Conceiving PE as a space of “confrontation with” to promote existential experiences

From the starting point that PE might allow students to “enter into experience,” two distinct ways (horizontal and vertical) of entering into experience are depicted, structuring students’ transformations. Pedagogy aims at testing students’ sensitivity in limit situations, so that existential resonance can be experienced. While planning a curriculum of “confrontations with” settings, PE teachers enable students to enact a new relationship to the world, a new way of inhabiting their body. From this point of view, the key transformations of the student are seen as something other than the learning of bodily techniques, skills, or other knowhow. Sitting between the phenomenology of Varela, the sociology of Rosa, and the existential philosophy of Jaspers, we conclude that resonance and its related illumination of the Being in limit situations could support PE as a space of “confrontation with.” As our proposal sketches out an existential PE, it thus encourages us to anchor research in subject theory, as much as in activity theory.