An investigation of how physical literacy is enacted in primary physical education

Abstract

This research investigated how students are becoming teachers of primary school (ages 5-11) physical education, using a physical literacy approach (Whitehead, 2010). Primarily methodological, the purpose was to disrupt how to investigate this topic since research highlights that the philosophy underpinning PL makes the concept difficult to operationalize (Shearer et al., 2018). Physical education settings are inherently lively, and I retain this in the analytic insights from what I call my ‘methodological meshwork’ (Law, 2004; Ingold, 2006). Informed by phenomenology, posthumanism and sociomaterialism, data gathering included observations, interviews with artefacts, with humans, tweets, as part of the methodological meshwork. Diagrammatic presentations accompany written text, whilst also doing work in themselves (Decuypere and Simons, 2016). I followed the actors (Adams and Thompson, 2016), thus entered the middle of data, such as lesson plan or physical education equipment. Onto-epistemological entanglements (Barad, 2007) are presented in an interweaving format. Thus, theory is discussed alongside the empirical and shows that a physical literacy informed approach to physical education is evident in multiple places-spaces. Broader issues are raised about methodological assumptions that inform investigations of physical literacy and practice generally. It is hoped these may be relevant to a wider professional audience as well as those in physical and teacher education.