Purpose
The purpose of this project is to explore how PE teachers in Denmark can support early primary school pupils’ (6–9 years old) meaningful experiences in physical education (PE).
As part of this aim, the project seeks to contribute to research on Meaningful PE by incorporating an embodied perspective on students’ meaningful experiences and developing pedagogical approaches that address the embodied dimensions of these experiences for early primary school pupils in Denmark.
Prosject Description
Meaningful Physical Education
This project is related to research on students’ meaningful experiences in PE, aiming to guide pedagogical principles that support such experiences. The research perspective primarily addresses students’ experiences in PE through a reflective interpretation of the value an experience holds, which may overlook significant embodied dimensions of these experiences.
To address this gap, the project is grounded in phenomenology and adopts an embodied perspective on students’ experiences in PE.
Phenomenological inspired Action Research
In collaboration with four PE teachers and their early primary school classes, the project employed action research as its method. Over a period of 18 months, we developed, experimented with, and analyzed approaches to support early primary school pupils’ meaningful experiences in PE from an embodied perspective through iterative cycles of workshops with PE teachers and observations of PE classes.
The project draws inspiration from ethnographic fieldwork, using observational descriptions as the primary method of data generation. This was supplemented with informal conversations with both PE teachers and early primary school pupils, as well as semi-structured interviews with teachers and groups of pupils.
Results
The result of the project is an article-based dissertation. The first paper is a phenomenological investigation of the theoretical underpinnings of students’ meaningful experiences, while the subsequent articles will be empirical.
