Girls on fire: alternative movement pedagogies to promote engagement of young women in physical activity

ABSTRACT

For a long time the role and lived experiences of the body in cognition and everyday life, let alone learning, has been problematised making the moving body a site of contestation. When tethered to the movement experiences of young women this contest takes on social justice imperatives destined to problematise power relations. In physical education (PE) this presents disciplinary challenges and invites critical contestations alongside opportunities for rethinking the role, impact, effect and affect of the female body in learning to move and associated pedagogies that might facilitate ‘embodied learning’. This paper seeks to extend recent discussions around ‘embodied learning’ and ‘valuing movement’ in PE by exploring the educative potential of ‘in’ movement experiences of a group of young women (n = 39) who attended one of three fire-fighting camps for girls in North America. By using ethnographic methods the paper explores the sensory nature of ‘embodied learning’ in movement moments at the camps in order to inform ‘embodied pedagogies’ with the potential to re-inspire and re-engage young women in PE. Findings suggest that young women conceive of their bodies as a conscious collective organism that simultaneously pays cognitive, physical, and social attention to its environment and the other material and non-material objects in it. This attentiveness occurs by thinking, feeling, sensing and deriving pleasure ‘in’ movement with blurred boundaries between mind-body. In highlighting what ‘embodied learning’ for young women might feel like the paper offers ideas for ‘embodied pedagogies’ and encourages PE practitioners to look outside classrooms for pedagogical inspiration.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• physical education (PE)
• embodied learning
• embodied pedagogies
• engagement
• physical education teacher education (PETE)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Karen Lambert http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7406-4013

Notes

1 Participant, names are pseudonyms; actual camp names are used.

2 I’m neither fire-fighter nor American. I became involved via Station Officer Bronnie Mackintosh of Fire & Rescue New South Wales whom I supported in a Churchill Fellowship application exploring international FES diversity and inclusion strategies. The camps were one strategy.

3 ‘A shipping container set on fire to a temperature that makes exposed surfaces emit flammable gases and simultaneously auto-ignite – you can see the fire creep and move’ (Dan, participant).

4 Whilst Foucault (1984) reads the ancient Greco-Roman instruction ‘take care of yourself’ as ‘know yourself’ (which could be construed as establishing who one is), he also provides a textual analysis which posits such ‘knowing’ more as aesthetic, communal, and nurturing.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the following Monash University small grants: Faculty of Education, Engagement Grant; Monash Education Academy Travel grant; Monash Education Academy Higher Education Research scholarship grant.