The senses/sensing relationship in physical literacy: generating a worldly (re)enchantment for physical education

ABSTRACT

In this article, we entangle Margaret Whitehead’s physical literacy (PL) that promotes intrinsically derived movement ethics in Physical Education (PE), with Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy of speculative empiricism to promote relationally derived movement practices in PE. Troubling neoliberal governance that positions the individual in linear trajectories of autonomous, independent, individualized, and self-determined agency, our goal in this article is to conceptualize PL within ideas of relational agency that is inherent in moment-to-moment movement encounters. We take up cartographic and diffractive storytelling in poems interspersed throughout the text, to show how we, as a researcher/teacher in PE, (re)emerged as humans-in relation with the world through the senses/sensing relationship enacting continual, dynamic, and reiterative becoming-withs. As bodies and movement are no longer seen as separate and detached, questions change from definitions of PL, or how to ‘obtain’ PL, to a focus on how movement does relationships. This has vast implications for PL, because through affective, aesthetic, sensory, and nonrational ways of moving, PL is actualized in ways that are contextualised, emplaced, and specific to the child’s (micro) politics of location. In turn, this provides the conditions of possibility for a worldly (re)enchantment in PE.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical education
• physical literacy
• aesthetics
• senses/sensing relationship
• response-ability
• Margaret Whitehead
• Alfred North Whitehead
• neoliberalism
• relational entanglements
• worldly (Re)enchantment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 At the time of writing, Author 1 is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Saskatchewan and Author 2 is a teacher of Physical Education with Saskatoon Public Schools.

2 Neoliberalism relates to the discourses and practices associated with commodification and capital accumulation within market-based social relations, in which individualization of responsibility to make appropriate choices is prioritized (Macdonald, 2014).

3 To show ourselves as entangled/differentiated in these poems, our unique narratives are denoted through different fonts.

4 Whitehead (2010).

5 As we seek to articulate in this article, differences and distinctions matter. We therefore pay attention to specificity and avoid conflating terms in following Massumi’s (2002, 2015) descriptions of affect, feeling, and emotion. Affect is an unconscious and pre-personal body intensity, while feelings and emotions are conscious and attributed to an already constituted subject (Shaviro, 2007). While this distinction was relevant to A.N. Whitehead, he used these terms interchangeably; although Whitehead’s ‘feeling’ coincides with Massumi’s ‘affect’ acting as a lure to animate the impetus of becomings (Mazzei, 2021). For Massumi, ‘emotion’ rises out from primordial feelings (Shaviro, 2007).

6 This bifurcation is also relevant to the sociology of childhood in the PE context, in which the either/or binary is maintained between a child’s naturalness towards a fixed end of maturation and a child’s socialisation towards becoming a competent member of society (Quennerstedt, 2019).

7 Haraway (2016).

8 Rooney, 2019.

9 Land & Danis, 2016.

10 Land & Vidotto, 2021, p. 615.