Unpacking physically active learning in education: a movement didaktikk approach in teaching?

ABSTRACT

This paper explores teachers’ educational values and how they shape their judgements about physically active learning (PAL). Twenty one teachers from four primary schools in Norway participated in focus groups. By conceptualising PAL as a didaktikk approach, the findings indicated that teachers engaged with PAL in a way that reflected their professional identity and previous experiences with the curriculum. Teachers valued PAL as a way of getting to know pupils in educational situations that were different from those when sedentary. These insights illustrate how PAL, as a didaktikk approach to teaching, can shift teachers’ perceptions of pupils’ knowledge, learning, and identity formation in ways that reflect the wider purposes of education. The paper gives support to a classroom discourse that moves beyond the traditional, sedentary one-way transfer of knowledge towards a more collaborative effort for pupils’ development.

KEYWORDS:

• Physically active learning
• didaktikk
• educational values
• teaching methods
• movement integration
• school-based physical activity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Erasmus+ funded project Activate Your Class (ACTivate) provided the context for the current paper. ACTivate is a Strategic Partnership in Higher Education project (2019-2022), with a six-nation partnership, thereby providing the ideal opportunity to collect data from a range of teachers with experience of using PAL.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills: [Grant Number 2019-1-NO01-KA203-060324]. The authors of this manuscript were supported and funded by the European Union ERASMUS+Strategic Partnership Fund as part of the Activating Classroom Teachers (ACTivate) project. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation, nor in the preparation of the manuscript.