Physical Education and Virtual Communities

Abstract

Virtual communities on internet are a current phenomenon. They are sources of research and access to social discourses. The present paper has the objective to analyze discourses in two virtual communities: «I love Physical Education» and «I hate Physical Education» on Orkut website. The emergence of these communities constitutes an element for reflection about the signifiers assigned to Physical Education classes at school and the tradition of these classes in Brazil. Bibliography and field research were the methodological procedures based on ethnography principles characterizing a mainly qualitative discussion. During the interviews with participants from both communities, it was able to realized that there are many complaints of badly succeeded classes by people who say «to love» Physical Education as by the ones who say «to hate» this subject at school. The reason for that is the tradition of these classes in Brazil, which are mainly an exclusively biological view of the body and body practices. This tradition implies a pedagogical action by the teachers focused on standardizing the students and not considering their differences

Keywords

• Culture
• Body Practices
• Physical Education classes
• Internet
• School
• Virtual communities