Physical Education, Meaningful Movement and Freedom: Towards an Anthropological-Pedagogical Understanding

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59614/acief62026305

Keywords:

Physical Education, Phenomenology, Movement Education, Values, Freedom

Abstract

Social acceleration, contemporary performance demands, and fatigue pose challenges to understanding the relationship between body, movement, and training beyond criteria of efficiency and performance. This article analyzes the possibilities of understanding movement as a formative experience of meaning and freedom through the dialogue between logotherapy, the phenomenology of corporeality, and physical education. Methodologically, it develops a theoretical-conceptual analysis that articulates philosophical and anthropological contributions on acceleration, performance, values, meaning of life, corporality, and freedom with contemporary developments in physical education, particularly physical literacy and Meaningful Physical Education. The analysis allows distinguishing between a personally meaningful experience of movement and an experience of meaningful movement, and introduces the category of bodily possibility as the situated horizon from which the person discovers, expands, or resignifies what he or she can do through his or her body, including limit, learning, alternative action, and the relationship with others. It is concluded that physical education can assume an anthropological-pedagogical function by generating conditions for movement to favor experiences of discovery, relationship, choice and orientation towards possibilities recognized as valuable, without reducing the body to performance or attributing a therapeutic function to the discipline. Likewise, it is proposed to develop qualitative and phenomenological research that allows exploring how these possibilities would be configured in concrete experiences of physical education.

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2026-09-21

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