Today children don’t play as active and as often as they did just 20 years ago. Children spend more and more time in front of the TV and the computer. It is especially around the age of 13 that we see a drastic fall in the time spend in active play. However some kids don’t stop playing and opposes this tendency. A still growing numbers of young people reclaim the streets with jumps and leaps. They use benches, stairs and rails for expressive physical activity and name it “parkour”.

In Denmark we spend a lot of time and money trying to get more activity in the institutions. We do this because of the positive relationship that we see between physical activity and children’s development and learning. Because of the popularity of parkour we try to use this as an activating activity in the institutions. The question is: What does this organisation and institutionalisations do to the activity? Don’t young people learn something in the self organized practise around the city that could legitimize more free time for playing by themselves? My research questions are:

1)      What qualities does the self organized practice of parkour by the young people promote? In other words: what is it all about?

2)      What kind of learning does the practice promote?

3)      What influence does the organisation have on the learning that the activity of parkour seems to promote?

The project will be carried out as a phenomenological case study of the activity parkour and will focus on these three questions. I want to apply a critical approach to the positive relationship between play and learning. Instead of investigating which pre-defined social, physical or psychical competencies the activity seems to promote I want to do a phenomenological study about the experienced learning in the present and bodily practice. I will follow four young people (18-23 years old) in their organized practice and four young people (18-23 years old) in their self organized practice by using participant observation and informal interviews doing the practice. For the phenomenological analysis I will use configurational analysis as developed by Henning Eichberg. The starting point will be the bodily practice that subsequent will be linked to theory about play and learning.