Coming to know about the body in Human Movement Studies programmes

Abstract

This paper explores how a group of undergraduate Human Movement Studies (HMS) students learnt to know about the body during their four-year academic programme at an Australian university. When students begin an undergraduate programme in HMS they bring with them particular constructions, ideas and beliefs about their own bodies and about the body in general. Those ideas and beliefs are often challenged, disrupted or reinforced according to discourses and practices to which students are exposed and which they experience throughout their programme of study. The courses that these students take in their in HMS degree programme present to them different perspectives about health and the body. Some perspectives take the status of taken-for-granted truths and others are dismissed or ignored. Taking a Foucauldian perspective, this paper explores the dominant discourses and practices to which this group of students was exposed during their four years of academic formation, and the influences that this exposure might have upon their construction of the body and their formation as pre-service Health and Physical Education (HPE) teachers. The participants in this study were 14 students, 11 females and 3 males, aged between 18 and 26 at the time of the first interview. The data used for this paper were taken from a larger study and were analysed using a content analysis approach. Results suggest that some students may be heavily influenced by certain practices and discourses during their programme of studies, and that they embody dominant discourses of health. Furthermore, a possible change of thinking may occur across their academic programme, as a consequence of their engagement with a few alternative discourses presented during their academic programme, disrupting some of their previous beliefs and knowledge.