Who is responsible for what? Exploring online pedagogies of remote physical education during the coronavirus pandemic

During the coronavirus pandemic, internet spaces became important sites of teaching PE remotely. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the emergency online pedagogies transpiring in these internet spaces and the role that digital resources gained in them. We focus on webpages on the platform Padlet.com, which have been identified but not yet investigated as relevant spaces for pedagogical encounters in German-speaking remote PE. Using a theory of practice approach to pedagogy and focusing on discursive practices of responsibilization, we investigate which responsibilities are claimed for PE as a subject, for teachers, students and digital resources on these webpages, and how these parties are thereby related to each other and positioned as recognizable subjects/actors of remote PE. Our qualitative discourse analysis of 14 Padlet webpages (755 posts combined) reveals that the online pedagogy on these webpages is characterized by the discursive positioning of (i) PE as being responsible for activity and sport under special conditions, (ii) teachers as subjects responsible for organizing PE and activating students while delegating pedagogical responsibilities to them and to digital resources, (iii) students as subjects who should care for themselves by taking responsibility for the processes and results of their physical activities and (iv) digital resources as important actors located between education, sport culture and internet economy. Discussing these results, we argue that exploring the actual ways and forms of performing pedagogical responsibility can yield important insights into the social constitution of - increasingly digitized - PE, its social relations, subject positionings and pedagogies.