Familiarity and strangement: The ethnographic method in the initial training of physical education students

Abstract

If we want, as the current didactic discussion demands, to further consolidate the figures of didactic thinking from the era of the "Post-Renewal Movement", which manifest themselves in a didactic concept open to experience and critical-emancipatory, then we need to consider how future Physical Education teachers can be qualified for this. This is not an easy process because Physical Education students begin their studies with a concept that is familiar to them, the concept of sport. This sports concept is characterized by the "closure" of content, methodology and an institutional "closure". This essay presents a didactic strategy of how future Physical Education teachers can be stimulated to "open" themselves to new ways of thinking as part of their studies. An ethnographic approach is proposed, in which we intend to learn to question the "familiar", the "self-evident". "Weirdness" methods are suitable for this. We present 5 steps that can lead students to learn to distance themselves from the "familiar", the biographically embedded sports concept. We understand that only when this distancing is successful, according to the hypothesis, will students be able to structure didactic ideas of the "Post-Renewal Movement" era and plan and implement physical education classes open to experience.