Knowing the Game: Integrating Speech and Action in Games Teaching Through TGfU

The “discursive turn” in the social sciences points to the potential in Teaching Games for Understanding pedagogy (TGfU) as a means of providing a holistic learning experience for students and a platform from which to reposition physical education among institutional forces that define boundaries between academic disciplines in the school curriculum. We argue that games taught in physical education using TGfU as a form educational conversation in which the mind, expressed in speech, and the body, expressed in action, embody the ideal holistic learning experience that simultaneously provides for cognitive, affective, social, and physical learning.