Embodied movement knowledge in fitness and exercise education

Pirkko Markula

pp. 61-76

in: Liora Bresler (ed), Knowing bodies, moving minds, Berlin, Springer, 2004

Abstract

As educators, we are intimately engaged with knowledge. When we teach., we deliver knowledge about the usual subjects in curriculum but also knowledge on our behavior and bodies or more broadly, knowledge on how to be a reasonable human being. We hope, then, that our students will let such knowledge guide them, not only through school, but also through the rest of their lives. Some of this education is not necessarily explicit and if asked, we might not be able to pin point the origin of our knowledge. It might a book, a television program or a magazine article, in fact, any type of media that today so effectively distribute knowledge. In this chapter, I focus on a type of bodily knowledge, fitness, that is not necessarily part of the school curriculum, "the official knowledge," but seems to shape our lives and the lives of our students beyond the school environment.