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"Movement culture, science and education: Making out a case for the playing body-subject" - Ejgil Jespersen

August 2006 – January 2009

The Department of Physical Education, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, is mainly responsible for professional studies and research concerning PE teacher education, adapted PE educator education and outdoor educator education. Most of the movement activities in these educational settings do not have an educational but a wider cultural origin, i.e. play and games, whereas others are an outgrowth of biosciences dealing with body problem-solving, i.e. planned physical exercises. The subject-term ‘Physical Education’ (PE) is in itself an expression of a bipartite disciplinary strategy in the area, but obviously without paying explicit attention to the cultural practices of movement.

 

Current efforts to associate physical education with health education rather than aesthetics and moral education are reinforcing the tendency to praise life and more precisely ‘bare biological life’ as the ultimate point of reference. An educational approach based upon a zoological imperative may give preferential treatment to sheer ‘physical activity’ reflecting what Arendt (1958) calls the ‘victory of the animal laborans’ and a certain interpretation of the good, namely an ideal of well-being and happiness.

 

In such a physical society we seem to live permanently under the threat of social exclusion if not death, being permanently put in the position of problem-solvers through movement for the sake of a restricted albeit totalitarian life-concept, without the right of appeal. To imagine the possibility of such an appeal requires us to recover our sense of the playing body-subject in educational movement settings.

 

Making out a case for the body-subject in terms of play, movement and learning in educational studies and practices of science and physical education.

 

Re-interpreting selected Norwegian educational studies and practices of science and physical education from a social existential-phenomenological point of view.

 

Preliminary publication
Ejgil Jespersen: Body, Movement and Technology. In Scientific Yearbook. Studies of Sport and Physical Education, published by Josef Pilsudski University of Physical Education in Warsaw (in press).