Body and School: teaching physical education as a democratic experience

Abstract

The recovery of the body is a discussion that the history of philosophy has addressed since the early twentieth century. The impact of this discussion in the school and teaching of physical education will be tackled from an affirmative biopolitical approach, which allows the co-construction of practices that strengthen democratic coexistence in the school institution. The first section deals with relational democracy as an expression of the body materiality, from its individual and collective condition. The second section discusses the invisibilization of the body in the school, based on the school practices implemented in a market society. The third section presents some tensions experienced by physical education students during the civil-military dictatorship from their experiences of construction of teaching-learning practices that are positioned from the recovery of the individual and collective body, whose praxis is exposed as political resistance to the professional training of that time. In conclusion, the implications of a teaching-learning of physical education are exposed from a relational democracy that subverts, from its practice, making docile bodies and the political-institutional demands of the school.