Physical Education and Aesthetic-Ethical Education. Comprehensive analysis based on the contribution of teachers and researchers in the fields of aesthetics, ethics, sport sciences and physical education.

Abstract

The research in the fields of sport's aesthetics and ethics has been shown a significant growth in the last decades, being the ethics of sports, reflected on the significant number of scientific and academic publications in this field, the main subject of concern between philosophers of sport. Traditionally studied separately, it has not been yet explored enough how aesthetics and ethics relate to each other in sports, and even less its concrete repercussions in a pedagogical approach to sports, especially in physical education. The premise that education through sports in general, and physical education in particular, are important elements in the global education of children and young people is theoretical and generally accepted. Considering aspects of this subject that go far beyond its more functional and hygienist criteria, the purpose of this work is to understand the potentialities of physical education as a vehicle for the development of aesthetic-ethical education in students. We started with an analysis of the existing literature in the context of aesthetics in general, aesthetics of sport, ethics in general and ethics of sport, in order to increase the knowledge regarding the state-of-the-art in these domains opening the way for the consideration of an aesthetic-ethics of sports and physical education. The qualitative research, with a hermeneutic and phenomenological approach, assumed a descriptive and exploratory character, due to the conducting of nineteen semi-structured interviews with experienced teachers and researchers from the fields of aesthetics, ethics, sports sciences and physical education. These interviews were submitted to a thematic analysis and discussion of its content, in which we could conclude that sport has a relevant axiological role in the education of students' sensibility, for both aesthetic and ethical values. It also allowed us to conclude that a relevant part of the physical education content with aesthetic potential has a strong ethical nature and vice-versa, thus legitimizing the explicit pedagogical approach of an aesthetics-ethics of physical education. Such approach demands for the understanding of some internal elements of sport's experience with a particular pedagogical relevance, such the understanding of the beauty-good-clean triad, and the educational aesthetic-ethical emphasis that can be given to specific sporting experiences, such as vulnerability, affection, identity and competition, in which, overextending the purposes of the mere development of motor and functional competence, we can promote the flourishing of students' sensibility to the aesthetic-ethical experience of sport, and through it, ofthe world and life.