Not only during PE lessons, but also throughout the whole school day pupils at school are bodily creatures, they embody experiences, and sometimes fall into a sort of standby mode. Boredom is usually not a preferred learning mode. The German notion of ‘Bildung’ relies per definition on the activity of the actors (Meyer-Drawe 2003). The paper poses the question, what bodily ‘Bildung’ may mean at school under the circumstances of a ‘postmodern condition’ (Lyotard 2006, Welsch 1995), were the individual needs to make choices constantly and is in identity work permanently.

Since the 90-ies a general theory of the body has been developed in the social sciences, esp. in Britain and the USA (e. g. Turner 2008, Shilling 1993), which is grounded in cultural studies. This relatively recent new branch of the humanities is apt to focus on apparently heterogeneous themes like medical care, health, discourse of diet, death, anorexia, beauty, identity, style etc. Nevertheless, it could be useful to examine carefully the possible impact of body theory for pedagogic. Astonishingly, some features of body theory can be combined with the latest  philosophy of cognition (Nöe 2004, Gallagher 2005, Caiani 2010). The paper will discuss what we can learn from the combination of heterogeneous concepts from body theory, philosophy of cognition, and research on visible bodily action (Heath 1997), formerly called ‘nonverbal communications research’. Relying basically on Polanyi’s notion of ‘tacit knowing’ (), which initially establishes a different paradigm in relation to ‘knowledge’, further developments of the sociology of knowledge (Hirschauer 2008, Knoblauch 2005) are taken into consideration to develop a concept of bodily knowing with reference to ‘Bildung’.

A very short part of a videographed interaction of two girls at school yard during break will be discussed in relation to the notion of bodily knowing and certain features of formal, informal and non-formal learning. This close microanalysis will be used as a base to discuss the mimesis concept (Gebauer & Wulf 2003) and the notion of ‘meta-action’ – in relation to the question if and how creativity and small changes of habitus (Bourdieu 1972) might occur. On the macro level, schools do not provide their pupils with equally good affordance structures for bodily learning opportunities and diverse experiences.

Having discussed the visual material concisely, we will  end up with an introduction of the category ‘potential of the situation’ (Volbers 2011, Alkemeyer 2011), which probably is of highest interest  to t conducting  and monitoring of lessons and avoiding bored bodies.

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