Since March 2020, most physical education (PE) teachers in Scandinavia have faced the challenges of remote teaching. Homeschooling has perhaps been particularly challenging for PE teachers compared to other teachers, given the essential role of bodily contact, interaction, social negotiations, game playing and shared expressions in PE (Varea and González-Calvo, 2020).
Having worked with covid conditions for a year now, we trust that teachers have worked out various solutions that, we hope, are relevant and meaningful for the students. At the same time, both from our personal experiences and early research findings (Mercier et al. 2021), it appears that PE teachers have largely provided students with physical activity and fitness training during the pandemic.
In this short text, we want to share an idea for a concrete alternative to fitness exercises, which, although important, is only one part of the PE curriculum. It springs from a pedagogical model we outlined in a double article from 2018, which focuses on practising. Practising, which in German is üben and in the Scandinavian languages øve/öva, is, briefly put, a form of activity in which you seek to improve some part of yourself through repeated efforts.
Recently, one of our colleagues, Dillon Landi, made us aware that this practising model is particularly relevant for teaching during the pandemic. While we did not have remote teaching in mind when we outlined the model, we realise now that it could be a relevant way of coping with the current situation. It can, we believe, guide how teachers can facilitate movement activities for students at home that are both meaningful and educationally relevant.
In the following, we will describe what remote teaching with a focus on practising might look like. We hope it can inspire teaching methods that add to the list of pedagogical options available for teachers during the pandemic.
Malmö University , 2021. article id May 21