"Experience-oriented athletics" starts in the summer semester 2011

Within school sport, athletics is experiencing an identity crisis.

The diverse natural spaces for children to exercise largely no longer exist today!

In addition, competitive sport has taken on a dominant leading role within school athletics as a whole. What is critical here is the unreflected proximity to the records and medals of high-performance sport. The differences in performance have become too great and some top-class sporting tendencies are too problematic.

If school sport wants to make an independent and irreplaceable contribution to fulfilling the holistic educational mission, then it must react to these changes in sport culture. This is particularly true against the backdrop of an environment that offers children and young people fewer and fewer natural opportunities for physical activity.

In the future, sports teacher training must be geared towards this by adopting a multi-perspective approach to teaching: it is about experiencing, thematizing and implementing the different meanings of athletics with a focus on physical experience, movement design, health and performance.

University education will certainly only be able to overcome these problems if, in addition to teaching skills, it increasingly focuses on topics such as innovation, experimentation and movement workshops.

This problem gave rise to the guiding idea for a teaching innovation project with the objective of developing and evaluating a training concept for experience-oriented athletics.

The project has been funded by the Forum Pro Lehre of the University of Kassel since 2010.

Under the direction of Dr. Günter Böttcher, planning and preparations began in the summer semester of 2010 and initial teaching concepts were tested and evaluated.

In the summer semester 2011, the respective courses will be scientifically monitored.

In the compulsory elective module and in the course 'Running, jumping, throwing in elementary school', we want to leave 'teaching in the ivory tower', i.e. practise and evaluate the teaching models.

Poster of the project