Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

This thesis deals with questions about the built environment in relation to the education of the body. The purpose of the thesis is to illustrate and discuss prerequisites for physical literacy and education in school gymnasiums.

The aim of the study was to examine how discourses about body and body movement are related to questions about knowledge and education within physical education in school (PE). Using discourse analysis I explore how discursive practices such as rooms and talk produce, reproduce and change discourses about body, movement and knowledge. The discursive practices that I have focused on are the designing of rooms for physical education as well as PE teachers’ ways of expressing themselves regarding these kinds of rooms. The empirical material that has been analyzed consists of rooms used for physical education, interviews with PE teachers and text material from a journal for PE teachers.

The results of the analysis suggest that some discourses can be described as strong and/or dominant and some as weaker. One example is the dominant discourse about body movement as competition and performance. Another example is the strong, although not dominant discourse about body movement as practice within which the body is (re)produced as a learning body. A third one is the weak discourse about movement as experiencing one’s body.

One of the conclusions of the study is that a more open design of rooms for physical education would enhance the possibilities for the practice discourse and the experience discourse to grow stronger, which would be desirable considering the emphasis on learning and positive experiences of body movement in the syllabus for PE. Another conclusion is that if the practice discourse would be more clearly materialized in the gymnasiums, it could mean that other discursive practices too such as teachers’ and pupils’ speech acts and body acts within PE could change more easily.