Navigating the body’s double nature in a sedentary environment: Swedish primary school children’s use of physical activity during the school day

Abstract

The structuring of time and space in schools influences when children’s bodies should be active and when they should be still. The growing interest in physical activity interventions in schools today highlights a pattern where schools act as sites meant to regulate and educate children’s bodies according to adult-centric interests. Drawing on existential phenomenology, particularly the dual nature of the body as both object and subject, this article examines how children themselves use physical activity in school. Sixty-three children aged 8–13 in Sweden participated in semi-structured focus groups where they discussed the significance of movement for them in the school environment. Reflexive thematic analysis in an ‘experiential mode’ was used to understand how the children related to their bodies in terms of objectivity and subjectivity, creating different types of incentives for movement. This is illustrated through two themes: ‘Physical activity for a healthy body (The body as object)’, which shows how children use physical activity based on instrumental motives, and ‘The sentient body (The body as subject)’, where the feeling body is presented in two states: both as trapped and as liberated. The children used movement as a way to balance the structuring of time and place imposed by their school environment, which generated various subjective corporeal states. Thus, the analysis shows that the school environment produces subjective bodies that children understand in objective terms influenced by contemporary health discourses, which in turn shapes their use of movement.