Beyond the performative paradigm: the Human-Centered approach in sports associations between corporeality and care

Abstract

Beyond the performative paradigm: the Human-Centered approach in sports associations between corporeality and care. Sports practice, understood as an embodied and situated experience, constitutes a privileged sphere of personal development and an educational and transformative catalyst for the development of social and value-based meanings, beyond a performative paradigm. Within associative contexts, the body is not merely a technical instrument, but is configured as a place for relationships and the construction of meaning: through movement, processes of subjectivation are activated and modes of participation in community life are experimented with. This paper aims to explore how the Deweyan perspective on experience (Dewey, 1938) and phenomenologically based pedagogical epistemology (Bertolini, 1988) can today dialogue with the Human-Centered approach to counter the growing reductionist tendencies of contemporary sport and encourage the transition from the body to corporeality as a conscious and responsible identity. The educational challenge consists in overcoming the logic of functional training to promote authentically transformative learning (Mezirow, 2000), and educational care (Mortari, 2015) capable of influencing the biographies of individuals in terms of openness, sharing and educational community in a democratic society.