To Örebro University

Physical contact between adults and children in educational setting has been a well debated subject in research over the past 20 years. Although physical contact is often regarded as an important pedagogical tool, it has given rise to an increased awareness amongst sports coaches, physical education and preschool teachers about the possible negative consequences of its use in these settings. The aim of this article is to map the current literature on physical contact inphysical education, sports coaching and the preschool and identify research gaps by means of a scoping review, i.e. after 20 years ofresearch in the field of intergenerational touch what can be said to be known in the field and what possible gaps are there in the research? The research questions are: (i) Which journals, countries, settings, theories and methods are represented in the research field? (ii) Which central themes and knowledge gaps can be identified? The results show that the research field has expanded significantly in the last 20 years, both in terms of the number of published articles, the number of countries represented in the research and the number of journals in which articles on the topic have been published. The central themes identified in the articles included in the review cover the following topics: fears related to physical contact, resistance, cultural differences, the functions and needs of physical contact and the professional identity of sports coaches, physical education and preschool teachers. It is concluded that studies that could lead the research field forward would ideally focus on intersectionality, or how practitioners’ fears of physical contact impact their pedagogical work with students.

This paper provides in-depth knowledge into young girls' learning processes in relation to physical activity, diet/nutrition and body image. Data were generated from interviews with 49 girls (age 13-15) in England. The practical epistemological analysis technique was used to explore young people as both producers and consumers, or prosumers, of content and knowledge. The data illustrate that adolescent girls navigate two interrelated health-related paradoxes within publicly private spaces: (i) skinny fat and (ii) naturally fake. Skinny fat refers to how participation in social media represents a continuous struggle of becoming skinny, but at the same time not trying too hard to become too skinny. Naturally fake refers to how having a 'natural' look is highly valued, but equally, it is acceptable to be 'fake'. Overall, adolescent girls are competent users of social media, who are able to navigate the complexity of the medium and its contents. At the same time, the adolescent girls sometimes found themselves, unintentionally, exposed to risks (e.g. bullying or body dysmorphia), particularly when social media was experienced publicly in a temporal order, connected to the past or present, and without control of potential future effects and impacts. Relevant adults should acknowledge young people's vast competence of life on social media and further empower young people to self-regulate their learning through social media, and in ways that help them to learn from experiences about their health and bodies to shape future actions.

The chapter clarifies how a transactional approach, by providing a specific view of the relationship between bodies and environments, can inform movement learning analysis. By emphasising classical pragmatism’s central ideas of experience (radical empiricism) and learning (the process of inquiry) two transactional principles are identified and then discussed in relation to empirical research. Methodological challenges, such as how to deal with the individual and social as simultaneous and mutual, and how to handle learning as practical and embodied, are described through previous empirical research. In doing so, the chapter explains how movement have been explored in term of what stands fast for participants in movement, which gaps they experience when they move, and what it means to create relations between old and new experiences. Using concepts of stand fast, gap, and relation transactional informed empirical research has gained detailed descriptions of, for example, how pupils navigate spatial-temporal conditions through movement, establish and maintain habits, achieve stability in terms of cooperation, use aesthetic judgements to make sense of movement, accept or refrain from intergenerational touch and gain balance and manoeuvrability in dinghy sailing. Transactional models used in research can, furthermore, be used by practitioners in order to observe, understand and discuss ongoing movement learning in their own or others’ practices. For example, help learners to identify certain gaps, privilege specific standing fast moments and recognize when and which relations fulfil certain purposes. 

Research has pursued salutogenic and narrative approaches to deal with questions about how everyday settings are constitutive for different health practices. Healthy behavior is not a distinguishable action, but a chain of activities, often embedded in other social practices. In this article, we have endeavored to describe such a chain of activities guided by the salutogenic claim of exploring the good living argued by McCuaig and Quennerstedt. We use biographical material written by Karl Ove Knausgaard who has created a life story entitled My Struggle. The novel is selected upon an approach influenced by Brinkmann who stresses that literature can be seen as a qualitative social inquiry in which the novelist is an expert in transforming personal life experiences into common human expressions of life. The study illustrates how research with a broader notion of health can convey experiences of health, thereby complementing (and sometimes challenging) public health evidence. 

Background: While studies of teaching frequently preserve an interest in teacher-pupil encounters that take place in certain spots, this article shows how teachers' can be understood as in-path instructors, which is significant for student-based learning. This complements studies that have mainly focused on teachers instructional work taking place at certain spots.

Purpose: The purpose is to describe how a PE teacher's rhythmic labouring of the diverse settings in the gym creates a learning environment. By examining emplacement (spatial) and empacement (temporal) as important aspects of how learning environments are constituted, this article contributes a framework for studying and analysing a teacher's work from a moving vantage point.

Conclusions: Based on a video ethnographic approach and using a wearable camera attached to the teacher's chest, the analysis of a station-wise lesson show how the teacher frequently covers a large part of the room and creates a web of educational challenges and possibilities. These brief encounters are identified as important tools that support each pupil's rhythm and engagement in the learning activities and maintain the corporate rhythm of a class. Furthermore, by analysing the teacher's temporal and spatial walking technique, which helps the pupils to transit between and accomplish practical exercises, the article highlights how the teacher's ability to support pupils' progression partly builds on a regional knowledge that is cultivated by the array of encounters.

The article draws on body pedagogics and considers that teaching and learning experiences and outcomes are directly related to the different characteristics of movement behaviour. In this article movement behaviour specifically centres on a sloyd (handicraft education) teacher’s walk through the classroom. The analysis illuminate the specific teaching use of the body as a spatial, temporal and situational movement rhythm in the classroom and how teachers and pupils tune into educational discourses by means of different body techniques. A wireless GoPro camera was attached to the teacher’s chest in order to gain detailed view of pupil–teacher–body–material–tool encounters and a specific visual perspective of the sloyd teacher’s walk. During a 2.5 years fieldwork, 25 wood–metal sloyd lessons were observed and recorded (circa 50 h of video). The study is informed by Dewey’s embodied theory of learning and focus the alternation between active and passive phases in the stream of experience. From such Deweyan perspective the rhythm of an activity for organising experience, is fundamental to the creation of intelligent moving habits. The results show the body pedagogic experiences, outcomes and means by highlighting the teacher’s (a) spatial path by describing mutual relationships between the material arrangement of the classroom, the teacher’s bodily movements and the pupils’ participation in the lesson, (b) temporal pace by his ‘flights and perchings’ through the lessons and how he moves from pupil to pupil and assignment to assignment, (c) specific pacts by describing body techniques and situated teacher–pupil encounters that terminate in an agreement about how to proceed.

Chapter 1

 This chapter explores some of the most interesting intersections between the philosophy of John Dewey and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. Practical epistemological analysis (PEA), Situated Epistemic Relations (SER), and Situated Artistic Relations (SAR) examine learning primarily as a sociolinguistic practice. Since it is a sociolinguistic practice, much of both the product and the process of learning are plainly visible to sophisticated methodological observation. This chapter emphasizes the primacy of practice in comprehending linguistic meaning (i.e., forms of life, language-games, meaning as use, etc.), the rejection of a private language, antifoundationalism, and epistemological contextualism, action, and antirepresentationalism. It establishes the philosophical framework for our analytical method developed in Chap. 3  and assumed in Chap. 4 .

Chapter 2

In this chapter, we exposit ideas found in Dewey that are either underdeveloped or entirely unexplored by Wittgenstein. Nonetheless, the Deweyan ideas we consider are generally commensurable with most of Wittgenstein. This chapter discusses such aspects of Dewey’s philosophy as the primacy of the aesthetic encounter, creative action, embodiment and especially nonlinguistic embodied immanent meaning, aesthetically expressive meaning, and how mind and meaning distribute to wherever they occur throughout a world without withins. All of these will contribute to the collection of data and the analytical models developed in Chaps. 3  and 4.

Chapter 3

This chapter introduces the SER model and PEA method as elaborated tools to empirically answer three paradigmatic questions about learning: (a) how learning is connected to continuity and change, (b) what constitutes learning, and (c) what influences learning. The SER model draws on Dewey’s theory of inquiry and the distinctions between anoetic experience, significant and immanent meaning while the first-person perspective and transactionalism is used to provide a primarily transactional understanding of PEA. This framework is then applied to the mobility practice of dinghy sailing and an empirical analysis that explains the process and content of learning the body technique of roller-tacking is employed. In so doing, the SER model provides descriptions and explanations regarding learning processes and products from data collected using PEA.

Chapter 4

While Chap. 3  emphasizes the empirical investigation of learning an embodied langauge-game in a mobility practice, this chapter explores how Dewey’s aesthetics can further our methodology by investigating sculptural expression in a production practice. Against the background of the primacy of the aesthetic encounter, creative action, aesthetic appreciation, and especially the creation of artistically expressive meanings, this chapter develops the analytical model of SAR. The SAR model and the PEA method are used to analyze sculptural expression in school sloyd. Since sloyd is approached as an embodied production practice, the analyses enable explorations of learning as it moves from an instrumental learning of  a body technique to an artistic expression through  a body technique and through  the material worked with. Thus, the connection between the learning of body techniques and artistic expressions and the formation and transformation of the self are investigated.

In this article, we investigate “no touch policies” as a practical teacher concern that includes the body as a location, a source, and a means in educational activity. We argue that to understand issues regarding physical touch within school practice we must conceive it as deeply associated with specific teaching techniques. Thus, the didactical challenge is not found in argumentations about the pro and cons of physical touch, but through analysis of how teachers handle student interaction and teaching intentions.

We consider teaching as a caring profession. Caring, as a practical teacher concern, requires wisdom regarding the right time to use bodily touch and to refrain from such use. This wisdom involves the ability to discern people’s needs, desires, interests, and purposes in particular situations and act appropriately. From a body pedagogical perspective we approach intergenerational touch not only as a discursive and power related question but as an essential tension in the intersection of the; ambiguity attendant to any intentional act such as teaching, the conflict between the ethics of care and the ethics of justice, and finally, the paradox of caring.

We draw on interviews with PE-teachers in Swedish primary, secondary, and upper-secondary schools and analyses of a collection of techniques of bodily touch that are established and practiced with specific pedagogical purposes. The results shows PE teacher’s competence in handling different functions of intergenerational touch in relation to three different techniques of bodily touch; 1) Security touch, which is characterized by intentions to handle the fragile; 2) Denoting touch, which is characterized by intentions to handle learning content; 3) Relational touch, which is characterized by caring intentions. Each of these is of importance for the teachers in carrying out their call to teach and each of these relies on professional assessments whether or not it meets its intended purpose.

Background: Pedagogical research on career is encouraged to not limit sport learning to athletic skills, coaching effectiveness and coach–athlete relationships, but to also focus on learning in a multidimensional sense in the context of an athlete’s individual and social biography. This article examines an elite athlete’s career path as a body pedagogic phenomenon involving processes of self-transformation in relation to practical, social and embodied environments.

Purpose: The purpose is to analyse the career path of the elite footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic by focusing on how different learning environments relate to different embodiments of techniques and skills and how values and norms shape professionalism.

Theoretical frameworks: A combined framework of body pedagogics and John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience is used to understand an elite career path as a learning trajectory involving different self-transformation means. Hence, the elite athlete is viewed as a career climber who creates his own educational pathway and engages in processes of participating, acquiring and becoming.

Data analysis: A practical epistemology analysis (PEA) with a focus on aesthetic judgements is used to analyse the narrative of Zlatan’s career path as it is portrayed in the biography I Am Zlatan: My Story on and Off the Field. One major theme is identified, namely that Zlatan develops from being a dribbler to a striker. Against this background, Zlatan Ibrahomovic’s self-transformation is scrutinised in relation to three different sub-themes (suburb, arena and team) in three different ways (auto-didactic, education and educator) to create distinct and heterogeneous forms of knowledge in support of professional artistry.

Results: The analysis offers an elaborated empirical description of how the means and ends of self-transformation develop reciprocally throughout Zlatan’s elite career and how this relates to practical, social and embodied environments. Examples of body pedagogic outcomes are: (1) different commitments to training, team culture and the coach–athlete relationship (social), (2) that Zlatan uses his dribbling skills more purposefully for scoring goals and satisfying the coach (embodied) and (3) that he is able to win different leagues and titles with different teams (practical).

Recently, there has been increasing pedagogical interest in the qualities and characteristics of movement. This article examines these qualities and characteristics in terms of John Dewey's distinction between abstract, linguistic significant meanings and concrete, embodied imminent meanings. Imminent meanings are comprised of intuitive qualities, feelings, selective attention, and habits. We examine each of these in turn in hopes of better understanding the learning of "body techniques" while illuminating some important aspects of body pedagogics.