80 Jahre vollakademische Sportlehrerausbildung

On 1 August 1929 the Prussian Minister of Education enacted a regulation establishing“exercise and physical education” as an academic field of study to be offered at all universities and institutes of technology under his jurisdiction. This action served to successfully complete the process that had been evolving since the middle of the nineteenth century to recognize the discipline as a university level specialty in the face of considerable longstanding opposition. The gravest forms of opposition emanated from the universities themselves and starting in the middle of the 1920s were ultimately overcome by proceedings and argumentation. These circumstances are described in this contribution based on accessing and evaluating new sources. The central focus is on a memorandum written in February 1929 by the Göttingen University physical education lecturer Bernhard Zimmermann. The article concludes by classifying and assessing the act of 1929 with a view to the further development of the academic education of sports instructors in the ensuing era of National Socialism and the postwar period in West Germany and the Federal Republic of Germany.     

Was macht den Sport zum Mediensport?

The popularity of sports varies to different extents around the world and leads to the question: what is a media sport? This contribution discusses definitional principles with the goal of using a model to establish the basis of categorization for future empirical analysis of diverse sports types. Media sports are defined as characteristic of movement structures in the culturally differentiated media sports complex. Features of media sports are distinguished according to the dimensions of context, organization, and (interactive) structure. It becomes clear that media sports types are not only characterized by cultural grounding, success, and charismatic stars, but can also exhibit structural distinctions. In conclusion, real, media-driven, and medial media sports are differentiated to demonstrate application of the model.     

Sports’ disciplinary legacy and the challenge of ‘coaching differently’

Be empowering. Be athlete-centered. Be autonomy supportive. These are three related topics currently being promoted by sport psychologists and sport pedagogists in an effort to recognize athletes’ unique qualities and developmental differences and make coaching more holistic and coaches more considerate. This has led us to ask, how likely are such initiatives to lead to coaches putting their athletes at the center of the coaching process given that coaches’ practices have largely been formed through relations of power that subordinate and objectify athletes’ bodies through the regular application of a range of disciplinary techniques and instruments [e.g. Barker-Ruchti, N., &; Tinning, R. (2010). Foucault in leotards: Corporeal discipline in women's artistic gymnastics. Sociology of Sport Journal, 27, 229–250; Heikkala, J. (1993). Discipline and excel: Techniques of the self and body and the logic of competing. Sociology of Sport Journal, 10, 397–412; Gearity, B., &; Mills, J. P. (2012). Discipline and punish in the weight room. Sports Coaching Review, 1, 124–134]? In other words, to try to develop athlete-centered coaches capable of coaching in ways that will empower their athletes without also problematizing the discursive formation of coaches’ practices concerns us [Denison, J., &; Mills, J. P. (2014). Planning for distance running: Coaching with Foucault. Sports Coaching Review, 3, 1–16]. Put differently: how can athlete empowerment initiatives be anything more than rhetoric within a disciplinary framework that normalizes maximum coach control? It is this question that we intend to explore in this paper. More specifically, as Foucauldians, we will argue that coaching with greater consideration for athletes’ unique qualities and developmental differences needs to entail coaching in a less disciplinary way and with an awareness and appreciation of the many unseen effects that disciplinary power can have on coaches’ practices and athletes’ bodies.     

The Film as a source of History

In order to gain clarity about historical facts the historian requires as wide and as varied a range of informative documents as possible. These documentary sources include all texts, objects or facts, from which knowledge of the past can be gained; texts such as annals, chronicles, letters, reports, certificates; things like relics, buildings, ruins, primers, stone axes; and facts or conditions still in existence based on historical premises.