Digital Education in Physical Education
Konstantin Rehlinghaus's Dissertation Proposal
Driven by digitalization, new digital opportunities are bringing about sweeping changes in nearly every sector of society. These changes also affect the education sector. In terms of education policy, the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (2017) stipulated that digital education—in the form of digital teaching and learning processes—and the promotion of media literacy must be implemented as a cross-curricular task across all subjects in schools. Physical education is therefore not excluded from the mandate of digital education.
The Society for Subject Didactics (2018) has pointed out that subject-specific goals must also be taken into account when implementing digital education. The requirement is therefore that, in addition to media education objectives, the subject-specific perspective must also be taken into account, a perspective that is shaped nationwide in physical education by the concept of educational physical education. In this context, there are as yet hardly any studies that address the reality of digital education in educational physical education classrooms.
The aim of this study is to use a comparative analytical approach to investigate potential discrepancies between the subject-specific pedagogical and curricular standards for digital education in physical education and the reality of classroom instruction (or, more precisely, various aspects of that reality). To this end, the study will first identify these standards through (1) document/content analysis (analysis of subject-specific and media-pedagogical-didactic standards, school-internal media concepts, and subject-specific curricula), then different facets of reality will be examined using (2) teacher interviews as well as (3) group interviews with secondary school students in North Rhine-Westphalia, and finally, potential differences will be comparatively identified and interpreted. With a view to the future professional development of physical education teachers, recommendations for addressing such differences can ultimately be provided based on the empirical sub-studies.