Sport as a fairy tale. Pedagogical notes on the formative aspects of the sports experience

Abstract

In the pedagogical literature there are numerous elements that suggest there is a strong link between sports activity and human development. If we take sport as a ludic phenomenon, in the sense attributed to play by scholars such as Huizinga and Caillois, we can recognize that it takes place elsewhere than in normal life, that is, in a place that is the matrix of the experimentation of self-alteration. In sport we encounter elsewhere in the playing field, on the racetrack, in the gym, in the street, which are characterized during sports practice by different and autonomous regulatory systems compared to those that regulate the functioning of daily life. This elsewhere energetically recalls the elsewhere we can find in the critical texts of children's literature, denoted by the suspension from reality, which is recognized as having a strong educational value, both for the protagonist and for the reader. This article highlights the autobiographical component of sports practice, associating it with the metaphor of the journey present in children's literature. Because physical activity involves a journey. It can be long or short-term, cyclical (with a departure and a return) or continuous, when sport and playing become the existential modality of those who practice them. In the journey, protagonists of the stories as well as athletes experience a deviation from reality, from the functioning of life according to the social conventions established by and for those who are not within that form of experience. Through the comparison with the formative process that takes place in the reader-narration relationship, we will try to reconstruct, regardless of the aspects inherent to physical development, the ways in which the experience of the player can transform the person who the player is.