William Harper

The Experience of Leisure

Abstract The question of the nature of leisure is a primary, if elusive, question. Quite recently, there has been some considerable interest in approaching the question by understanding leisure as an experience, in contrast to leisure as time, activity, or simple state of mind. This study discusses the methodological difficulties created by the conceptual shift in the leisure sciences. Specifically, the method of descriptive phenomenology is introduced as a suggested way of gaining access to the lived experience of leisure. Both the possibility for and the necessity of taking up the phenomenological standpoint are discussed.

Freedom in the experience of leisure

Abstract A popular claim in some leisure research is not only that perceived freedom is essential to leisure, but also that perceived freedom means free choice. This paper suggests that perceived freedom is indeed essential, but that reducing perceived freedom to whether or not a person chooses a leisure activity or pursuit unnecessarily shrinks the scope of the potential meaning of perceived freedom. Instead of settling for taking the freedom proper to leisure as a point of departure (free choice) or even as a point of arrival (outcome freedom), it is argued that freedom is lived through in the experience of leisure. This experiential freedom is characterized by a feeling of ongoing consent or cooperation and by the intensification of our ordinary experience. This intensification, in turn, is an enlarged sense of an experience rounded out in anticipation, realization, and recapitulation. Perceived freedom, consequently, becomes the experience of a playful dialogue between our ongoing consent and the elem...

Skill and Physical Activity: A Central Dogma for Kinesiology

Kinesiology has a long and storied tradition and history. The growth of our discipline and what might be called our subdisciplines has been the shining achievement of the 1970–2006 era, spurred on by Henrys (1964) call for an academic discipline. In this short thought paper, we argue that we have lost sight of the discipline in a quest to become socially relevant. This social relevance has been to get on the exercise as prescription bandwagon, which has produced a wide chasm between our undergraduate curriculum and our research endeavors. The reason for this chasm is that kinesiology does not have an agreed upon central theme, what we call a dogma. We argue that we need to return to make skill and physical activity the central dogma of kinesiology and to make a new coherent curriculum for undergraduate kinesiology.

Some Conditions for Graduate Study.

The subject of this essay is graduate study in physical education. Rather than discuss the condition of graduate study, the paper described some conditions for graduate study. For graduate programs to be genuine graduate programs, certain conditions must be present—no matter the particular model of graduate study in operation. At least four such conditions are needed: academic quality, time to fiddle, a baggy idea of truth, and a sense of community. Each of these conditions is described in turn. In the end, these four combine to make legitimate graduate studies in physical education possible and necessary. They are what bring graduate programs to or keep them in a healthy state of repair.

A Lesson From Minerva

In 1783 the Montgolfier brothers successfully experimented with lighter-thanair balloon flight. But their remarkable invention eventually turned out to be less useful than expected. Their guiding vision—that one could sail the heavens much like sailing the seas—was wrongheaded. Much like the story of early balloon flight, the telling of any story, such as ours, depends upon having a sensible vision before the facts become intelligible, much less useful. As an illustrative example, it is often argued that the experience of sport is essentially one of leisure and is not of the work world. This vision is challenged by analyzing the possibility that sport is indeed good work. If this is so, then promoting the text or our sports story as part of the so-called progressive culture of evermore comfort and convenience is a story without much lift. An alternate vision for our field is to cultivate the story that the experience of sport is essentially work, hence inconvenient and difficult, but productive and there...