“Reflective practice” in physical education

Abstract

Physical education (PE) is rooted in a historically evolved subject culture that goes largely unquestioned in everyday teaching and learning. It is characterized by a normative primacy of movement practices, placing it in a precarious relationship with the intellectual practices required by sports pedagogy and school curricula. The present case study is based on praxeological classroom research and examines how didactic interferences between intellectual reserves and movement reserves are represented in the principle of “reflective practice” in PE. To reconstruct key orientations toward the interfering practices of teaching and learning that guide teachers’ actions, we conducted six expert interviews in a PE development project in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) and analyzed the interview data based on the coding procedure of grounded theory. The reconstructed orientations guiding PE teachers’ actions can be described according to three key dimensions: On the temporal level, one key interference is the scarcity of time for movement. On the spatial level, the space of the gymnasium often stands in the way of establishing and routinizing intellectual practices. On the media level, the use of written forms in PE classes appears to be regarded as a requirement that is imposed upon teachers and that should be kept to a minimum. The results are particularly relevant to research on the institutional professionalization of PE teachers.