Running: A way to increase body awareness in secondary school physical education

Abstract

Research suggests that young people’s understanding of how their bodies move in space and time is deteriorating. The aim of this study was to examine how students learn to analyse sensations and feelings while running. In total, 94 students aged 16–19 years and seven physical education (PE) teachers from two different secondary schools participated in the study. Five different PE lessons were designed, conducted and analysed based on the tenets of variation theory. Two questions guided the investigation: (a) What aspects of the running movement do students discern as critical for increased awareness of body posture in running? (b) In what way do lesson designs and teaching techniques affect students’ identification of critical aspects of body posture in running? The paper provides examples of how embodied exploration of body awareness can be used as an educational means to enhance movement capabilities. Two themes are identified and described: tentative critical aspects of body posture for running, and differences in students’ ways of developing movement capability. The paper concludes with a summary of the main results along with reflections on issues that require further attention.

Learning in the educational landscapes of juggling, unicycling, and dancing

“…Durden-Myers, Green, and Whitehead 2018; Roberts, Newcombe, and Davids 2019; Renshaw and Chow 2019;Thorburn and Stolz 2017). Nor did we investigate the effects of any model or principles as was done by Gray and Sproule (2011) and Bergentoft (2018). Rather, we have suggested a way of approaching learning, designed learning sequences, and then chose three learners whose progress was apparent in order to analyze their learning processes.…”

“…These studies include guidelines for promoting physical literacy (Durden-Myers, Green, and Whitehead 2018;Roberts, Newcombe, and Davids 2019); principles for designing teaching by using the nonlinear pedagogy or constraints-led approach (Chow 2013;Renshaw and Chow 2019); principles for enhancing embodied learning based on phenomenology and existentialism (Thorburn and Stolz 2017); guidelines for using phenomenography and the variation theory of learning (Nyberg and Carlgren 2015); and principles for implementing a philosophically-informed kind of 'practising' (Barker et al 2018). Researchers have also investigated the effects of using different theories and models on movement learning (Gray and Sproule 2011;Bergentoft 2018;Nyberg 2018), whereas some scholars have compared different models (see e.g. Bozkurt 2018;Hooyman, Wulf, and Lewthwaite 2014).…”

“…Chow (2013), for example, asserted that 'the over emphasis on comparing one teaching approach against another has blinded researchers from examining more meaningful information about the processes present in these different approaches ' (479). Studies that have taken learners' experiences into account (Bergentoft 2018;Nyberg and Carlgren 2015;Nyberg 2015;Rönnqvist et al 2019) have tended to overlook what learners actually 'do,' or the actions that they take, to develop movement capability (see e.g. Lindgren and Barker (2019) and Barker, Nyberg, and Larsson (2020) for exceptions).…”

‘Feeling better’: embodied self-knowledge as an aspect of movement capability

“…However, our approach in this article differs from (or stated more positively: adds to) the movement capability literature in the sense that we are primarily concerned with the students' own experiences of moving and being in movement rather than with learning and perfecting specific movements. Movement capability researchers are interested in how students' embodied experiences, feelings and sensations are important for learning to move in different ways, but these ways of movement are nevertheless connected to specific activities and practices, such as running (Bergentoft 2018), pole vaulting (Nyberg 2014b), juggling (Nyberg, Barker, and Larsson 2020), house hopping (Nyberg and Carlgren 2015) and so on.…”

“…The basic tenets and empirical findings from the literature on movement capability (e.g. Bergentoft 2018;Nyberg 2014aNyberg , 2014bNyberg and Carlgren 2015) is thoroughly covered elsewhere in this special issue. For the purpose of this article, there are nevertheless some aspects of the movement capability literature that we will highlight.…”