Every Friday parts of youth all over Europe started to leave schools for protest against climate change and earth pollution. Everything started with 17 year old Swedish - Asperger autist - climate activist Greta Thunberg. In the age of 8 she started to act in her surrounding against energy waste. May be because of her rather special identity she was able to speak without fear - people probably may misinterpret this as lack of respect. Completely authentic she dismantles downheartedness: "You only speak of a green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg, accessed 30.1.2019) - The degree of reflexivity shown by teenagers or even kids and children is sometimes remarkable. But not in any kind this can be assessed as a welcome development in every type of manifestation. Increased self-control can turn out as inhibiting (Forster 2014, 595).

Indeed, reflexivity as part of the postmodern condition has been described by several important theorists in general (Lyotard, Welsch, Baumann, Luhmann), thinking mainly of social systems and adult people. If girls in Germany already undergo averagely three kinds of diets at the age of 12 (!) we have to look up reflective body practices more closely. This kind of practical reaction or making of a difference to construct the own identity can be taken as practical everyday reflexivity that has different connotations compared to a rational recursive inversion with the interest to prevent prejudice (Lynch 2004, 284).

The kind of reflexivity observable within postmodern body techniques has more to do with unconscious and/or suggestive sediments of former scientific knowledge (e.g. about healthy nutrition) (in principle: Pavón-Cuéllar 2018).  The British scholar Nick Crossley explained in several articles for Body & Society the analytical importance of the different mode the body is handled in late modernity. In the end, the phenomenological description of Leib may lose its distinctive quality as even subjective awareness comes out as ideologically colored. Therefore the relation to the own body as a reflexive one is ambivalent. Practices of diet and body modification, of enhancement and beautification are symptomatic for this aspect of becoming of age in an era of risk because identity is questioned. In fact, some body practices like the QS movement are calling intensely for a more mature reflexivity that has to be primed within PE, the only discipline that is concerned with the body at school. More or less consciously the development of PE curricula reacts to this need but has to cope with other main conceptual changes like competence orientation or inclusion - together causing a situation of overload.

Almost no regard has been put on children’s reflexive body practices so far in Sports Pedagogy. But at the same time a rather broad mentioning of reflexivity has entered recent curriculum developments in Germany. The paper will give concrete examples of reflexivity demands for PE education in curricula in BRD (under the umbrella of cognitive activation) and traces the development of curricula in connection to changes of parameters of education policy; additionally some comparisons to other countries will be made explicit coming to a discussion about the future of PE education in Europe.

The paper is fully theoretical but is accompanied by examples to make the different kinds of reflexivity more intelligible.

Competence orientation is the central and almost magical notion that influences changes in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Due to the entanglement with output orientation and blind activism concerning education for its own sake (in view of bad international survey results) on one hand and not well thought out implementation of – rather less effective - inclusion on the other hand within the same time period contradictory demands steamroll schools, causing a vague feeling of personal incapacity or resignation for teachers. Standards of competence levels and a relativistic individualization of support don’t fit naturally under the same logical umbrella (Eversheim). As we know from teacher research, teacher under pressure tend to act as they were taught, not as they were taught to teach. The increased demands for teachers under the conditions sketched above suggest that meeting the challenges of reflexivity in PE lessons might show up as overload if universities don’t face the problems soon. The paper ends up with a presentation of different types of reflexive PE ranging from knowledge acquisition about reflexive body techniques to reflective questioning for everyday use in PE lessons. Finally the discussion in Germany about the sense and the problems of reflective PE lessons (Alkemeyer, Serwe-Pandrick, Bockrath etc.) will be picked up again and carried on one step further. Last but not least limits of reflexivity in PE will be discussed (see Lynch).

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