Three-Modal Embodied Reflection in Physical Education: Integrating Pose Imitation Practice, Photovoice, and Body Mapping in a University Bodybuilding Course

Physical education increasingly seeks to move beyond skill acquisition towards pedagogies that attend to embodied awareness, emotional insight, and meaningful engagement, yet research still struggles to access the tacit and multi-layered qualities of lived bodily experience. This article explores how three reflective modalities, Pose Imitation Practice, Photovoice, and Body Mapping, illuminated different dimensions of university students’ embodied experience within a bodybuilding course informed by Greek-inspired ideas of symmetry, proportion, and bodily presentation. A phenomenologically informed qualitative design was used with eight undergraduate students, and the three modalities were introduced sequentially through an eight-week phase incorporating Pose Imitation Practice, a four-week Photovoice task, and a final Body Mapping workshop. Analysis generated five cross-modal themes: bodily sensation and kinaesthetic awareness; aesthetic perception and embodied body ideals; identity, self-image, and embodied self-understanding; motivation, emotion, and internal dynamics of training; and training insight, learning, and behavioural adjustment. The findings suggest that embodied reflection did not take a single form, but emerged differently across immediate bodily enactment, everyday visual-textual documentation, and visual-symbolic representation. Read together, the three modalities appeared complementary within this sample and made visible different ways in which students noticed, interpreted, and expressed bodily experience. The article contributes a context-sensitive account of embodied reflection in higher education PE and proposes a cyclical three-modal framework as a way of conceptualising how bodily enactment, everyday documentation, and symbolic representation may be brought into relation in qualitative research and pedagogy.