Learning, playing and children. A way to understand Physical Education

Abstract

As Physical Education teachers, we conduct our daily work in reference to what we understand teaching may be, what we think the result of our work might be, and who the subjects with whom we interact may be and do. These frames of reference are historically constructed, and each of us continues to create and recreate them in our interactions with others, i.e., our social experience. Our teaching practice with young students also influences our capacity to maintain and change the prevailing values about who we think children are, and what they deserve in school and other contexts of institutional corporal practice. This work is an alert to the present risks involved in the fragmentation of childhood images, pointing out to a concept of corporal subject, and rescues the need to preserve the richness and potentiality of the world of the children by appreciating play and creative learning. Physical Education for children could be based on a pleasurable lively teaching without abandoning the focus on content.