Experiencing being objectified? A critical investigation of basic pedagogical categories in digital health education

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the role digital health education can play in physical education. We argue that the use of digital media and technologies has been accompanied by fundamental changes in basic sports pedagogical categories such as body, movement and experience. In doing so, we advance the thesis that increasing digitalisation offers multi-layered and partly paradoxical opportunities and risks for health education, which have not yet been sufficiently discussed from a sports pedagogical perspective in a digitalised world. To develop a deeper understanding of these changes, we aim to analyse the mechanisms, opportunities and challenges created by digital health education in physical education, with a focus on the use of tools such as wearables. We draw on a Bildung-oriented perspective rooted in German-speaking pedagogy. With this in mind, we first look at the possibilities and limits for digital health education in physical education at the surface level, before we offer a deeper investigation of body, movement and experience in a digitalised world. This leads us to critical reflection at a structural level. Supposedly clear distinctions between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’, and ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’, are increasingly untenable. On the one hand, the use of digital technologies can convey reductionist images of humankind and a narrow understanding of education. On the other hand, students can experience differences between supposedly objective and subjective views of their bodies and their movement behaviour using digital technologies. This can lead to Bildung processes in which the relationship between oneself and the world is questioned, which in a sense constitutes a form of Bildung-oriented digital health education.