A wide range of research about embodiment in sport pedagogy has paid attention to how and why specific meanings of the body and embodiment are created in different contexts and cultures (e.g. Evans et al., 2009; Shilling, 2007; Crossley, 2004; Andersson, Öhman & Garrison, 2016). This study connects to the growing field of body pedagogics and its endeavour to gain educational knowledge about the environment of embodied action (e.g. Shilling, 2016). Particularly, that part of research in body pedagogics that analytically emphasize rhythm.

Inspired by an increasing interest in embodied dimensions of learning and education (Hockey & Allen-Collinson, 2007; Shilling, 2007), and how ‘movement’ recently has been utilised as an analytical object in order to investigate embodied learning within schools (Larsson & Quennerstedt, 2012) we consider teaching and learning experiences and outcomes, as directly related to different characteristics of movement behaviours (e.g. Sheet-Johnstone, 2011; Johnson, 2007; Shilling, 2008). In order to further explicate movement in relation to body pedagogics and PE teaching in the Gym, the movement behaviour is for the purpose of this study centred around two PE teacher’s walk during lessons when the students are practising different exercises at different stations.

Studying the reflexive body techniques of circuit trainers Crossley (2004) note the importance of rhythm between instruction and physical movement and concludes, “the playing of music aids in the construction of this inter-corporeal order” (p. 46). Likewise, Lande (2007) describes how soldiers are trained to run, shoot and patrolling by means of breathing rhythm. By conducting a video analysis of the PE teachers’ walk in the Gym, the PE teachers’ specific teaching use of their bodies is in our paper analysed as a spatial, temporal and situational walking rhythm. The purpose of the study is to inquire into how the teachers and the pupils synchronise and assimilate different rhythms and environments into their bodily capacities of movement and anticipation. In order to do so we use a body pedagogic framework of habit formation, and analyse how the teachers’ walking rhythm connects to teachers’ and students’ experiences, the social, technological and material means, and the embodied outcomes of the activity (see Shilling, 2016, p. 2).

Various studies in body pedagogics urge a notion of bodies as transactional (Shilling, 2008, 2016; Andersson & Maivorsdotter 2016; Quennerstedt, Öhman & Öhman, 2011). That is, a view of the body as an organic collection of activities “characterized by habit and grounded in physicality that is constituted by its relationships with its various environments” (Sullivan, 2001, p. 40). The important notion of body pedagogic studies in relation to rhythm, habit and experience (e.g. Lande, 2007; Shilling 2008; Crossley, 2004) is that people not simply march their own beat but uses and creates different means, cultivate different experiences, and actualize and appreciates different outcomes in relation to each other. In much the same ways as urban life can be analysed through complex polyrhythmic patterns (Lefebrve, 2004), the learning environment in the Gym, then, can be analysed through the spatial, temporal ad situational patterns of how teachers and students are tuning in on educational discourses by means of different body techniques. Hence, students are engaged in a collective educational rhythm as well as rhythms of individual body techniques. To highlight the rhythm of spatial path, temporal pace and situated pacts of a teacher’s movement habit as a central feature of a learning environment, then takes seriously the account of a transactional body.

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