Meaningful Physical Education: Philosophy in practice: Experiences from an action-research project

Physical education is an arena for bodily actions which can pave the way for meaningful experiences of existential value. According to Merleau-Ponty (2012), the lived body is the opening towards the world. He argues that understanding one's surroundings depends on the bodily experience of interacting with those surroundings. From this perspective, movement is a reciprocal and meaningful relationship with the world that forms the basis for insight, knowledge, and understanding of new experiences. Thus, the body furnishes the meaningful configuration of the senses. Accordingly, the body is a perceptual point of reference, and humans are body-subjects that encounter and perceive the world through embodied experiences. Therefore, physical education has the potential to qualify the pupils' lives if it is organized around meaningfulness (Fletcher et al., 2021; Kretchmar, 2000).
This perspective is significant in primary schools, as pupils at an early age may develop insights into how and when bodily experiences become meaningful. However, knowledge concerned with the pedagogy of meaningful physical education in primary schools is limited. Against this background, we examine how teachers can promote meaningful experiences in physical education in primary schools. In the action research project More Meaningful Physical Education, researchers, vocational pedagogues and teachers develop different didactics in a joint effort (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005). The project is based on phenomenology and informed by international research into meaningful physical education, including pedagogical principles and themes. However, applying existential philosophy in a practical teaching context has proven challenging. The action research project seeks to enhance interaction between theoretical concepts and pedagogical practice to facilitate changes in perspective and pedagogical practices. In this presentation, we will outline how the concept of 'meaningfulness' manifest differently in practice and support new didactic considerations. This includes the teachers' perception of meaningfulness, first-person perspective and didactics such as narratives, play, and the experimental use of equipment. Furthermore, we will address the possibilities and challenges in processing philosophy-informed practice research.