Re-Play: Whose Games, Whose Learning? Interdisciplinary Provocations on Game-Based Approaches in Physical Education and Sport
Purpose
This paper examines how Game-Based Approaches (GBA) can cultivate environments in which athletes move beyond prescribed roles and fixed identities, entering zones of experimentation where new forms of action can unfold.
Framework
Drawing on philosophical ideas about rivalry, invention, and encounters with forces that exceed technical or tactical instruction, the discussion approaches team sports as spaces where players continually negotiate tensions between structure and improvisation, stability and change, intention and emergence. Within this framing, athletes in team games resemble Deleuze’s 'acrobats' or 'bizarre athletes': figures who respond to the intensities of play through improvisation, creativity, and stylistic rupture. Using Zlatan Ibrahimović’s martial-arts–inflected volleys as a point of departure, the paper highlights how players in various team sports exceed the limits of codified technique and often slip into new modes of coordination that transform the very logic of the game in real time. These stylistic deviations reveal player identity not as a fixed attribute but as an ongoing, embodied negotiation with the contingencies of play.
Results
Aligned with the symposium’s intention to ‘re-play’ the field, this contribution challenges purely instrumental interpretations of games and foregrounds their transformative potential. It argues that team sport settings -when approached through GBA - need to be conceptualized not only as sites for skill development but also as laboratories of creativity, relational attunement, and emergent meaning-making, where athletes participate in the continual evolution of both the game and themselves. In this sense, performance becomes a fluid accomplishment that materializes through shared rhythms, collective improvisation, and the capacity to act differently.
Concusions
Reframing games in this way deepens the pedagogical value of GBA and invites coaches, educators, and scholars to view team sports not simply as domains for teaching tactics or enhancing performance, but as vibrant ecologies where players experiment with ever-new modes of moving, relating, and becoming.
Topic/Content of the Symposium
This symposium revisits Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) as originally conceived by Bunker and Thorpe (1982, 1986): a pedagogical response to the persistent failure of isolated drills to produce transferable skill in game performance. TGfU was designed as a performance-focused approach that embeds learning in modified games where perception, decision-making, and skill execution co-evolve under authentic constraints. Its purpose was not only to promote tactical “understanding,” but to ensure that players learn to perform skilfully in context—an early, practice-based theory of skill acquisition and transfer.
Over time, TGfU has expanded within Physical Education to address broader educational aims such as inclusion, motivation, and social learning. While these extensions have value, they have also obscured TGfU’s original purpose as a method for developing adaptive performance. As Renshaw et al. (2015) note, TGfU was not grounded in a formal motor learning theory, yet it intuitively aligned with key skill acquisition principles: representativeness, variability, and learning through interaction. More recent work (Chow, Renshaw & Moy, 2023) shows that the constraints-led approach (CLA) provides a coherent theoretical model to explain TGfU’s effectiveness—without redefining it. TGfU remains a pedagogical framework; CLA a scientific explanation of its learning dynamics.
Reasons for the Symposium
This symposium reasserts TGfU’s original intent—to integrate tactical understanding and skill learning in ways that enhance transfer. Its broader aim is to stimulate new research that examines TGfU explicitly from a skill acquisition perspective, testing its pedagogical principles through ecological and dynamical systems frameworks.
Scholarly Value and Interdisciplinary Relevance
By reuniting pedagogy and motor learning science, this symposium positions TGfU as a pedagogy of skill acquisition and transfer. It invites researchers, teachers, and coaches to reconceptualize games-based learning as a form of skill adaptation, renewing TGfU’s relevance for both sport and education.
ID:29 Re-Play
Purpose
This presentation challenges traditional assessment practices in physical education and sport that prioritise isolated technical skills detached from authentic performance contexts. Contemporary approaches—such as Game-Based Approaches (GBA) in team games and situated, ecological perspectives in individual sports—emphasise decision-making, adaptation, and meaningful engagement. Yet evaluation systems continue to privilege decontextualised motor skills. This provocation argues that performance should instead be understood as the contributions athletes make to the unfolding logic, rhythm, and value of performance, whether in team games or individual sports. Building on the Game Contribution Analysis (GCAI) framework I have proposed, the presentation positions “contribution” as a unifying concept for rethinking performance across diverse physical activity settings.
Methods / Approach / Framework
GCAI conceptualises performance as context-dependent value creation.
In team games, contributions emerge through relational and co-adaptive actions such as spacing, positional attunement, support play, creating options, tempo coordination, and defensive disruption.
In individual sports, contributions are expressed through strategic pacing, rhythm control, risk management, precise decision-making, and adaptive adjustments that shape the quality of performance.
To analyse and make these contributions visible, the framework incorporates drone-based tactical footage and trajectory generation, VR-based situational replays, AI-assisted tagging and visualisation, and motion or positional sensors. The integration of these technologies provides powerful means to capture previously invisible micro-actions, relational patterns, and contextual cues that define contribution in both individual and team contexts. Rather than replacing teacher judgment, these tools enhance pedagogical insight into how learners shape performance ecologies.
Results
Implementations of GCAI in school and sport settings highlight that learners frequently exhibit contribution-rich behaviours—support movements, stabilising decisions, adaptive pacing, and coordinated off-ball actions—that traditional skill-based assessments overlook. Teachers and coaches reported that the contribution-oriented lens produced more equitable, motivating, and pedagogically authentic portrayals of learning.
Conclusion
Reframing performance as contribution reconnects assessment with the lived realities of games and sports. GCAI offers a unified, conceptually robust, and technologically enhanced framework for understanding how learners shape, influence, and co-create performance. Recognising contribution over isolated skills enables educators to more fully capture the complexity, creativity, and emergent nature of human movement.
Purpose
This paper provocatively argues that the primary purpose of physical education is not the development of sporting ability but to nurture a sense of self and a sense of belonging through play. It challenges the long-standing dominance of “fundamental movement skills” as the foundation of primary physical education and repositions games as relational encounters where learners develop their personal and social identity as well as physical competence. The presentation draws on the design and development of Movewell, a national resource created in Aotearoa New Zealand, to show how movement education can be reframed as a humanising practice that connects skill with care, and performance with participation.
Methods / Approach / Framework
As a pedagogy, the Games Based Approach is informed by ecological dynamics, complexity thinking, and enactivist learning theory. These frameworks share an understanding of learners as embodied, relational, and situated actors who learn through their adaptive engagement with others and the environment. Through games, children learn to be creative, expressive, cooperative, fair, skillful, confident, problem solving, active, resilient, etc. Games are an excellent medium for teaching a broad range of skills, attitudes and values
Results
Teachers have valued Movewell’s inclusive, play-centred philosophy and reported that it fostered more equitable participation and a stronger sense of belonging among students. The games encouraged collaboration, empathy, and shared joy, helping children to see themselves as capable and connected participants rather than as performers of isolated skills. At the same time, systemic constraints, such as limited time, confidence, and resources, revealed the enduring dominance of instrumental models of skill learning that undervalue social and affective outcomes.
Conclusion
By situating learning within meaningful play, GBA enables physical education to be a site for cultivating care, community, and competence. This stance disrupts technical and performative logics of skill acquisition and invites educators to reconsider: What if the primary purpose of physical education is not the development of sporting ability but to nurture a sense of self and a sense of belonging through playing games?