Don't touch! - Pedagogical consequences of the "forbidden" body in Physical Education

The study takes its point of departure in child protection policy and ‘politics of touch’ that have been prominent in current society. The development of a child protection discourses in general may be expected to have a mutual relationship with practices in the school subject Physical Education (PE). The aim of the project is to study how general discourses and wider worries around abuse and intergenerational touch in society influence teachers’ pedagogical work in PE. It is a matter of problematizing the tensions between protection of children and problems of abuse on the one hand, and the consequences of putting strict codes of conduct (restrictive use of physical contact) into teachers pedagogical interactions in the practice of PE on the other. The method used in the study is divided in three parts, (i) text analyses of child protection policy documents, (ii) video recorded PE lessons and (iii) interviews with PE teachers.