Physical education and the art of teaching: transformative learning and teaching in physical education and sports pedagogy

ABSTRACT

The paper is the José María Cagigal Scholar Lecture presented at the AIESEP World Congress in Edinburgh 2018. In the paper I argue that the only real sustainable aim for physical education is more physical education, where different ways of being in the world as some-body are both possible and encouraged. To reach this aim, a focus on the art of teaching is vital as a way of critically scrutinising and designing transformative and genuinely pluralistic physical education practices. In order to do this I discuss education as being educative, a certain view of the child as well as teaching as a continuous act of making judgements about the why(s), what(s) and how(s) of education, normative judgements about desirable change. The take home messages involves: (i) reclaiming a certain view of the child in education, (ii) reclaiming the open-endedness of physical education, and (iii) reclaiming the art of teaching in physical education, which is about being educative and making judgements about what to bring to the educational situation. We then must start with the purpose of education – the why – before deciding on the what and how.

KEYWORDS:

• education
• didaktik
• teaching
• learning
• children

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 AIESEP - Association Internationale des Écoles Supérieures d’Éducation Physique (International Association for Physical Education in Higher Education).

2 According to Cranton and Taylor (2012), this is achieved through a process of critically exploring and questioning assumptions that we take for granted and also involves the possibility of changing oppressive, unfair or unsustainable practices (O’Sullivan, Morrell, & O’Connor, 2002). This is a form of transformative learning bell hooks (1994) have called transgressive.

3 I know that many people from English speaking countries find the didaktik concept strange and perhaps rather related to being didactic and offering little beyond ‘pedagogy’. However, in continental Europe and the Nordic countries the concept stands for an important research tradition with an interest in theories and practices of teaching and learning.