The learning event has a dialogic ontology that emerges in the interaction between student, teacher and text. How does this description fare in relation to less obviously 'textual' activities? Certainly it’s not very difficult to see the development of a capacity to swim as being transformative in the sense of an embodied change. I want to stress, also, what might be considered a conversational aspect of this process. I begin by comparing my own experiences with swimming with a fictional account from L'Etranger. I am aware of a world not 'opened' to me: the world that Meursault inhabits. I thus raise the question of the extent to which an education in swimming needs to 'open worlds' for students.
I then consider intentionality as it is configured in the literature of swimming education. The pool context takes the learner into a distinctly unfamiliar and risky physical environment. Success in this context cannot be considered simply in terms of the mastery of repetitive movements, but relies on having what Nietzsche calls ‘the will to go on' with the endeavour. Drawing on contrasting presentations of physical activity and the outdoors in the work of Sartre and Camus, I consider the complex roles of embodiment, intentionality, impulse and transcendence in swimming. I present swimming as phenomenologically contested; its good is not an unambiguous given.
Swimming education is an attempt to evoke a world that the teacher considers to be valuable. This is an educational endeavour that might be carried on as much outside of the pool as in, and it is one which necessarily cannot succeed with all students. A dialogic education about swimming would create the space in which students’ turning away from swimming, as much as their rush of movement towards it, can be effected and affirmed.
Oxford Phenomenology Network
Contact name: Erin Lafford
Audience: Open to all
