"Claim vs. Reality"-A German Case Study on Modes and Functions of Sports-Pedagogical Communication.

David Jaitner,Esther Serwe-Pandrick,Swen Koerner

doi:10.3389/fspor.2021.775322

David Jaitner, Esther Serwe-Pandrick + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2021.775322

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Abstract

Academic sports pedagogy continuously assures itself of its disciplinary foundations and determines its position in the structure of modern sciences. While communication is based on differences, the distinction between claim and reality plays a crucial role in sports pedagogy. However, the forms and functions in which the distinction appears have not been more closely investigated in sports pedagogic. This article starts with this in mind, exemplarily focusing on academic sports pedagogy in Germany. While analyzing 212 scientific texts of sports-pedagogical provenance, three central variations of the distinction could be identified, which persist until today and are present in the discipline's central discussion lines: (1) hierarchical demarcation, (2) unsystematic approach, (3) direct synthesis. From a functional point of view, the distinction between claim and reality continuously (re)organizes the relationship of sports pedagogy to other scientific disciplines, educational policy guidelines, and school practice expectations, thus proving to be a supporting pillar of disciplinary identity work.

Highlights

The social evolution of academic disciplines is a story of a continuous differentiation process
With the presented analysis of the function and consequences of the historically ongoing distinction between claim and reality within sports-pedagogical communication, the present study contributes to a systems-theory-based self-understanding of the discipline
As an observation of observations, the systems theory approach offers the possibility of contributing to the reflexive selfunderstanding of sports pedagogy in a systematic, theory-guided way, supporting the regularly self-initiated location determinations of the discipline (e.g., Scherler, 1989; Schierz and Thiele, 1998; Prohl, 2013; Thiele, 2013; Gissel, 2020) in the sense of an increased “control complexity” (Luhmann, 2008, p. 137)