical education
• Inclusion
• Disability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.