From technological tools to technological bodies: rethinking the digitalisation of school physical education in China through Don Ihde’s postphenomenology

This manuscript rethinks the digitalisation of school physical education (PE) in China through Don Ihde’s postphenomenology. Rather than treating digital technologies as external tools for efficiency, feedback, or management, it develops the technological body as an analytical concept for examining how bodily experience is reconfigured in digitally mediated PE practice. Drawing on Ihde’s human–technology–world relations, the article constructs a three-dimensional framework of relation, perception, and context to analyse how wearable monitoring, AI-supported recognition, virtual environments, and platform systems reshape movement, pedagogical interaction, and educational meaning. The analysis shows that the digitalisation of school PE gives rise to two structural tensions: the pressure of datafication on bodily perception and the pressure of standardisation on situated bodily practice. In response, the article proposes a practical reorientation guided by bodily integrity and contextual adaptability, and advances two pathways: virtual–real practice cycles and negotiated human–technology co-construction. It argues that the significance of digitalisation in school PE lies not simply in applying tools, but in how technological mediation reorganises bodily education from within practice.