Touch in artistic-expressive tasks in Physical Education Teacher Training

The aim of the article was to identify the positive and negative aspects as perceived by students in relation to the tactile interaction that they experience when undertaking physical artistic -expression activities. The study sample comprised 25 students from the physical education course of the Primary School Teaching Degree at Zaragoza University in Spain (10 men and 15 women, age of 22.29 +/- 2.62). Data were collected through (i) the internship diaries which students filled in in the 13 practical sessions on physical artistic -expression activities which were part of the expressiveartistic physical activities module. Then, a content analysis of the diaries was carried out, performing a concordance test with two independent encoders. The Nvivo 11 program was utilized for data processing. The results show that: i) touch interaction conditions expressive practice; ii) the transmitter role is perceived as being more problematic than the receiver role; iii) while receivers experience relaxation, transmitters focus on maintaining concentration and on not hurting receivers or touching certain parts of their bodies. The results of this study are relevant because they improve our understanding of the positive and negative aspects of tactile interaction in artistic -expression activities.