A Day with the Mountain: Phenomenology, Wonder, and Freeskiing

• Main Author: Coleman, John
• Other Authors: Boudreau, Pierre
• Language: en
• Published: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa 2012
• Subjects: self-movement; movement; wonder; phenomenology; writing
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/22819; http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-5684

A Day With The Mountain is an inquiry that ventures into the experience of self-movement through the context of freeskiing. This inquiry focuses on both my experience with three freeskiers; Leah Evans, Josh Dueck, and Mark Abma and my personal experience with freeskiing. The intention behind this inquiry is to challenge, celebrate, and evoke the self-movement experience in order to gain understandings of something so fundamental to human development. This intention is met by asking the main research question; ‘What is the experience of self-movement?’ Self-movement was fleshed out in this inquiry within a phenomenological approach. Phenomenology aims to evoke human experience through descriptive writing, which also proved to be the main challenge of this study. Stories, poetry, and images within a narrative entitled A Day With The Mountain were used to address this challenge and to invite the reader into deeply textured experiences of self-movement. A Day With The Mountain is a day of freeskiing where accumulation, threshold, breakthrough, and release make up the rhythms of the experience; these same rhythms also serve as the chapters of this text. Woven within the evocative writing of the experience of freeskiing are theoretical insights into self-movement, movement itself, of wonder. Emerging from this inquiry are ideas and questions about self-movement and movement that challenge the ground of formal physical education. I sense a potential pedagogical approach that combines movement, self-movement, and wonder as presented in this text. The emerging pedagogical approach focuses on evoking wonder, situates movement as a realm of possibility, and self-movement as possible freedom. The margins of self-movement and movement itself remain beyond the horizon of this text, and those margins are in need of more evocative description. Continuing to inquire into self-movement may reveal new possibilities and expanded understandings of self-movement, which may have significant pedagogical potential.