(Making school from Physical Education. The teaching of corporal practices for the formation of critical, reflexive and emancipated citizenship)

Abstract

This article reflects on some of the results achieved in an investigation that revolved around the ways in which a group of teachers trains Physical Education student-teachers. From a qualitative and ethnographic approach, four teacher trainers’ classes were observed and recorded over a long period of time, which, together with in-depth interviews conducted with each of them, made up the empirical corpus of reference. On this occasion, visibility is given to what the group of teacher trainers delivers when they transmit teaching. It seems that what they distribute when teaching is not only knowledge, but they also add value that institutes novelty. It focuses on the ways in which each one does school, from Physical Education to teaching how to teach. Teachers transmit in class that Physical Education must be taught following the school’s mandatory curriculum, an educational institution that seeks to teach a more critical, reflexive, and emancipatory citizenry. In this sense, the analysed educational proposals link the disciplinary specificity with social institutional responsibility and radicalize them by attempting to widen the space of Physical Education in school, as a subordinate discipline that can be discussed from within by the hegemonic, conservative, and meritocratic that is eternalized there. They also try to disassociate Physical Education from a certain functional utilitarianism and seek that the motor experience has less to do with improving strength, achieving results, producing gendered bodies, or resting from the efforts of modern life and more with ensuring the good life of the subjects.