Sports Teaching, Traditional Games, and Understanding in Physical Education: A Tale of Two Stories

Unlike Dickens’s novel, this is not a tale of light and darkness, order and chaos, good and evil…It is, though, a story worth to be told about two standpoints about games and sports, teaching and research, physical education simply put, that have pursued similar interests on parallel tracks for too long, despite their apparent closeness and shared cultural grounds. The objective of this conceptual analysis is to try and reconcile two perspectives, namely motor praxeology and teaching games for understanding (TGfU), born in the last third of the XX century in France and England with the intention to rethink the foundations of physical education (PE) and sports teaching. Pierre Parlebas, from the French side of the English Channel, claimed in 1967 that sports make part of PE, that team sports must be considered from a specific, sociomotor point of view, and that motor conducts (i.e., the significative organisation of motor behaviour), not sports techniques, are the corner-stone of PE and sports coaching. In the early 1980s, from the English side of La Manche, Almond, Thorpe, and Bunker made a plea for a shift in the way to teach games (sporting collective duels mostly), deeply concerned by the negative impact of the traditional technics-centred approach on motivation, competence and attained level of the least able in school situations. Our conclusion is that TGfU, or game-based approaches to sports coaching and teaching, can take great advantage of the motor-praxeological rationale for three reasons: firstly, because concepts like understanding, game sense and action principles are operatively, semiotically linked to the reality of the playing process; secondly, because the inner structures of the games that constrain players and guide their motor conducts, permit to integrate games in the general system of sporting games, no matter their level of institutionalisation; finally, because any motor intervention process is better thought of and more systematically developed upon the operational concepts of internal logic and expected practical effects of game playing. This time, Paris could be the place to go to in search of solutions, not the city to run away from in hope of consolation.

The Praxiological Adventure. Science, Action and Physical Education

A Book Review on La Aventura Praxiológica. Ciencia, Acción y Educación Física Pierre Parlebas (Seville: Junta de Andalucía), 2017, 496 pages, ISBN: 978-84-89225-74-9 In 1959 Pierre Parlebas, just graduated from the Normal Higher School of Physical Education (ENSEP) in Paris, published his first, visionary article in response to an invitation from one of his former teachers: Éducation physique et éducation philosophique (Parlebas, 1959). In 1986 he successfully applied for the position of Professor in the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of La Sorbonne, after receiving a State Doctorate in the same university, 2 years earlier, thanks to a piece of research in three volumes that put traditional sporting games in the front line of physical education and social sciences: Psychologie sociale et théorie des jeux: étude de certains jeux sportifs (Parlebas, 1985). In between these two biographical milestones, Parlebas built up an outstanding theory of human motricity, games and sports, and physical education whose inception and development are now fully accessible to Spanish readers thanks to this work: La aventura praxiológica. Ciencia, acción y educación física (The praxeological challenge. Science, action, and physical education). This volume of 496 pages, published thanks to the support of The Andalusian Regional Government, contains 32 articles selected and translated by the editor Raúl Martínez-Santos (Martínez-Santos, 2017), who groups them chronologically and thematically in seven parts. As he explains in a sound introduction in which Parlebas’ thought and trajectory are wisely exposed and explored: “There is a chance that Parlebas be more famous that truly known, despite his sports classification is most popular and many of his concepts (i.e., motor conduct, motor situation, internal logic, sports games, etc.) already make part of the terminology of so many scholars and practitioners” (Parlebas, 2017)..