ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper aims to criticize the current early childhood physical education and provide an alternative to the traditional physical educational approaches. Binary thinking has long dominated the physical education practices in early childhood practitioners: opportunity for play or game vs. professional physical training. Early childhood is not considered as a period of extensive ability development through embodiment (Choi, 2013) although young children deserve to learn about the ways of life through bodily movement and prepare for their future. In this respect, this study proposed somatic education as an alternative physical education for young children in that the education saw human body as a means to achieve individual developmental tasks by emphasizing bodily embodiment and comprehensive harmony in life. Somatic literacy helps young children understand that they can choose to achieve such embodiment on their own, thereby acquiring skills in theoretical and practical thinking (intellectual and experiential knowledge) as well as physical proficiency according to Linden (1994). This study suggests us to go beyond the binary thinking that is now pervasive in early childhood physical education fields and search for a variety of ways to improve physical education for young children in the direction of obtaining the wholeness of a human being.

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