🇩🇰 Summary in Danish
Malene Hannibal Schubart, Camilla Ottsen & Charlotte Svendler Nielsen
Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, University of Copenhagen
This article presents a study of what it can mean to young people when an embodied perspective on education in upper secondary school is strengthened, and how a space for this can be created within the subject area of Physical Education. During lessons focused on developing a holistic movement practice which we call Basic Bodily Awareness we studied students’ experiences of this teaching practice. In the article excerpts from empirical material gathered in the form of ’lived experience descriptions’ and ’close observations’ is presented. The material is interpreted by including both an embodied and a movement phenomenological perspective using concepts described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and a sociological perspective using concepts from Hartmut Rosa.
Based on the students’ descriptions we find answers to what it can mean to establish a space in the Upper Secondary School education that gives room for slowness and embodied experiences through a holistic movement practice. By turning ‘in’ to the body the students can experience what Sheets-Johnstone describes as I can, which means that the students discover and develop their potential. By building the students’ repertoire of I can, their sense of agency, in the sense that through bodily experiences they build a sense of themselves as capable individuals, can also be strengthened. We also see that the activities help to create a space and a place in the everyday lives of the students in which they sense and develop their skills to experience resonance as a relational mode in which subject and world mutually touch and transform each other as a counterpart to the accelerated society in which they live.
By trying how Basic Bodily Awareness could work as part of Physical Education we have focused on how this subject area as the context could contribute to raise awareness about the importance of focusing on the embodied dimension of education in young people’s lives The insights that this project have provided also underline the need for further research about how to approach the education and well-being of young people by including a more holistic perspective.
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MALENE HANNIBAL SCHUBART has a master’s degree in Humanities and Social Sport Sciences from the University of Copenhagen. Malene has a yoga teacher certification by Yoga Alliance. She has thorough knowledge of young people’s wellbeing from a volunteer job as a youth counselor at Headspace Denmark.
CAMILLA OTTSEN has a bachelor’s degree from University College Copenhagen in Psychomotor Therapy and a master’s degree in Humanities and Social Sport Sciences from University of Copenhagen. Camilla works with 18- to 25-year-old young people in social psychiatry programmes in the Copenhagen municipality.
CHARLOTTE SVENDLER NIELSEN, PhD in Educational Studies of Dance and Movement, is an Associate Professor and Head of Studies for two master programs at the Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, University of Copenhagen. She is currently Chair of the European Network of Observatories in the Field of Arts and Cultural Education (ENO), an organisation in official partnership with UNESCO. Her research focuses on dance education, arts integration, and interculturality in an embodied perspective. She is co-editor of the Routledge book series Dance, Young People and Change.
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