Exergames ‘as a teacher’ of movement education: exploring knowing in moving when playing dance games in physical education

Background: A fundamental dimension of school physical education (PE) is arguably movement and movement activities. However, there is a lack of discussion in the context of PE regarding what can be called the capability to move in terms of coordinative abilities, body consciousness and educing bodily senses.Purpose: This article explores and articulates what there is to know, from the mover's perspective, when knowing how to move in specific ways when playing exergames (dance games). Taking different ways of moving as expressing different ways of knowing as a point of departure, the following questions are the focus of this article: (i) How do students move when imitating movements in a dance game, and what different ways of knowing the movements can be described in the student group? (ii) What aspects of the movements are discerned simultaneously through the different ways of knowing the movements? (iii) What aspects seem critical for the students to discern and experience in order to know the movements in as complex a way as possible?Design and analysis: The theoretical point of departure concerns an epistemological perspective on the capability to move as knowing how with no distinction between physical and mental skills, and also knowing as experiencing aspects of something to know. The data in this study comprise video recordings of students playing Nintendo Wii dance games in PE lessons in a compulsory school (for children aged between 7 and 16 years) in a small Swedish town. There were three PE lessons with four different stations, of which one was Nintendo Wii dance games (Just Dance 1 and 2). In total, the videoed material covers three 60-minute PE lessons, recorded during the autumn of 2012 and in which just over twenty students participated. In the study, we have used video observation as a data collection method. Jordan and Henderson maintain that video observation removes the gap between ‘what people say they do and what they, in fact, do’ (51). To conduct a systematic and thorough analysis of how the students experienced the avatar's movements, we looked for moments where all the students and the avatar could be simultaneously observed. Two video sequences were chosen, showing four students imitating two distinct and defined movements which constituted the basis for a phenomenographic analysis.Conclusion: The result of the phenomenographic analysis shows different ways of knowing the movements as well as what aspects are discerned and experienced simultaneously by the students. In other words, these aspects also describe knowing in terms of discerning, discriminating and differentiating aspects of ways of moving. By examining a certain exergame's role ‘as a teacher,' we have emphasized the capability to move, from the mover's perspective, as an intrinsic educational goal of PE while highlighting the need for systematically planning movement education.