Language matters

Twice in the last week I have had conversations with people about why they engage in physical activity. The first said fitness and the second said health. These have been stock answers I have heard all through my career. I agree that being fit and healthy are important and could be meaningful, but I don’t buy that they are what underpins an enduring and positive relationship with movement through our lives, especially when we are young. We are conditioned to say it, because others tell us it is so, and then we uncritically repeat it ourselves to others.

Kretchmar (2001) puts health and fitness into a category he calls ‘prudential meanings‘. These are logical reasons why we engage in physical activity. These may work for some people, but not many. He highlights we aren’t purely rational beings who can be told to engage in physically active behaviours for socially valued outcomes, but rather we are relational beings who have “allegiances, loves and history“. Kretchmar challenges those who advocate for the physically active lifestyle to do better at leading people into the inner rooms of meaning within movement. This is where delight can be found. How might we go about doing that in PE? Here language matters.

The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett in her book, How Emotions Are Made, puts forward a theory of constructed emotion. One of the key concepts she explores in her theory, which I think is important for the PE profession to consider, is emotional granularity. Emotional granularity is about deepening our understanding of affective experiences, by enhancing our vocabulary to describe them, which in turn allows us to construct our reality. Movement is rich with affective experiences and therefore so is PE, and we should look to explore this in richer ways.

By looking to expand children’s vocabulary in PE, not just in important technical language related to the subject but also their emotional language, we would be in a better place to explore what underpins an enduring and positive relationship with movement. Justin O’Connor (2018) would call this a pedagogy of meaning making, which are those that “prioritise a valuing of movement across a physical education programme, attempt to position movement as something relevant and embedded in the everyday lives of young people (lifewide), as well as form the residue for later connections and elaborations (lifelong)“. In his study he used reflective writing as a means to develop “rich narratives” of subjective experiences when in engaging in forms of movement. Along with Kretchmar, O’Connor challenges PE to find a more central space in the subject to explore these experiences. For those who wish to do for that for their pupils, a starting point might be with their own experiences first.

A question I’ve asked pre-service PE teachers before is if you could go back in time and repeat any movement experience from your past, whenever you wished, with the feelings you felt then, which one would you pick and why? However before I get them to answer I model, by using O’Connor’s reflective narrative approach: Take some time with your eyes closed to think back to that moment. Recall what it looked like. Recall what it sounded like. Recall what it felt like. Write those words down. Then construct a rich narrative to share.

I look at language I have used to describe a movement experience which underpins my current relationship with walking and climbing mountains and then I compare it to the technical, rational and prudential language we use in the subject. They are worlds apart. The subjective feelings we experience when engaging in movement are very different to the prudential benefits we get from engaging in forms of movement. This distinction is crucial, especially if we are in the business of physically educating children and young people.

“Health” and “fitness” for reasons why we move should be a beginning of inquiry, not the end. It is an opening to be curious, to find out more and dig a little deeper. That requires support through the development of emotional granularity and the construction and sharing of rich narratives to better express subjective experiences. I did this with both with the people I spoke to this week. The one who said they moved for fitness shared an insight about their weightlifting – that when they lifted a weight above their head they felt strong, empowered and could take on the world. The one who said they moved for health shared an insight about their swimming – that the feeling at the end of a hard swim, which they likened to a rave happening inside their head, was the feeling that uplifted them beyond the swim and into the rest of their day.

Health and fitness are important, but they aren’t for many of us the reasons why we might get out of bed to lift weights, swim or engage in other form of movement. Yet the language that describes what does is often missing in PE and beyond. Ask your pupils what it is that gets them out of bed to cycle, to skateboard, to play rugby, to go to the gym, to the dance club or engage in any form of movement in their free time. Get them to dig deep. Support that with an extended emotional language. Then make this language a central part of framing movement, physical activity and sport to them.

In PE our language matters, because the language we use gives the subject its matter.