DAPS, DYKES AND FIVE MILE HIKES: Physical Education in Pupils' Folklore

Lesley Pugsley, Amanda Coffey and Sara Delamont

Abstract

  • Analysing children's and young adult's stories about transfer reveals that physical education (PE), and more generally the body, are central to pupils' anticipations and anxieties about the move to secondary school
  • Fears pupils express about the dangers associated with secondary school PE should be placed within the context of the transition to adulthood.
  • Secondary school PE is an integral part of the status passage to adulthood, during which the recognition of the body as physical, social and sexual is central.
  • A key aspect of the transfer to secondary school is the anticipations and anxieties associated with physical education. Secondary school physical education, and its teachers are part of a rich mythology which precedes and even supercedes both activity and memory.

Conclusions

  • The social place of the body and the ways in which we experience ourselves as bodies (Morgan and Scott, 1993) have become increasingly important in situating the individual in cultural and organizational contexts.
  • Shilling (1993) indeed observes that conditions of high modernity (or post-modernity) have led toward a tendency for the body to become increasingly central to the modern person's sense of self identity.
  • We argue in this paper that children's experiences of school, and more centrally the transition to secondary school, can be seen from a body perspective. That is, schooling and the stories we tell and remember about schooling include explicit and implicit reference to individuals as physical social and sexual bodies.
  • Manifest in physical education in particular, but present elsewhere in school rhetoric, the school serves as an organization involved in the social production of adolescent bodies. This is not limited to a narrow view of the body. Rather it includes how young people feel about their bodies, how they exercise and expose them, and how the physical body is related to the social, sexual, gendered body.

The stories that both boys and girls tell demonstrate the fears of homosexuality, of not being seen to be a real man or woman. Stories warn of the dangers of being watched, or being touched or being the object of inappropriate sexual behaviour or attention. The cross-country run myth, more often told by boys, emphasises achievement and fear of failure. Girls’ 'knicker' stories centrally position fears of psychological and physical violation and of being viewed as object.

  • The stories mark out a period of significant status passage and serve to provide a

benchmark for young people. The transition from primary to secondary school can be viewed in parallel to the life course transition from child-to- adolescent-to-adult. Growing up is not only social and emotional, it is also physical and concerned with bodily things.

Young people are becoming aware of both their own bodies, and other people's bodies (their peers, teachers and so on). The awareness of the physical occurs at precisely the same time as the status move from primary to secondary pupil. Placed in these terms it is perfectly understandable why many of the stories people tell about the move to the big school are peppered with references to and accounts of the body, its social and sexual place.
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School of Social and Administrative Studies

University of Wales, Cardiff

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Cardiff CF1 3AT

Wales, UK.