Beyond the Instrumental Posture: Embodied Cultural-Pedagogical Coupling, Intangible Heritage Enactment, and Student Physical Education Experience in Chinese School Taijiquan

Overview School-based Taijiquan in China carries a dual curricular mandate: to cultivate movement competence and to transmit an intangible cultural heritage. In everyday school enactment the two mandates frequently come apart, leaving instruction divided between decontextualised postural drill and verbal heritage lecturing that rarely reaches the moving body. Drawing on the phenomenology of motor intentionality, somaesthetics and Chinese bodily ontology, this article conceptualises embodied cultural-pedagogical coupling as an observable property of physical education practice and evaluates a three-pillar curriculum model, Embodied Cultural-Pedagogical Coupling (ECPC), in a three-wave longitudinal study of 648 students nested in 27 classes across lower secondary, upper secondary and university physical education. ECPC integrates breath-weight-shift-posture somatic attunement across the Dian-Xian-Mian-Ti hierarchy with intangible-heritage metaphor enactment (yinian, yinyang and zhongzheng) and a three-stage responsive pedagogical scaffolding cycle (formative attunement diagnosis, adaptive segmented-holistic and dyadic tuishou pacing, and inclusive classroom equity calibration). At week 16, ECPC reached a composite embodied experience score of 82.69 against 76.73 for the strongest external pedagogical comparator (adjusted difference 5.95, 95% CI [5.49, 6.46]) and 75.93 for the same curriculum syllabus taught without responsive scaffolding, while narrowing the between-stratum experience gap from 1.66 to 1.49. Gains held across all three educational stages and all 18 pre-specified student subgroups. The findings reposition cultural heritage in physical education from propositional content talked about beside movement to a quality of somatic-cultural coupling that can be scaffolded, inhabited and evaluated. Contents This record contains 28 files. The table lists every data table in the archive with its row count. FileRowsSize (KB)data/classes.csv272data/dyad_tuishou.csv99054data/epe_items.csv1,94486data/folds.csv3,24071data/physical_fitness.csv1,94474data/sensitivity_runs.csv1265data/session_coupling.csv1,944122data/students.csv64877data/variant_predictions.csv31,1045158data/wellbeing.csv1,94473data/derived/ablation_table.csv81data/derived/cohort_profile.csv30data/derived/contrasts.csv91data/derived/descriptives.csv80data/derived/dimension_scores.csv803data/derived/failure_modes.csv804data/derived/main_table.csv32031data/derived/mediation.csv41data/derived/net_benefit.csv392data/derived/responder_curves.csv1506data/derived/sensitivity_grid.csv1265data/derived/state_transitions.csv151data/derived/subgroup_consistency.csv182data/derived/trajectory.csv814data/derived/variance_components.csv40data/derived/wave_growth.csv271 Reuse Released under cc-by-4.0. If you use these data, please cite this record together with the associated article.